Sermon’s BiLT Relevator is finished in shoreline gold and features both an MXR Carbon Copy and BiLT’s own fuzz circuit built into the body along with a Sustainiac in the neck position. Sermon can control the parameters of the effects via a wealth of buttons, switches, and controls that are accessible on the front of the guitar. There’s a Pedaltrain Volto on his strap that supplies power to the pedals via the stereo cable. He keeps this guitar tuned a half-step down from standard.
On “Fricton” Sermon reaches for this prototype BiLT baritone that’s tuned to A and features a Mastery bridge and tremolo along with a pair of Bare Knuckle Mule humbuckers. He strings it up with a set of Elixir strings gauged .012–.068.
For the acoustic tunes, Sermon grabs either his Gibson J-35 or Gibson LG-2 American Eagle (shown here), both flattops have LR Baggs M1 pickups. The LG-2 is kept in standard tuning and used on “Trouble,” “Thief,” and “Release,” while the J-35 is tuned a half-step down and is featured on the bridge to “I Bet My Life.”
The backline for Sermon’s chimey brand of pop-rock is full of classic British tones. His wet/dry/wet setup revolves around a quartet of vintage Vox AC30 amps—two from ’64, a ’66, and a ’67.
Along with the vintage Voxes, Sermon runs an angry Friedman Smallbox 50.
Each one is modded with a Top Boost Kit from Plexi Palace.
Friedman Smallbox 50 is plugged into a 65 Amps 2x12 Whiskey cabinet.
In order to keep things tight, Sermon’s pedals are kept offstage in a rack. The first drawer contains an original silver Klon Centaur, Analog Man King of Tone, ISP Decimator II, Paul Cochrane Timmy, and a Refractor built by Aion Electronics. The whole shelf is powered by a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus power supply.
The second drawer houses everything that’s routed before the volume pedal. It includes an Electro-Harmonix POG 2, Voodoo Lab Micro Vibe, J. Rockett Mark Sampson Hightop, Wampler Ego Compressor, Electro-Harmonix Superego Synth Engine, and a Malekko Vibrato (which is in the effects loop of the Superego). All of the effects are run through a RJM Mini Effects Gizmo and powered by another Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus.
The final drawer of “silliness” holds the Eventide H9, DigiTech Whammy, and Source Audio Programmable EQ. Sermon’s tech uses his iPad to connect to the H9 via Bluetooth in order to change or tweak any settings on the fly in real time.
During a typical show, Sermon needs to cover a lot of ground. After going through a Shure ULXD4 wireless unit, the signal hits a Sound Sculpture Switchblade GL before feeding one of three Eventide products: a pair of 7600 units and a H9.
Out front, Sermon uses a RJM Mastermind GT/22 for all his switching needs. He pairs that with a trio of Mission Engineering expression pedals that control the volume of individual amps and the DigiTech Whammy. Also on the board is a Boss TU-3 tuner.
Ben McKee keeps it cool with this custom bass built by Chris Stambaugh from Stambaugh Designs. It has some T-style design concepts along with a 33” scale length. It also features custom artwork using images that represent the band’s charitable foundation, The Tyler Robinson Foundation.
This Sadowsky Jazz bass is tuned to B-E-A-D for specific tunes on the band’s latest album, Smoke & Mirrors.
McKee also keeps this Mike Lull T4 tuned to B and it features passive electronics, a mahogany body and acoording to McKee, makes him feel like a “badass.”
A pair of Matchless Thunderman 50-watt heads provides McKee with his low-end rumble.
He runs the Matchless heads into a Bergantino NV412 cab.
Shane Johnson also built McKee’s bass rig. The goal was to be bulletproof yet still offer plenty of sonic options. His pedal drawer houses a Malekko B:Assmaster, Brimstone Audio Crossover Distortion XD-2, Electro-Harmonix Bass Micro Synth, and an Xotic EP Booster.
