Premier Guitar’s Perry Bean met with Bring Me The Horizon guitarist Lee Malia and his tech, Dean Rowbotham of Bedford Guitars, before their March 3, 2014, gig at the War Memorial in Nashville. Lee explained the simple beauty of a low tuned Les Paul plugged into a very loud Marshall JCM 800.
Guitars
Lee is all about Gibson and Epiphone guitars with heavy strings (.080 on the bottom) and tuned down to C or sometimes Bb. On tour, Malia brings a well-stocked guitar vault that includes his signature Epiphone Les Paul Custom loaded with a P-94 in the neck, a Gibson Les Paul Traditional with Lace pickups, a Gibson Les Paul Supreme with Bare Knuckle pickups, and two vintage models: a 1982 Gibson Victory MVX and a 1979 Gibson The Paul. All guitars are retrofitted with bone nuts crafted by Dean Rowbotham and TonePro Bridges with either graphite or bone saddles.
Amps
Lee stays true to his British roots with two Marshall JCM800s. Both amps have been modded to accommodate Svetlana Winged C 6550C power amp tubes and Electro-Harmonix Gold Pin 12AX7 preamp tubes. The amps drive a duo of Marshall 1960A 4X12 cabinets.
Effects
Lee’s signal path runs from this guitar to a Shure UR4D+ Dual Wireless Receiver into a Bedford Audio Line Driver, a Bedford Audio JB1 Junction Box / Line Receiver and a Boss NS-2 Noise Suppressor. To keep his tone pure, Lee runs all effects through a Free The Tone ARC-03 Audio Controller.
Loop 1 – J Rockett Audio Designs Chicken Soup Overdrive
Loop 2 - Fulltone OCD overdrive
Loop 3 - Boss DD-20 Giga Delay
Loop 4 - Boss DD-7 Digital Delay with FS-5U tap delay footswitch
Loop 5 - Boss RV-5 Digital Reverb
Loop 6 - Electro Harmonix Cathedral Stereo Reverb
Loop 7 - Output to clean amp
Loop 8 - Output to dirty amp
Lee checks his tuning with a TC Electronic Polytune. The whole enchilada is powered by an MXR Custom Audio Electronics MC403 Power System.
Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst have been making music as Shovels & Rope since 2008. The husband-and-wife duo from South Carolina specialize in rootsy, bluesy rock, Americana, and alt-country, but they don’t confine themselves to traditional two-piece arrangements. They switch off on vocal, guitar, percussion, and synth duty throughout their shows, orchestrating a full-band ruckus with all available limbs.
Their seventh full-length, Something Is Working Up Above My Head, released in September last year, and while touring in support of it, they stopped at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl in late February. PG’s John Bohlinger caught up with Trent before the gig to see what tools he and Hearst use to maintain their musical juggling act.
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Trent’s not a guitar snob: Generally speaking, he plays whatever he can get his hands on. While playing Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Fest, someone loaned him this Gretsch Black Falcon, and he fell in love with it. He likes its size compared to the broader White Falcon. It’s also the band’s only electric, so if it goes down, it’s back to acoustic. Hearst takes turns on it, too.
Trent loads the heaviest strings he can onto it, which is a set of .013s. It lives in standard tuning.
Ol' Faithful
As Trent explains, he and Hearst have done some DIY decorating on this beautiful Gibson J-45—it’s adorned with sweat droplets, stains, and fingernail dust. It runs direct to the venue’s front-of-house system with an LR Baggs pickup. This one is strung with Martin heavy or medium gauge strings; lighter ones are too prone to snapping under Trent’s heavy picking hand (which holds a Dunlop Max-Grip .88 mm pick). And it rolls around in an Enki tour case.
On Call
These second-stringers—a Loar archtop and an LR Baggs-equipped Recording King—are on hand in case of broken strings or other malfunctions.
Need for Tweed
Trent doesn’t trust amps with too many knobs, so this tweed Fender Blues Junior does the trick. It can get fairly loud, so there’s a Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box on hand to tame it for some stages.
Shovels & Rope's Pedalboard
Because Trent and Hearst trade off bass, guitar, keys, and percussion duties, all four of their limbs are active through the set. Whoever is on guitars works this board, with an MXR Blue Box, Electro-Harmonix Nano Big Muff, EarthQuaker Devices Hummingbird, and Boss OC-5, plus a pair of Walrus Canvas Tuners for the electric and acoustic. Utility boxes on the board include a Walrus Canvas Passive Re-Amp, Radial J48, Livewire ABY1, and a Mesa Stowaway input buffer.
A Roland PK-5 MIDI controller, operated by foot, sits on the lower edge of the board. It controls the board for “Thing 2,” one of two MicroKORG synths onstage.
Thing 1 and Thing 2
There’s no one backstage helping Hearst and Trent cook up all their racket; they handle every sound themselves, manually. During the first few sets of a tour, you’re liable to see some headaches, like forgetting to switch synth patches during a song, but eventually they hit a rhythm.
Affectionately given Seuss-ian nicknames, this pair of microKORGs handles bass notes through the set, among other things, via the foot-controlled PK5. “Thing 1” is set up at the drum station, and runs through a board with an EHX Nano Big Muff, EHX Bass9, EHX Nano Holy Grail, and a Radial Pro DI. A Walrus Aetos keeps them all powered up.
The board for “Thing 2,” beside the guitar amps, includes an EHX Mel9 and Bass9 powered by a Truetone 1 SPOT Pro, plus a Radial ProD2.
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