Summer NAMM '11 - Cole Clark Guitars Brent Mason & Randy Kohrs Performance Pt. 2
PG is On Location in Nashville, TN, for the Summer NAMM 2011 show where they visit the Cole Clark Guitars booth to capture a performance segment of guitarists Brent Mason and Randy Kohrs.
PG is On Location in Nashville, TN, for the Summer NAMM 2011 show where
they visit the Cole Clark Guitars booth to capture a performance segment
of guitarists Brent Mason and Randy Kohrs.
Join PG contributor Tom Butwin as he explores how this simple, yet essential, device can save your instrument from catastrophic damage. Discover the peace of mind provided by the Atlas C1.
How this simple sustain stomp helped me bring one of my favorite David Lynch scenes to life and took me across oceans.
There’s a scene in David Lynch’sMulholland Drivewhere Naomi Watts and Laura Harring’s characters find themselves in a darkened, mostly empty theater. Against a backdrop of spooky, synthy chords, they breathlessly watch the night’s oddball emcee deliver an intense, cryptic soliloquy on recorded sound. A trumpet player slowly walks onto the stage, the two characters clutching each other. They—and you—get fully drawn into his muted, jazzy lines. Suddenly, he pulls his instrument away from the mic, throwing his hands in the air. But the solo continues. The narrator looks to the audience: “It’s all recorded.”
Like the best Lynch moments, it’s a thoroughly dramatic moment that needs to be experienced with all applicable senses. Words alone won’t do. This scene is meant to stick with you.
I had that scene in mind as I first plugged into an Electro-Harmonix Freeze. I wanted to play a note and have it keep going … and going … until the audience would see that those notes were just lingering in the air, my strings no longer vibrating, unsure what the effect is. The Freeze could do just that.
“This wasn’t some new iteration of some other effect—a crazy fuzz or a weird flanger. This was a new category.”
If you’ve never played one, the Freeze elegantly holds whatever you give it—a note, a chord, a pick scrape, or whatever else. For such an obvious effect to come out when it did felt so refreshingly groundbreaking. It represented new possibilities. This wasn’t some new iteration of some other effect—a crazy fuzz or a weird flanger. This was a new category.
There had already been ways to fake drones and sustained notes with loopers and delay pedals, but those inevitably had their quirks that ruined the illusion. David Cockerell, the designer of the Freeze, explains that loopers capture short bits of sound, apply an amplitude envelope, and play it back repeatedly. This can work to make sustained notes if the passage includes a whole number of cycles of the sound's fundamental pitch, but in most cases, you’ll hear a click when it repeats.
Back in the ’70s, the EHX team had worked on the idea for a sustain pedal. “At that time, the best I could do was intelligent-splice-single-cycle-looping,” recalls Cockerell. “This looked for a waveform match in the same way that guitar tuning meters do, and then endlessly played one cycle. It worked reasonably well for saxophone or other instruments with strictly harmonic overtones, but it was hopeless for guitar.”
”The pedal only requires one knob for volume, one toggle for latching or fast/slow swell modes, and a footswitch.”
Fast-forward to the early ’00s when DSP chips became available that could reproduce more complex sounds and overtones. While he was working on the EHX Hog with John Pisani, the company’s current-day chief engineer, the idea for a sustain pedal reared its head once again. Cockerell used an algorithm with a special provision that avoids freezing on a pluck transient, thus eliminating the risk of that pesky click. And the Freeze was born.
Released in 2010, the Freeze has a simple beauty. The pedal only requires one knob for volume, one toggle for latching or fast/slow swell modes, and a footswitch. Within, there’s such a wide range of subtlety: How you hit the pedal after your attack greatly affects the response. With the level setting, you can create subtle drones, much like an electronic shruti box, meant to subtly fill space. Or you can set it more obviously as you change chords, freeing up your hands. At higher volume settings in fast momentary mode, you can create glitchy stutter effects. And the way it interacts with other pedals opens up entirely new worlds.