VOX Amplification Tone Sculptor
The VOX Tone Sculptor graphic EQ delivers tube-driven tone shaping that adds warm distortion as you raise the level, infusing your sound with rich tube harmonics and natural compression.
$219 street
voxamps.com
SoloDallas SVDS Boost
This pedal recreates the legendary 1975 signal boost from the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System, which provided up to 30 dB of boost, shaping the tones of Angus Young, David Gilmour, and others. Unlike typical clean boosts, it enhances vintage coloration and harmonics. Built with high-quality components, it’s designed for both studio and stage reliability.
$129 street
solodallas.com
Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster Mini
The Pickup Booster Mini delivers the perfect boost and features a resonance switch for multiple tonal characteristics without taking up space on your board.
$99 street
seymourduncan.com
J. Rockett Audio Designs Archer Clean
The Archer Clean is a recreation of the clean boost found in a Klon Centaur. Go from beautiful cleans to slamming the front end of your amp instantly!
$229 street
rockettpedals.com
VOX Amplification Power Burst
The VOX Power Burst offers the rich tone of a genuine tube boost, designed to enhance your tone with natural compression and tube saturation.
$199 street
voxamps.com
Rock N’ Roll Relics Stinger Boost
Not your typical boost. This single-transistor midrange booster lets you switch between a punchy silicon transistor and a warm, vintage NOS Germanium transistor. Whether placed before or after other drives, it delivers the signature midrange growl that defines classic rock ’n’ roll. Each pedal is aged to perfection.
$279 street
rocknrollrelics.net
MXR Micro Amp
The MXR Micro Amp slams your amp to the brink—up to +26dB—while adding just a touch of honey to your tone with the twist of a single knob.
$99 street
jimdunlop.com
Rafiq Bhatia’s guitar is a Flip Scipio Flippercaster with vintage Teisco and DeArmond pickups and has a strikingly original voice, even without effects or processing.
“Where [neuroscience and economics] intersect is the science of decision making,” explains Bhatia. Back when he was a new student at Oberlin College, “the lab that I was the most interested in being a part of was focused on decision making under various levels of risk and uncertainty, and trying to pick apart aspects of what happens in the brain before cognition kicks in. What are the precognitive aspects of decision making, and do they predict in any way the decisions that you will actually make?
“And that, I think, is part of the same underlying spirit of inquiry that making music, and especially improvised music with other people, is born of,” he continues. “You’re in these situations where there is uncertainty and there is also risk—and if there’s not enough risk, then it’s not that compelling.”
Bhatia’s latest solo release—his first in five years—is the EP Each Dream, A Melting Door, made in collaboration with pianist Chris Pattishall. The duo improvise their way through the five-track record, unwinding an extended impressionistic world wherein dreamlike piano underscores a range of guitar tones that glimmer in an abstract light. It’s clear that Bhatia has no intention of conveying a traditional sonic image of a guitar, instead preferring to manipulate the instrument as a device for painting colors of sound.
Bhatia’s collaborator on his new EP is pianist and composer Chris Pattishall, at left.
Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Of course, before even getting into the methods of how he achieves those sounds, Bhatia says, “I think it’s less important how I get the sounds out of the guitar than the reasons why I might choose to go looking for them. And the way I get them out of the guitar today might be drastically different than the way I get them out of the guitar tomorrow. I care deeply about the sounds that are made, but I’m so not about the perception that you have to acquire all these ‘things’ to make it.”
His prized 6-string, the Flippercaster, was designed by the reclusive-yet-storied luthier Flip Scipio, who’s built and worked on guitars and basses for Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and many others. After coming to recognize Scipio’s trademark on builds he came across in various New York studios, Bhatia sought him out in an effort he compares to the search for the legendary swordsmith, Hattori Hanzō, in Kill Bill. “He’s the nicest dude ever; it just took me a while to find him. But if you go visit him, he’ll make you either an amazing AeroPress coffee or a mug of smoky lapsang tea and then sit and talk with you,” Bhatia adds, smiling.
