Album
The War on DrugsLost in the Dream
Secretly Canadian
The music of Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs almost universally invites references to expansive landscapes, big skies, and the open road. It would be easy to dismiss such a unified collective reaction as lazy journalists cribbing from the same press release. In reality, it’s a testament to WOD mastermind Adam Granduciel’s gift for crafting deeply evocative and vivid images from sound. Indeed, when taking in Lost in the Dream’s steady, streamlined rhythmic underpinnings, long-echo guitar lines, minor-key melodies, and Granduciel’s yearning loner voice, it’s almost impossible to not imagine interstate wanderers fleeing heartbreak and seeking salvation.
Granduciel honed this formula on his 2011 release Slave Ambient. But “Red Eyes,” the first single from Lost in the Dream might be Granduciel’s melancholy masterpiece (the title alone conjures pictures of tearful, desperate late nights far from home). Exultant, full of longing, and bristling with the tension of driving acoustics, drifting baritone sax, and weeping synth strings, it’s a heart-rending little ride—one of many on an LP that marks a brilliant texturalist emerging as a master songsmith.
Must-hear track: “Red Eyes”
Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts was last year’s pop-rock album of the year, with singles like “All-American Bitch,” “Get Him Back!,” and “Bad Idea Right?” igniting a revival of early-’00s pop-punk, but with quite a bit more nuance and grit.
Rodrigo’s tour behind the critically acclaimed record has been rolling around the world since February. To bring it on the road, the star has hired guitarists Emily Rosenfield and Daisy Spencer, along with bassist Moa Munoz. PG’s Chris Kies caught up with the three musicians before Rodrigo’s show at San Francisco’s Chase Center in early August to see what gear powers the pop-rock machine.
Special thanks for helping out to guitar techs Luis Munoz and Maurizio Pino.
Brought to you by D’Addario.Aye Aye, Captain
Among a stable of sharp, fun axes, Rosenfield, who also plays with Rina Sawayama and has played guitar for Broadway productions of Rent and Hamilton, favors this eye-catching Gibson Kirk Douglas Signature SG. Strung with Ernie Ball Paradigm strings, the triple-humbucker configuration carries a fair bit of Jack White mojo—a great fit given White’s oddball influence on Rodrigo’s barbed take on pop-rock.
Black Cat
Spencer’s number-one is this Shabat Guitars Leopard, built by Los Angeles-based luthier Avi Shabat. The Jazzmaster-style guitar, which also takes Ernie Ball Paradigms, covers some shoegaze tonal territory that crops up through the carefully programmed set.
Rick Rock
As a teen in Sweden, bassist Moa Munoz grew up on a steady diet of rock and metal, and Rickenbacker basses seemed like the right tool for those jobs. She delivered mail to save up for this 1981 Rickenbacker 4001, and it’s still her top choice.
Kemper Tantrum
Munoz runs an onstage amp rig—powered by a Mesa Boogie Subway D-800 head and matching cab—but supplements that with a Line 6 Helix Rack and Control system. Spencer and Rosenfield run through Kemper Profiler systems, with Kemper Profiler Remote units at their feet to dance through their sound changes. They cover everything from acoustic ballads to sparkly cleans to alien octave jumps to full-on grunge sludge, so tune in to hear snippets of the sonic spectrum.
Shop Olivia Rodrigo Band's Rig
Kemper Profiler
Kemper Profiler Remote
Shure AD4Q
Radial JX42 V2
Line 6 Helix Rack
Line 6 Helix Control
Mesa Boogie Subway D-800
Gibson Hummingbird
Gibson Les Paul Standard
Gibson Kirk Douglas Signature SG
Fender Stratocaster
Fender Acoustasonic Player Jazzmaster
Ernie Ball Music Man Valentine
Fender American Professional II Precision Bass
Guild Starfire I Bass
Ernie Ball Paradigm Strings
Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky .045-.105
Unlike the simplest sustain pedals, the Layers enables the player to significantly mutate sustained notes and textures. You can add blends of delay and chorusing that aren’t perceptibly either effect, which creates uncommon-sounding stacks and waves of guitar sound. The Layers pedal takes practice to use with precision, but even partial command of its time-warping capabilities makes it rewarding to use, and it’s relatively easy to dial in chaotic—or fluid and ordered—sustain and harmonizing effects to suit your whims.
Blink Twice If You Understand
Dive straight into Layers without a peek at the quick-start guide and you might fast end up swimming in washes of repeats and harmonic tangles. At first, it might not even be apparent what a layer is supposed to be, particularly because the delay and modulation effects can be so prominent. Essentially a layer is a snapshot of the sound you’re playing as you trigger the effect—either by pressing the soft-relay footswitch or by dynamic picking, depending on where you set the threshold control. (This type of functionality will be familiar to players that use envelope filters.) From there, you can control the length of the layer with the decay control, the wet/dry mix, and the rate at which the layer becomes audible, with the attack knob. By getting a feel for these functions, you can use Layers to predictably create droning and harmonizing accompaniment to what you play. But several additional features enable dramatic alteration of the shape and color of your layers. The “single” button allows switching between a default mode, in which as many as three layers can play concurrently, and another that allows only a single layer at a given time.
