This beauty cherry picks aspects from Jonathan Nuñez’s favorite guitars. It all started with his love affair with his friend’s G&L F-100 while recording Admission. The F-100 he borrowed had a smooth floating trem arm that bends and wobbles all over the new record. “The trem was too much fun to play,” Nuñez jokes. “But once we finished the record, I realized, shit, I need to pull this off live.”
So, with the task of reverse engineering a guitar that is suited for Torche’s established roar and new tones flexed on Admission, Nuñez turned to some more friends. To keep in tradition with bandmate Steve Brooks’ and Torche’s steam-locomotive sound, he got a metal neck from Robot Graves Industries and put it with a curvy, mahogany, Mosrite-style body built by fellow South Florida rocker Joe Koontz (formerly of Against All Authority aka AAA). Nuñez has always been partial to the Bill Lawrence L-500 humbucker and thanks to his buddy (and Rig Rundown alumnus) Bobb Bruno of Best Coast turned him onto the Mastery OMV Vibrato, so those features made into this custom piece. All of his guitars take custom-gauge Dunlop strings (.070–.052–.046–.017–.013–.010). The band’s main tuning is an octave tuning that consists of A–A–D–G–B–E.
On the heels of their fifth album, 2019’s Admission, Torche hit the road for an extensive tour that started out having the harmonious doomers open for Baroness before venturing out for their own headlining sets. We fortunately caught the band on the latter run and guitarist Jonathan Nuñez (who also has served as the band’s bassist for 13 years and producer/engineer for Admission) spoke to PG’s Chris Kies about his and Steve Brooks’ slim setups that center around custom-made, metal-neck instruments and explains why he started Nuñez Amplification, which has become a big part of the band’s sonorous sonic imprint.
This Fender Telecaster HH Rosewood (with a Lace Nitro Hemi in the bridge) is the “bomb-note” guitar that sees stage time for “Infierno,” “What Was,” and “Annihilation Affair.” It takes the same .010–.070 strings and is set to the aforementioned octave tuning, but (as you’ll hear in the video) the 6th string is, well, not exactly ready for battle. It flops and allows Nuñez and Brooks to thwap the dead string producing a huge bomb-drop note. This was first discovered when Brooks was recording with his first band Floor and someone busted a string mid song, causing a lightning-strike noise.
In 2017, Nuñez switched from bass to guitar and missed the blowing breeze that his Ampeg 8x10 stack stirred up each night. Feeling a void after trying countless amps, Nuñez got Overtone Works’ Gary Phillips on the horn and the first idea that came to fruition was the Annex Bass Channel pedal. After that, the tone-chasing duo set their sights on an Annex guitar amp. The way Nuñez describes this 130-watt behemoth is this: “a handwired, discrete class A/B, quad-voiced, dual-channel, all-tube head.” Each channel is independent, so you’re essentially getting two amps in one box. Channel one has symmetrical clipping, while channel two has asymmetrical clipping. This growler is brought to life thanks to a quartet of EL34s. The one shown above is a MkII variant.
Jonathan Nuñez’s pedal playground is host to a pair of EarthQuaker Devices stomps—Arpanoid and Avalanche Run—a Nuñez Dual Range Boost and Nuñez Tetra-Fet Drive (with custom Admission artwork), an MXR Phase 95, Catalinbread Echorec, and DigiTech HardWire DL-8 Delay/Looper. A Boss TU-3 keeps everything in tune.
Guitarist/singer Steve Brooks first got his hands around a JML Custom Guitar when Jay Lewis handbuilt a neck-through, SG-style ripper that was cleverly coined the SB. Steve always wanted a V so he commissioned the builder to create an oversized, neck-through version that’s approximately 1.25 the size of a standard model.
If you’re a loyal Torche fan, you’ll recognize this Electrical Guitar Copmany Standard as Steve Brooks’ longtime main ride that still sees plenty of stage time when the band goes through older material.
This Nuñez Annex MkII is from one of the first batches and been Brooks’ amp of choice since working on Admission. There are minimal differences between this head and the newer one Nuñez plugs into, mainly cosmetics (the company now offers more colors to not pigeonholed themselves into a specific musical genre or player), upgraded circuitry components, and an fine-tuned FX loop, but Brooks still plugs into the front of the amp.
Steve Brooks is more of a rhythm, meat-and-potatoes player and keeps an airport-friendly board. He has an MXR Carbon Copy, MXR Phase 90, and a Nuñez Tetra-Fet Drive. A Boss TU-3 keeps everything in check and a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus brings the noisemakers to life.
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Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
