We kicked off NAMM 2016 with a look at some of Mojotone's new amps. The Deacon is a 50-watt beast that runs on a pair of KT-66 tubes and has a foot switchable effects loop. The street price on the head is $2150 and the combo version will be $2245. Both will be available in March.
Chops: Intermediate Theory: Intermediate Lesson Overview: • Learn how to construct Dorian scales. • Understand the minor-key harmony of “Last Dance with Mary Jane.” • Develop an ability to hear the raised 6 in a minor scale. Click here to download a printable PDF of this lesson's notation.
I love modes. I love playing them. I love teaching them. But they are tricky to teach because it’s difficult to wrap your head around them without having to dive deep into theory, which isn’t an easy step for some players. As a teacher, I look for ways to make modes fun and relatable, and this always lives and dies by the quality of your examples and source materials. Over this past holiday break, I started researching the mighty 5-watt Fender Champ tube amp. What does this have to do with modes? Read on.
Tom Petty’s guitarist Mike Campbell is a well-known fan of low-wattage Fender amps. I was watching a segment on the history of the Champ and when the main riff to “Last Dance with Mary Jane” came up, it piqued my interest. It was a song I knew well, hadn’t really heard in a long time, and never had a reason to study—until now.
There was something about the song that was unique and I wanted to dig into. And because I needed inspiration for a new lesson, the timing was perfect. The first thing I like to do when figuring out how a tune works is to lay out the main chords as an inventory. For this tune, the chords are pretty simple:
Am–G–D–Am
Yet again, Tom Petty takes a simple harmony and crafts an enduring rock anthem around it. We all joke about three-chord rock, but this is not only three-chord rock, it’s modal as well. So, why is this a Dorian chord progression? Just looking at the chords might be enough if you’d studied harmony a ton, but if you haven’t, the next step we should take is to spell out the chords into their individual notes:
Am = A C E
G = G B D
D = D F# A
Now that we’ve deconstructed the chords, the next task is to decide which note you think is home, or in theory-speak, the I. In this case, it’s pretty clear that A is home. We keep coming back to it, and it really does feel and sound right. With that done, we can take the chord tones and alphabetize them, starting with A. This yields a string of seven notes: A–B–C–D–E–F#–G.
Okay, we’ve taken inventory of all the notes contained in those three chords, starting from our root (A). The next step is to ponder the harmonic consequences of this discovery. What makes this a Dorian progression is the D major chord with an Am tonic. This D triad brings us an F#, which is not the normal F you’d see in an A Aeolian, aka A natural minor, scale (A–B–C–D–E–F–G). With Dorian, you end up with a scale that sounds minor, but with a raised 6, compared to natural minor. This yields an intriguing sound that’s not quite as dark as the minor scale you’re accustomed to. Many people describe and teach Dorian as a minor scale with a raised 6, and that’s exactly what we have here.
To get familiar with this sound, grab “Last Dance with Mary Jane” on your favorite music service and play along in A Dorian. Ex. 1 shows a handy scale diagram based on the 5th fret root of A on the 6th and 1st strings.
Now that we’ve connected the chords to the Dorian mode and we have a scale fingering, let’s hear some riffs in context.
For Ex. 2, I’m keying off the fact that this Dorian scale position is in the same spot as the familiar minor pentatonic scale, so we’re getting to use both the mode and the pentatonic in the same phrase. I’m featuring the F# (or the 6) as the signature note that makes Dorian unique, and also because it’s the 3 of the D major chord. You can play that F# whenever you want in this progression, but it’s extra awesome over the D chord.
With its bluesy beginning, Ex. 3 is another line that relies on the pentatonic scale lurking inside of the Dorian scale. Again, when the D major chord occurs in the second measure, I’m calling attention to it with the F#. It’s a simple way to connect with the Dorian scale and still keep that rock/blues feel we all love.
For our final example (Ex. 4), I stayed away from the pentatonic sound and tried to create a simpler melody with just the Dorian scale. It starts in the middle of the guitar’s range and follows a see-saw pattern of “go up a few, go down a few.” At the start of each chord change—every two beats—I align to the chord in the progression: A for the Am chord, G for the G chord, and F# for the D chord. This is a little bit of voice-leading that reminds me of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” It not only helps you anchor the chord progression, but it connects with the mode at the same time. We’re only using a portion of Ex. 1’s two-octave scale pattern—sometimes simple is best.