A set of secondary functions for each knob are activated by holding down either the single or sub-octave button, which primarily transposes layers down an octave. Options here include the ability to adjust the modulation time, modulation blend, delay time, diffusion (between more or less cavernous ambience), and the amount of dry signal sent to the delay effect, which makes the echoes dirtier and more prominent. The footswitch does triple duty. A single click activates a layer, clicking and holding sustains a layer for as long as you hold the switch, and clicking twice clears layers and puts the pedal in bypass. Functions like dry/wet signal splits, stereo operation, and control via external pedals are also available.Third-Eye Super Vision
The features listed here make the Layers seem more imposing than it is. As I said at the top, you may stare at the pedal a lot to see when the attack threshold is crossed or see which layers have been activated in the multi-layer mode. But the longer you work with Layers, the more you can do by feel. Getting a feel for what rate of swell and decay are right for a given guitar part can change from tune to tune, which makes the absence of presets a slight inconvenience. But it’s not terribly hard to make these adjustments in between tunes or even on the fly, when you’re comfortable. If you elect to go with a single set up and stick with it, you can still add much dynamic control depending on where you set the threshold. Configuring the pedal with a low- to medium-sensitive threshold, three available layers, conservative mix levels, and more generous delay times means you can move between gentle passages where you ride over misty, slow-fading overtone backgrounds or forceful, blown-out ones—all by varying pick intensity. It’s a much more interesting way to build quiet-to-loud dynamics than just switching on, say, an extra drive pedal and reverbs simultaneously. And that flexibility can help you respond to a live performance with extra sensitivity to the mood of a piece. (By the way, it bears mentioning that Layers is often more effective at the start of an effects chain, where it will respond most directly to your input.)
Layers can be subtle. I enjoyed using low mix levels, long decay settings, a permissive threshold, and slow-ramping rise times to create hazy harmonizing trails. I also loved the avalanches of deeply modulating, colliding, and completely unsubtle soundwaves you can slather over a still-coherent melody. Loopers will love building stacks of rising, falling, swelling, and swirling passages of all of these textures that roll like storm clouds. In fact, a two-pedal setup of Layers and a looper will make a simple guitar and amplifier weirder and more otherworldly by orders of magnitude.
The Verdict
The Layers inhabits a sweet middle ground between a simple single-function sustain pedal and overflowing loopers or multi-delays. And though you can utilize very prominent harmonizing voices, it’s generally grainer, less loaded, and more unique than a shimmer reverb. It’s these very uncommon voices and sounds, as well as a capacity for intuitive operation, that make Layers so alluring.
It would have been easy for Wampler to simply make a Mostortion clone and call it a day, but they added some unique twists to the Mofetta pedal. While the original Mostortion had a MOSFET-based op amp, it actually used clipping diodes to create its overdrive. The Mofetta is a fairly accurate replica and includes that circuitry, but also has a toggle switch for texture, which lets you choose between the original-style diode-based clipping in the down position and multi-cascaded MOSFET gain stages in the up position.
Luscious Low Gain and Meaty Mid-Gain
The Mofetta’s control panel is very straightforward and conventional with knobs for bass, mids, treble, level, and gain. The original Mostortion was revered for its low-gain tone and is now popular among Nashville session guitarists. Wampler’s tribute captures that edge-of-breakup vibe perfectly. I enjoyed using the pedal with the gain on the lower side, around 9 o’clock, where I heard and felt slight compression that gave single notes a smooth and silky feel. I particularly enjoyed the tone-thickening the Mofetta lent to my Ernie Ball Music Man Axis Sport’s split-coil sound as I played pop melodies and rootsy, triadic rhythm guitar figures. The Mofetta has expansive headroom, and as a result there’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much. Even turning the gain all the way off yields a pleasing volume bump that would work well in a clean boost setting.
There’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much.
Switching the texture switch up engages the MOSFET section, introducing cascading gain stages that elevate the heat and add flavor the original Mostortion didn’t really offer. Classic rock and early metal are readily available via the MOSFET setting. If you need to stretch out to modern metal sounds, the Mofetta probably isn’t the pedal for you. Again, the original Mostortion was, first and foremost, a low-to-mid-gain affair, so unless you’re using it as a boost with a high-gain amp, the Mofetta is not really a vehicle for extreme sounds.
One of the Mofetta’s real treats is its responsiveness. Even at higher gain settings the Mofetta is very touch sensitive. You can tap into a wide range of dynamic shading just by varying the strength of your pick attack. I enjoyed playing fast, ascending scalar passages, picking with a medium attack then really slamming it hard when I hit a high climactic note, to get the guitar to really scream.