I threw myself into the pedal not long after it hit the market, learning its nuances and eventually buying a second one to create a stereo effect. With my retuned 12-string Strat, I blasted my amps with drones, blowing a few speakers with abandon. Soon, the Freeze changed my approach to the guitar, and I released a series of solo drone and noise albums that took me across the U.S. and Europe. When I recognized Bill Frisell using one during a solo set, I’d bonded with the pedal so much that it was like a friend was sitting in with my favorite guitar player.
“I blasted my amps with drones, blowing a few speakers with abandon.”
There are plenty of pedals that have followed, adding more functionality. EHX’s Pico Deep Freeze, most obviously, but also the Gamechanger Plus, TC Electronic Infinite Sample, and the Chase Bliss Onward—enough that guitar sustain pedals have become their own class of effect. As fabulous as those pedals are, I still cherish the simplicity of the Freeze, a rare thing that leaves all the creative decisions on our side of the pedalboard.
PG's host straps on a prototype Tele to unleash the Knife Drop's horror and heft only to dismantle Jack White's Triplecaster in one accidental Bigsby bomb.
Our columnist links a few memories together to lead us to another obscure guitar model—one he remembers from his childhood and came to acquire as an adult.
Do you have any “click and stick” movies that you love? Like when you are channel surfing and see a movie that you’ve watched a lot, and then just watch it again? Lately, for me, it’s been the 2015 movie The Revenant. It’s a truly brutal tale of survival set in 1820s frontier America. My gosh, that movie just draws me in every time. There’s one scene where the main character goes flying off a cliff while riding a horse! He just sort of falls/rolls through a pine tree and lands in the snow … and he still survives! It’s crazy!
It makes me think about an old childhood friend who lived up the street from me. Jerry and his parents lived in an old house on their grandparents’ large plot of land. On one part of the land there was an old orchard filled with all types of fruit trees and pines, and I remember how we would climb to the top of the pines and just roll ourselves down the side, Revenant style! If you fell the right way, the branches would kind of gently let you down to the next, but if you hit it wrong and got in between the branches, you’d be wrecked. It’s like we enjoyed getting hurt, and, of course, when you’re young, you can snap right back. Ah, the days when pain really didn’t hurt. Now I wake up with injuries, for real.
“The action was way high and the fret ends were sharp. It was basically a painful affair.”
So why am I talking about my click-and-stick movie and stupid childhood escapades? Well, let’s get back to memories of my old friend Jerry. First, the house he lived in was so old that it had real wooden siding, but it hadn’t been painted in forever so the exterior took on a worn, faded, haunted house vibe. Second, his carpet was so tattered that it was being held together with duct tape. Lastly, I remember his dad had a cool, old electric guitar in the living room. His dad would let me play it sometimes, and I remember that it actually hurt to play! The action was way high and the fret ends were sharp. It was basically a painful affair. Not falling-out-of-a-tree painful, but as bad as it comes with guitars. It had the label “Conrad,” and young Frank didn’t realize that he’d be looking for that guitar again one day. I mean, it did have four pickups and lots of knobs and switches!
Made at the old Japanese Matsumoko factory in the ’60s, this Conrad Bison 1233 has four pickups and a 27" scale.
Years later, I would discover that his was a Conrad Bison guitar. The model came in a few different configurations, but the four-pickup design was designated as the 1233. Primarily featuring a lovely sunburst, these Bisons were made at the amazing old Matsumoku factory in Japan and were imported by the David Wexler Company that was based in Chicago. Matsumoku always had a good supply of aged wood, and many of the guitars made there are resonant and built well. The Bisons first appeared around 1966 and had a rather good run into the early ’70s.
Simple volume/tone knobs are paired with preset solo/rhythm switches that power alnico magnets. There’s an on/off switch for each pickup, and the sound really covers all the bases. Thumpy lows and crisp highs are all there. And, the pickups handle fuzz and distortion with ease. The Bisons also came in one- and two-pickup configurations with a normal scale, but the four-pickup ones have a longer, 27" scale, which is common for Matsumoku-made electrics.
So there it is: pain, survival, American frontier, Bison, haunted houses. It all sticks together like a duct-taped carpet. Click and stick, baby!