But wait there’s more! While the opening chords clearly spell out an A Dorian progression, the chorus shifts to yet another modal key. This song keeps on giving us things to learn and practice—how cool. When the chorus starts, we hear the following chords:
Em–A–Em–A–G
As before, let’s pull the chords apart to see what’s inside:
Em = E G B
A = A C# E
G = G B D
And just like last time, we need to determine the root. In this case, it’s clearly E minor, so we’ll call this an E something mode. Starting with E, let’s ascend through the pitches to see what we get:
E–G–A–B–C#–D
This gives us six notes. While we’re missing the second note after E (which, in a seven-note scale, would be some type of F), we can still conclude it’s another Dorian scale, this time in the key of E. Relative to E, C# is a raised 6 and this matches our general idea of Dorian construction: minor scales with a raised 6. It’s really cool that this song allows you to practice in two keys, A Dorian for the verse and E Dorian (E–F#–G–A–B–C#–D) for the chorus.
Ex. 5 is a scale diagram for E Dorian. Note that it’s the same pattern as our previous A Dorian scale, just shifted up to the 12 fret to place the E root on the 6th and 1st strings.
The chorus is my favorite part of the song because it’s a moment where everything comes together—the chords and Petty’s vocal melody combine for a beautifully haunting Dorian sound. Pay attention to the “ry” in the melody of “Mary” to hear that C# over an Em chord—that’s the distinctive Dorian color at work. It’s one of the reasons I’ll keep this song in my arsenal of material for teaching Dorian to students, along with Pink Floyd’s epic “Breathe” from Dark Side of the Moon. (Go work out the Dorian key for that one.) For now, use the above examples for inspiration and find your own riffs and ideas for “Mary Jane.” Let your creativity and ears be your guide.
I hope you enjoyed exploring how to reverse-engineer a simple song. Over time, this process will become faster and you’ll be able to hear the modes more easily. The next time a tune really tickles your ear, take it apart as we’ve done here. Who knows? It may spawn a soloing concept or a song idea you wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
Are you looking for a flexible amp modeler for the stage, studio, or home? In this in-depth demo, PG contributor Tom Butwin takes you through gigging, practicing, and recording with two compelling options: the touchscreen-powered Hotone Ampero II and the tactile, amp-style Blackstar AMPED 3.
Editorial Director Ted Drozdowski’s current favorite noisemakers.
Premier Guitar’s editors use their favorite fuzz pedals in countless ways. At any point during our waking hours, one of us could be turned on, plugged in, and fuzzed out—chasing a Sabbath riff, tracking menacing drone ambience, fire-branding a solo break with a psychedelic blast, or something else altogether more deranged. As any PGreader knows, there are nearly infinite paths to these destinations and almost as many fuzz boxes to travel with. Germanium, silicon, 2-transistor, 4-transistor, 6-transistor, octave, multimode, modern, and caveman-stupid: Almost all of these fuzz types are represented among our own faves, which are presented here as inspiration, and launch pads for your own rocket rides to the Fuzz-o-sphere.
Ted Drozdowski - Editorial Director
My favorite is my Burns Buzz, a stomp custom-made for me by Gary Kibler of Big Knob Pedals. Gary specializes in recreations of old circuits, and this Burns Buzzaround-inspired box has four germanium NOS transistors and sounds beautifully gnarly. It improves on the original, which Robert Fripp favored in early King Crimson, by adding a volume control. I went a little stir-crazy acquiring fuzzes during Covid lockdown and now have an embarrassing amount. My other current darlings are a SoloDallas Orbiter (which balances fuzz with core-signal clarity), a Joe Gore Duh (a no-nonsense, 1-knob dirt shoveler), and my Big Knob Tone Blender MkII 66, which taught me how smooth and creamy fuzz can be with carefully calibrated settings. These pedals allow me to cover all of my favorite fuzz sounds from the past 60 years. I do have one more secret weapon fuzz that only travels to the studio: an original Maestro FZ-1 that I picked up used for about $20 in the early ’90s. It’s banged up but functional, takes two 9V batteries, and is righteously juicy.