The guitar is equipped with vintage Teisco and DeArmond pickups wired to a blend knob in place of a switch, which Bhatia loves. “I usually don’t want half and half; I want a little bit of one and mostly all of the other. And to me it’s very dependent on what the room sounds like and what musical context I’m in,” he explains. The Flippercaster goes into a small pedalboard, the brain of which is a custom Eventide H90. Bhatia collaborated with the pedal manufacturer on the development of the device’s design.
The duo improvise their way through the five-track record, unwinding an extended impressionistic world wherein dreamlike piano underscores a range of guitar tones that glimmer in an abstract light.
“I was really excited,” Bhatia shares. “I was like, ‘Can you make it switch other pedals in and out of the chain like one of those pedalboard controllers? And let’s say I’m using one of your reverbs, but I want to put distortion on it. Can you make it only affect the wet signal?’ I thought they’d maybe do 10 percent of what I asked, and they did basically all of it,” he concludes, laughing.
Aside from his expression and volume pedals, his pedalboard is otherwise made up of a Klon KTR and a ZVEX Fat Fuzz Factory, the latter of which he has particular fun with. “I’m very jealous of saxophone players because they have breath,” he prefaces. “But what I’ve found is that if you play in such a way where you flirt with the edge of the [Fat Fuzz Factory’s built-in] gate, you can get the ends of notes to crackle and decay, almost like when you hear a saxophone player breathe out at the end of the note.”
His pedalboard then goes through a Universal Audio Apollo Twin MkII interface, which connects to Ableton Live on his MacBook Pro. Bhatia then uses two MIDI controllers—one on the floor with a digital display, and one with knobs that he controls with his left hand—that are both color-coded to match the lanes of his session in the DAW. “I can then grab these little bits of things that I’m playing, and bring them in and out and manipulate them while I’m also playing the guitar and generating other ones. I’m excited about it because it’s a process that is helping me erase the line between what I’ve been doing on the guitar and what I’ve been doing away from the guitar. I feel like I’m getting a little bit closer to where I can play, and the sound is saying who I am.”
Rafiq Bhatia’s Gear
Filmmaker David Lynch has been a powerful influence on Bhatia—a cover of “The Voice of Love,” from Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, appears at the end of Each Dream, A Melting Door—as have a number of hip-hop producers and jazz musicians.
Photo by John Klukas
Guitars
- 2018 Flip Scipio Flippercaster with vintage Teisco and DeArmond pickups
Amps
Live:
- Strymon Iridium (with replaced IRs and EQ tweaks) > Telefunken TDA-2 DI > Universal Audio Apollo Twin MkII > MacBook Pro running Ableton Live > FOH
Studio:
- Swart Atomic Space Tone Pro
- Anderson custom 1x12
- Swart Space Tone Atomic Jr.
Effects
- Ableton Live controlled by Morningstar MC6 PRO and DJ TechTools Midi Fighter Twister
- Eventide H90
- ZVEX Fat Fuzz Factory
- Klon KTR Overdrive
- Lehle Dual Expression
- Sound Sculpture Volcano Volume
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL Balanced Tension (.011–.050)
- Bluebird 1.5 mm custom picks, handmade from vintage Galalith poker chips
Filmmaker David Lynch has been a powerful influence on Bhatia—a cover of “The Voice of Love,” from Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, appears at the end of Each Dream, A Melting Door—as have a number of hip-hop producers and jazz musicians. Bhatia shares, “If you listen to Madlib beats, sometimes he’s doing a lot and it’s a million different small elements that have been collaged together, but other times it’s just a sample that he flipped and he didn’t change anything except for the loop point. But whether it’s something he made while fussing over all these little ingredients, or it’s just something he looped, you hear two seconds of it and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s Madlib.’”