The Verdict
Wampler is a reliably great builder who creates pedals with a purpose. I own two of his pedals, the Dual Fusion and the Pinnacle, and both are really exceptional units. The Mofetta captures the essence of the Mostortion and makes it available at an accessible price. But even if you’ve never heard or played an original Mostortion, you’ll appreciate the truly versatile EQ, touch sensitivity, and the bonus texture switch, which expands the Mofetta’s range into more aggressive spaces. The wealth of dirt boxes on the market today can make a player jaded. But Wampler pushed into a relatively unique, satisfying, and interesting place with the Mofetta.
Filthy, saturated fuzz is a glorious thing, whether it’s the writ-large solos of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s live “Ball and Chain,” the soaring feedback and pure crush of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” or the sandblasted rhythm textures of Queens of the Stone Age’s “Paper Machete.” It’s also a Wayback Machine. Step on a fuzz pedal and your tone is transported to the ’60s or early ’70s, which, when it comes to classic guitar sounds, is not a bad place to be.
Catalinbread’s StarCrash is from their new ’70s collection, so the company is laying its Six Million Dollar Man trading cards on the table—upping the ante on traditional fuzz with more controls and, according to the company’s website, a little more volume than the average fuzz pedal, while still staying in the traditional Fuzz Face lane.
The Howler’s Viscera
Arbiter Electronics made the first Fuzz Face in 1966. The StarCrash is inspired by that 2-transistor pedal, but benefits from evolution, as did almost all fuzz pedals in the ’70s, when the standard shifted from germanium to silicon circuitry to improve the consistency of the effect’s performance. The downside is that germanium is gnarlier to some ears, and silicon transistors don’t respond as well to adjustments made via a guitar’s volume control.
While Fuzz Faces have only two knobs, volume and fuzz, the silicon StarCrash has three: volume, bias, and low-cut. Catalinbread’s website explains: “We got rid of that goofy fuzz knob. We know that 95 percent of all players run it dimed, and the remaining 5 percent use their guitar’s volume knob to rein it in.”
I suspect there are plenty of players who, like me, do adjust the fuzz control on their pedals, but the most important thing is that the core fuzz sound here is excellent—bristly and snarling, with a far girthier tone than my reissue Fuzz Face. It’s also, with the bias and low-cut controls, far more flexible. The low-cut control allows you to range from a traditional, comparatively thinner Fuzz Face sound (past noon and further) to the StarCrash’s authentic, beefier voice (noon and lower). Essentially, it cuts bass frequencies from 40 Hz to 500 Hz, resulting in an aural menu that runs from lush and lowdown to buzzy and slicing. And the bias control is a direct route to the spitty, fragmented, so-called Velcro-sound that’s become a staple of the stoner-rock/Jack White school of tone. The company calls this dial a “dying battery simulator,” and it starves the second transistor to achieve that effect.
Sweet Song of the Tribbles
Playing with the StarCrash is a lot of fun. I ran it through a pair of Carr amps in stereo, adding some delay and reverb to mood, and used a variety of single-coil- and humbucker-outfitted guitars. While both pickup types interacted well with the pedal, the humbuckers were most pleasing to my ears with the bias cranked to about 2 o’clock or higher, since the ’buckers higher output allowed me to let notes sustain longer before sputtering out. Keeping the low-cut filter at 9 o’clock or lower also helped sustain and depth in the Velcro-fuzz zone, while letting more of the instruments’ natural voices come through, of course.
With the low-cut filter turned up full and the bias at 10 o’clock, I got the StarCrash to be the perfect doppelganger of my Hendrix reissue Fuzz Face. But that’s such a small part of the pedal’s overall tone profile. It was more fun to roll off just a bit of bass and set the bias knob to about 2 or 3 o’clock. Around these settings, the sound is huge and grinding, and yet barre chords hold their character while playing rhythm, and single-note runs, especially on the low strings, are a filthy delight, with just the right schmear of buttery sustain plus a hint of decay lurking behind every note. It’s such a ripe tone—the sonic equivalent of a delicious, stinky cheese—that I could hang with it all day.
Regarding Catalinbread’s claims about the volume control? Yes, it gets very loud without losing the essence of the notes or chords you’re playing, or the character of the fuzz, which is a distinct advantage when you’re in a band and need to stand out. And it’s a tad louder than my Fuzz Face but doesn’t really bark up to the level of most Tone Bender or Buzzaround clones I’ve heard. In my experience, these germanium-chipped critters of similar vintage can practically slam you through the wall when their volume levels are cranked.
The Verdict
Catalinbread’s StarCrash—with its sturdy enclosure, smooth on/off switch and easy-to-manipulate dials—can compete with any Fuzz Face variant in both price and performance, scoring high points on the latter count. The bias and low-cut dials provide access to a wider-than-usual variety of fuzz tones, and are especially delightful for long, playful solos dappled with gristle, flutter, and sustain. Kudos to Catalinbread for making this pedal not just a reflection of the past, but an improvement on it.
Catalinbread Starcrash 70 Fuzz Pedal - Starcrash 70 Collection