Nick Millevoi - Senior Editor
The two greatest fuzzes I’ve ever played are a Pigdog Tone Bender build and a Paul Trombetta Bone Machine. Both experiences will stick with me for decades to come. But creations by those two masters of fuzz come with a price tag high enough to keep my time with those pedals fleeting.
Instead, my favorite fuzz is an inexpensive, mass-produced pedal that hasn’t left my board since I reviewed and subsequently purchased it in 2021: the Electro-Harmonix Ripped Speaker, designed to emulate the distorted tones on ’50s and ’60s records that were created with broken or misused gear.
Retro inspiration is not all it has to offer though. The rip knob, which controls transistor bias, is the star of the show, interacting with the fuzz level to deliver everything from a smooth, mild fuzz to sputtery mayhem that can evoke a faulty channel strip or old tube combo that’s been set ablaze. I prefer to crank the rip knob and feed it to a phaser and slapback analog delay, which gives me a bit-crushed-like gnarliness. Pull back on the rip or add a boost in front of the pedal, and it has a more organic but still gated sound, which, for me, can be just the thing to set my sound apart in a more traditional setting.
For a cool $116, the Ripped Speaker, which seems to fly under most fuzz freaks’ radars, might be the special something that complements the rest of your board or just a tone you turn to on occasion. Either way, it’s a great deal.
Luke Ottenhof - Assistant Editor
You could give me the most powerful-sounding fuzz in the world, but if it was in a stupid-looking enclosure, I don’t know if I’d give it a second look. This is just how we operate: Vision is the sense we privilege most, even in matters of audio.
Luckily, the most seismic, monstrous fuzz I’ve ever heard also happens to come in a beautiful package. The Mile End Effects Kollaps, built by Justin Cober in Montreal, measures an elephantine 7 3/8" x 4 5/8" x 1 1/2", and its MuTron-meets-’60s-Soviet aesthetic matches the sounds its guts produce. The Kollaps is modeled after the nasty Univox Super-Fuzz circuit, and carries a few of that pedal’s hallmarks, including its use of germanium diodes and midrange boost control. Cober added a switchable Baxandall active EQ circuit, with up to 12 dB of boost and cut to both low and high frequencies. Coupled with the mid-boost toggle, this gives the Kollaps a shockingly broad range of tonality to play with.
With the mids off, the Kollaps is jagged and ruthless, a deafening turbojet of upper mids and chest-vibrating lows that yanks me toward the darker, less commercially successful corners of ’90s doom and noise rock. Kicking on the EQ circuit and boosting the lows turns it titanic. With the balance (volume) and expand (gain) controls maxed, the Kollaps starts to live up to its name, crumbling into a thick, overextended chaos in a way more polite fuzz circuits rarely do.
My favorite Kollaps sounds occur when the mids are engaged, for an articulate, deeply textured fuzz sound that retains your attack. Playing with your guitar’s volume knob, you can coax a range of EQ profiles and take advantage of the upper- and lower-octave content in the fuzz. With guitar volume lower, you can access some unbelievably emotive and sensitive sounds that still teeter on the edge of chaos and violence. It’s a rich, volatile circuit that gets as close as I’ve heard to a sound and physical feeling I’d call “planet-destroying.”
Charles Saufley - Gear Editor
My first fuzz, A Sovtek Big Muff, remains tied for first place among many favorites. The pedal’s most famous virtues—corpulence and sustain—are among the reasons I treasure it. But the way the Sovtek pairs with a Rickenbacker 330 and Fender Jaguar, which were once my two primary guitars for performance and recording, made it invaluable in various projects for a long time. Neither the Ricky nor the Jag are sustain machines, but the wailing mass of theBig Muff makes their focused voices an asset—inspiring tight, concise fuzz phrases, hooks, and riffs as well as articulate chords.
A silicon Fuzzrite clone built by good pal Jesse Trbovich (long-time member ofKurt Vile’s Violators) runs second place to the Sovtek in terms of tenure, and is a very different fuzz. It’s a piercing, hyper-buzzy thing, but a perfect match for a squishy 1960s Fender Bassman head and 2x12 I adore. Perversely, I sometimes couple it with a Death By Audio Thee Ffuzz Warr Overload or Wattson FY-6 Shin-Ei Super-Fuzz clone. These tandems create chaos and chance, but sing loud and melodiously too—at least when I’m not intentionally bathing in feedback. The Jext Telez Buzz Tone, a clone of the mid-’60s Selmer circuit, is often my go-to now. It’s a low-gain affair compared to the other fuzzes here, and I use it in its even-lower-gain (and vintage-correct) 3-volt setting. It’s pretty noisy, but it is thick, dynamic, detailed, raunchy, and plenty trashy when the occasion demands it. It’s also a very cool overdrive when you back off the gas.