He mentions how that effect similarly belongs to icons such as Thelonious Monk and Jimi Hendrix. “Those are all the heroes, and they say something that’s so personal and honest to who they are and their experience that right away, you just know [snaps fingers]—it’s them. To me it sounds like honesty, and it sounds like an expression in many cases of hybridity.
“I was in class in 9th grade when the planes hit the Twin Towers, and it was on our school news channel,” he continues, emphasizing the discomfort it created for him as someone of Muslim origin, which drew unwanted speculation from his non-Muslim peers. “That was the backdrop to how I got into playing the guitar and listening to music. So, when I would hear folks who seemed to be able to take all these different aspects of who they were and what their experience was and distill it into a way of communicating through sound, that was really inspiring. It just felt like therapy to engage in trying to figure out how to do that.”
For the release of his last solo album, Breaking English, Bhatia performs here with a trio, showcasing his uniquely creative approach on the instrument in a more traditional context.
Duane Betts enjoys a control set modification that was preferred by his father, the late, legendary Dickey Betts.
Guest Picker - Duane Betts
Betts’ 1961 ES-335 has its toggle and volume-dial positions switched.
A: My favorite mod is the one on my 1961 Gibson ES-335. The toggle switch and neck volume knob positions have been switched so the volume knob is more accessible for volume swells using your pinky finger. This is something my dad had done when he obtained the guitar in the ’90s as he loved using the volume swell effect.
A pedal primed for vintage fuzz sounds.
Obsession: My current obsession is this DanDrive Secret Machine fuzz that JD Simo gave me a few years ago. I don’t use fuzz often but I’ve loved it as a way to change things up and give the listener something fresh. My normal tone is very natural with the amp turned up. This is just a great fuzz tone that gives me a new angle that I really enjoy pursuing both live and in the studio.
Reader of the Month - Steve Nowicki
A: A push/pull knob for humbucker coil split. It’s a sneaky little mod I throw on my tone pots. You won’t get amazing Strat tone, but the ability to instantly swap between Les Paul chunk and Fender twang during a jam opens a ton of possibilities tonally. Plus, no extra switches or routing needed—even though it’s fun to hack guitars apart.
Obsession: The EVH 5150 Iconic EL34 amp. Owning an 80-watt half-stack in a Brooklyn apartment might be overkill, but damn this amp is awesome. It delivers insane amounts of gain and distortion, yet every little nuance of your playing comes through crystal clear. I pair it with a Bugera Power Soak so I can crank the head and get that warm “Brown Sound” tone at lower volumes.
John Bohlinger - Nashville Correspondent
John Bohlinger and his Lukather-ized Strat.
A: I’ve hacked up a bunch of guitars over the years, but my favorite mod remains the highly intrusive, expensive, and quixotic B-bender install. It is the equivalent of open heart surgery, and there’s no going back—but the first time you play the Clarence White “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” intro right, it’s totally worth it.
John at work. When it comes to mods, he know the drill!
Obsession: I recently filmed a PG video where we swapped pickups in my ’90s Strat with an EMG Lukather set. I never thought I’d go active, but what gets me is how smoothly the volume and tone work. I’m rethinking all my gear biases. Like maybe there’s been some progress since 1957.
Jon Levy - Publisher
Let it bleed: Jon dials back the treble on his Tele.
A: Installing a treble bleed on my volume pots has changed how I play electric guitar. Previously, I never dialed back my volume knob because it dulled my sound. Now I can fine-tune loudness and gain while retaining tone—it’s a game changer. I still swap pickups and hardware, but one mod always comes first: the humble treble bleed.
Did you know both John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page played on Shirley Bassey’s iconic recording of “Goldfinger?”
Obsession: John Paul Jones. I’ve always loved his bass (and other instrumental contributions) with Led Zeppelin. But after seeing the Zep documentary [Becoming Led Zeppelin] I searched his session work from 1964–1968, which includes Shirley Bassey, Lulu, Donovan and more. What an amazingly versatile and talented artist he is!