Jason Shadrick - Managing Editor
I rarely need fuzz in my everyday gigs, but it's one of the most fun effects to explore when I'm noodling around. At a NAMM show a few years ago I plugged into Mythos' Argo and as soon as I hit a note my eyes lit up. The sound of the fuzz wasn't unwieldy or hard to manage. It gave me the illusion of control while the octave was the magic dust on top. I knew right then I wasn't leaving the show without one. After I spent some time with it, I became enamored by how much more the Argo can do.
It's inspired by the Prescription Electronics C.O.B. (Clean Octave Blend), so the control set is similar. The octave is always present in the signal path, but you can dial it out with the blend knob. The fuzz and volume knobs are self explanatory, but dialing the fuzz and octave knobs all the way down gives you a killer boost pedal. I find my favorite settings are at the extremes of the fuzz and blend ranges. Typically, both are either all the way up or all the way down. Another great experiment is to turn the fuzz down and then pair it with a separate drive pedal. And in octave mode, Argo is one of those pedals that inspires you to head directly for the neck pickup and stay above the 12th fret.
On the surface, fuzz is an almost barbarian concept—a nasty sound that’s easy to grasp in our imaginations. But contrast David Gilmour’s ultra-creamy Big Muff sounds with James Gurley’s free and visceral fuzz passages from Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrillsand you remember that two different fuzzes, in the hands of two different players, can speak very different languages. The latter artist concerns us here because Gurley did his work with a Jordan Boss Tone, which is the inspiration for the Ananashead Spirit Fuzz.
Ananashead’s Pedro Garcia has a knack for weirder 1960s fuzzes. HisMeteorite silicon Fuzzrite clone, for instance, is a knockout. This take on the two-transistor Boss Tone is equally thrilling, and genuinely idiosyncratic when it runs at full tilt. It exhibits tasty inherent compression, and transient notes ring out as pronounced and concise before blooming into full viciousness—a quality that shines when paired with neck-position humbuckers (and which probably made the original circuit appealing to Spirit’s Randy California, another 1960s Boss Tone devotee). That tone profile gives the Spirit Fuzz meatiness that stands out among ’60s-style two-transistor circuits, and the sense of mass, combined with the pedal’s intrinsic focus, makes it superb for tracking. The Spirit loves humbuckers, which coax real sweetness from the circuit. But it was just as happy to take a ride with a Jaguar bridge pickup and an old Fender Vibrolux with the reverb at 10. Sounds painful, right? On the contrary, it was one of the most haunting fuzz sounds I can remember playing.
In recent years, Samantha Fish’s most often-used guitar was this alpine white Gibson SG, but it ran into some issues last summer—“I ended up having to reglue the neck”—and it is now on hiatus.
Photo by Douglas Mason
Samantha Fish is moving in new circles these days—circles occupied by the kind of people you see a lot on classic-rock radio playlists. First there was the invitation from Eric Clapton to play at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in L.A. Then there was the summer ’24 slot on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour, followed by the Experience Hendrix tour, on which she dug into Jimi classics in the company of Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa, and other luminaries. And, oh yeah, she opened for the Stones in Ridgedale, Missouri, on the final date of their Hackney Diamonds jaunt. That’s right, the Rolling Stones.
If you’re already a fan of Fish’s tough Delta-mama singing and high-temperature guitar work, you’ll probably think that all this is just as it should be. You gotta reap what you sow eventually, right? And Fish has been sowing for a long time, from her bar-band days in Kansas City 15 years ago through eight rootsy, eclectic albums as a leader (not counting the two early-2010s discs she cut with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith as Girls with Guitars, or her 2013 outing with Jimmy Hall and Reese Wynans in the Healers, or 2023’s tangy swamp-rock collaboration with Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues) to her current tour schedule of about 150 dates per year in North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Still, even with such a solid career foundation to draw on, mixing and mingling in the flesh with folks you’ve known all your life as names on record covers could be a little intimidating. Is it? “You know, I don’t ever think about it in those terms,” Fish says on the phone from her home in New Orleans. “So when you lay it all out there like that, it feels like, ‘Aw shit, that’s crazy.’ I mean, it is crazy. When I think about the goals that I’ve made over the years … honestly, I’ve crossed off a bunch of things that I thought were even ironic being on the list, because they just seemed so far-fetched. Every interview I’ve ever done, they were like, ‘If you could ever open up for somebody, who would it be?’ And I always said the Stones, ironically. Cause when the hell’s that gonna happen? I’m a guitar player from Kansas. That’s nuts.”
With her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, heavy hitting style, and wide array of blues and rock influences, Fish is an artist of a different stripe.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Fish spits out the sentences above in a fast, excited spray, one word tumbling over another. Then she pauses for a second, and it’s clear that wheels are turning in her head. Her voice gets more playful. “I’m gonna start speaking some even wilder things into existence just to see what happens,” she cracks, her grin nearly audible over the line. “A billion dollars!No, money’s evil, but you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to lean into superpowers.”
Given her formidable chops, it’s not that daring a leap to suggest that Fish could be capable of playingsome wilder things into existence, too. She’s certainly off to a good start with the just-released Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. Whether your personal taste leans more toward nasty string-snapping riffs (the aptly titled “Can Ya Handle the Heat?”), sizzling slide escapades (“Lose You”), or high lonesome twang (“Off in the Blue”), you can’t deny that the album’s loaded with prime guitar moments. And its two longest tracks, “Sweet Southern Sounds” and “Fortune Teller”—“longest” being a purely relative term (they’re both under six minutes)—offer listeners just a taste of the neo-psychedelic fantasias that can occur when Fish stretches out in concert.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got to figure out a way to capture the live feeling on a record,’” she reports. “Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta make the song work for vinyl, so let’s cut it down,’ and you end up hacksawing away some of these parts that are kind of the feeling and heartbeat of the song. This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Fish made her recording debut in 2009 as the leader of the Samantha Fish Blues Band, with the punny-titled in-concert indie album Live Bait.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
That’s one way in which Paper Doll differs dramatically from its predecessor, 2021’s Faster, which delved into a poppier territory of synths, beats, and high-tech production (and, in this writer’s opinion, did so with great effectiveness; one of Faster’s highlights, “Hypnotic,” sounds like it could have been recorded at a late-night dance club hang with Prince and the Pointer Sisters). In contrast, obviously electronic sounds are nowhere to be heard on the new disc, and the music referenced stays firmly in the American roots category: soul, rock, country, juke-joint blues. For some artists, a stylistic shift like this could be seen as a retrenchment, but for Fish, it’s the result of a major departure. This is the first time she’s ever used her road band—keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass—to make a studio album.
“Everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
“Usually,” Fish explains, “I’ve worked in studio situations where there’s been a producer and they want to put the people they know together. So it was cool to bring in the band that I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years instead of session musicians. I feel like the dynamic was different—the familiarity, and just kind of knowing where the others were gonna go. It might be a minute difference to a listener, but for the players in the room, it helped breed another sensibility.”
Also helping in that department was producer Bobby Harlow, late of Detroit garage-rock revivalists the Go. Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.
“Last March, Bobby came out to a show we did in Detroit,” Fish recalls. “We went out to lunch, and because I was working on writing songs, I asked him to do some co-writing with me, because I love the songs he wrote for the Go. He’s really fun to be in a room with when you’re making something, because he’s incredibly devoted to it. So we started writing, and then a few months later the label was like, ‘We gotta make this album, who’s gonna produce it?’ Well, we’re on the road all summer, so I don’t know when y’all expect us to do this record. But Bobby was available, and it was like the universe bringing us back together. He was passionate about the kind of songs I was writing, and he understood where I wanted to go with it.”
Samantha Fish's Gear
Before finding her SG, Fish’s main guitar was her Delaney signature model thinline style, with a fish-shaped f-hole.
And where was that? “I wanted to lean into superpowers,” Fish quickly answers. “What are my strengths, what are the things that people know me for and recognize me for, and what can I amplify to make this a real statement record? It’s funny, because everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
Born out of the blues it may have been, but when the Paper Doll material reached the studio (actually, two studios: the Orb in Austin and Savannah Studios in L.A.), it went through some changes, partly due to the band’s contributions, partly due to Harlow’s conceptual leaps. “Bobby’s like a musicologist,” Fish says approvingly. “He’s deep. He pulls from so many different spaces, and he’s definitely introduced me to some things that I wasn’t hip to over the years. That’s done a lot to shape my musical tastes.” If you’ve had the significant pleasure of attending one of the many gigs in which Fish breaks out proto-punk nuggets like the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and Love’s “7 and 7 Is,” well, now you know the guy to thank.
“This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Paper Doll’s best tracks, “Rusty Tazor,” is a similar romp through the garage. In a rare case (for this album) of the producer bringing in someone he knows, Harlow tapped Mick Collins of cult faves the Gories and the Dirtbombs for backing vocals. “He adds such a personality to that song,” Fish says. “And I’m a punk rock fan. I love that whole era. I just love this raw, uninhibited way of playing. There’s nothing precious about it. Leaning into the edges—that’s where the real shit lies.”
Because the Paper Doll sessions took place in between periods of touring, Fish only brought her road instruments, including a new white Gibson SG and Stogie Box Blues 4-string cigar box guitar (see sidebar for more on her personal collection). But both the Austin and L.A. studios presented plenty of other options. “A ton of guitars,” Fish remembers with a laugh, “in varying degrees of disrepair. I used a rather unruly [Gibson ES-] 335 in Savannah for ‘Sweet Southern Sounds.’ You know how some guitars fight you when you play them? Well, I like a little bit of fight, but not so much that I’m pulling the strings out of the saddle, and it was fighting me like that. It was hard to push the strings down, I could only bend in certain places. But that just made the performance more intense, and it sounded good. There was also a Tele and a Strat that they had at the Orb. We had so many tools at our disposal, it was like, ‘Let’s go nuts and play with everything we can.’”
That choice of m.o. also sounds like a positive way to respond to a career moment that Fish calls “an incredible ride. Especially in the last year-and-a-half, two years, it’s just upped the ante even more. There’s nothing more to do, really. I went out, I played to the best of my ability and I did the thing that I’ve been working hard to do for the last 15 years or so. And it’s awesome to be able to show up in that capacity and perform alongside people that I’ve really looked up to. I just feel grateful. I know I’m lucky.”
Fish’s Favorites
Fish has a brawling style of playing slide, often on her cigar box. “Lose You,” on her new album, is especially representative of her approach to the classic blues technique.
Photo by Jim Summaria
For nearly a decade, Samantha Fish’s primary stage axe has been a 2015 alpine white Gibson SG that she bought new online. She’s still got it, but last year it ran into some trouble. “I ended up having to reglue the neck over the summer,” she says, “and it’s been having tuning issues. So Gibson sent me another white SG that’s just beautiful, in great shape. The neck’s a bit fatter, which is cool, different from mine. I’ve been using that one a lot”—indeed, the new SG is all over Paper Doll. “I’ve hung onto it, and I feel bad about that. I don’t want to be the person who borrows a guitar and keeps it. But it just played so great, and it was like, ‘I need this thing. What can I do to keep it?’ Luckily, the people at Gibson have been so good to me over the years.”
An even more recent addition to Fish’s electric arsenal is a Custom Shop Gibson ES-335 in silver sparkle finish, purchased in the fall at Eddie’s Guitars in St. Louis. “Because I played a 335 on ‘Sweet Southern Sounds’ in the studio, I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need one live, so of course I have to get this one!’ I’ve always wanted a silver sparkle, and this one is pristine. I’m so scared of the first scratch I get on it, or buckle rash. I’m probably gonna cry!”
Fish hasn’t been playing her Delaney SF1 Tele-style “Fish-o-caster” so much recently, but another Delaney model, the hollowbody 512, is still getting lots of action (often tuned to open D for slide use), as is her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, equipped with a P-Bass pickup. Her Danelectro baritone, Bohemian oil-can guitar, and clutch of Fender Jaguars are also safe at home, along with her current acoustic main squeeze, a new Martin D-45.
YouTube It
Samantha plays Jimi in this September 2024 performance from the most recent Experience Hendrix tour. The selection: “Fire.”
