Back in February, PG’s Perry Bean headed over to Nashville’s Cannery Hall to catch up with his longtime friends in the Tennessee mathcore outfit the Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza. Before their gig, guitarists Layne Meylain, Josh Travis, and Eric Berngruber, along with bassist Mike Butler, took Bean through the Kiesel-and-Quad-Cortex-powered guts of their audio acrobatics. Check out some highlights below, and watch the full Rig Rundown for more.
Layne Meylain asked Kiesel to ship him this wicked 7-string Kira model, which is loaded with Kiesel pickups—a Lithium and Nail Bomb. He uses a custom set of Stringjoys, .010-.074 gauge.
Purple Pain
This 8-string Kiesel, with a walnut neck and swamp ash body, was initially a loaner, but Meylain found a way to hang onto the guitar. If the company ever comes to retrieve the instrument, he’s willing to pay for it.
Green Giant
This 8-string was custom-built by Jeff Kiesel, and features a multi-scale, green-stained fretboard, and neck-through-body construction.
Layne Meylain’s Amp and Effects Rig
Meylain and his bandmates run Neural Quad Cortex units onstage, but the main sounds are from an amp and cab he captured with his Fractal Axe-Fx unit. He relies on the Quad Cortex's in-house effects, though, and prefers its interface. A Laney LFR-212 cabinet moves some air onstage.
A Real Looker
Josh Travis never had a guitar this gorgeous before. He runs this 8-string Kiesel with Dunlop 72-8 gauge string set, and most of his axes are loaded with either Kiesel Lithium or Thorium pickups.
Woody
Travis also brought this darker-finish Kiesel, with plenty of natural wood grain showing through, along for this run.
High-5-String
Butler primarily plays this Kiesel A2 5-string bass, which features fanned frets, active pickups, and .065–.105 gauge strings.
Mike Butler’s Bass Rig
While Butler is getting used to the Quad Cortex, he runs a Darkglass Micro Tubes X900 preamp and matching 410 cabinet.
Berngruber’s Balaguer
Newest member Eric Berngruber is endorsed by Balaguer Guitars, and the red 7-string in the middle here, loaded with Fishman active pickups, is his primary weapon. The Kiesel and Ibanez flanking it are on hand for certain tunes, and Berngruber, too, runs a Quad Cortex.
Portrayal of Guilt, (l-r): guitarist/vocalist Matt King, bassist Alex Stanfield, and drummer James Beveridge
Photo by Craig Murray
No one would accuse black-metal innovators Portrayal of Guilt of being optimists. The Austin band, led by singer and guitarist Matt King, have always made good on the bleak promise of their genre’s name. Their 2018 debut full-length, Let Pain Be Your Guide, was bold and brutal, with moments of precious reprieve scattered between bludgeonings. They released back-to-back LPs in 2021, the title of the second of which would get us some complaints if we printed it here. On 2023’s Devil Music, King and his bandmates, bassist Alex Stanfield and drummer James Beveridge, experimented with crusty chamber and classical music alongside their signature onslaught. They are not here to write happy songs.
King and his frosty friend: a Fender Vintera ’70s Telecaster Custom with an aluminum neck from Electrical Guitar Company.
But their new album, ...Beginning of the End, seems to auger even deeper shades of black. In a genre often racing itself to be the fastest, loudest, and most intense, King, Stanfield, and Beveridge understand that space and slowness can be just as unsettling. If their previous records felt like a relentless descent into darkness, this new collection is a doomed arrival at the frigid, mucky bottom. Opener “Backstabber” dusts itself off and gets its bearings behind a phaser-warped nu-metal guitar lead, before Beveridge’s groove clatters in. It drops the listener into a sort of twisted alternate reality à la Alice in Wonderland, where scabby goblins and warped insects skitter around in the shadows. “Human Terror” follows it with an industrial, whining feedback sample that builds to a Death Grips-style groove, again on the merits of Beveridge’s beat and Stanfield’s syncopated bass line.
“Heaven’s Gate” is classic black-metal mayhem, and true to PoG, it’s mixed to be as caustic and abrasive as possible. But after the thrash-metal crush of “Under Siege,” much of the record plays out like a sludge-crusted concoction of black metal and hip hop, an invigorating melding of Texas music traditions that comes to a head on “Chamber of Misery Pt. IV,” which features veteran Houston rapper Slim Guerilla.
The band recorded ...Beginning of the End with trusted producer Phillip Odom at his Austin studio, Bad Wolf Recordings. King’s goal was to make the record sound as similar as possible to their live shows, and he doesn’t mind being exact in his approach to mixing. “I’ve got to be one of the most difficult people to work with in general, but as far as mixing and stuff, I’ll go crazy if it doesn’t sound exactly the way that I hear it in my head,” he says. “And there’s no way to describe what I want, either.” That leaves him using his hands or other abstract communication methods to explain himself.
Stanfield plays his aluminum-neck Kramer DMZ 4000.
Photo by Tomislav Crnkovič
Alex Stanfield’s Gear
Basses
Sterling by Music Man StingRay
Kramer DMZ 4000
Amps
Sunn Coliseum 880
Traynor TS-140
Worshiper 6x10 cabinet
Effects
TC Electronic PolyTune
Electro-Harmonix Freeze
Electro-Harmonix Bass Clone
Darkglass Microtubes B7K Ultra
Strings & Picks
Ernie Ball Regular Slinky
Ernie Ball Power Slinky
Dunlop Tortex .88 mm
However King got his point across, it worked. As usual, he counted on his Sovtek MIG-60, coupled with a handful of pedals. Chief among them was his Dead Air Portrayal of Guilt/Matt King Dual Drive, a crushing dual-channel drive pedal developed between King and Dead Air’s Will Killingsworth. One side is Dead Air’s extra-gnarly TS-style Tube Nightmare circuit, which is goosed by an extended control set and gets both cleaner and filthier than a traditional Screamer. The other side, which can be engaged independently, is a punishing, super-saturated boost. Paired with a Boss HM-2, the signature pedal has formed the basis of King’s clanking, frostbitten guitar tone since 2022. Other key elements include an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, Boss RV-6, and an Old Blood Noise Endeavors Procession. For his crushing bass parts, Alex Stanfield relied mostly on his Sunn Coliseum head, with a Traynor TS-140 checking in on a couple of songs, too.
“I always like sounds that are bleak and sad, so I’m more or less trying to recreate that with the guitars.”
Conversations about “good” guitar tone usually involve the same handful of adjectives: warm, full, smooth, tube-y, etc. Matt King’s sound is the antithesis of virtually all of those words. His guitar work is frigid and harsh, cavernous and unforgiving. “I always like sounds that are bleak and sad, so I’m more or less trying to recreate that with the guitars,” he explains. For years, King’s longtime primary guitar has been his Guild S-60D, an oddball electric produced between 1977 and 1989. But during the recording of ...Beginning of the End, he bought a Fender Vintera Telecaster and swapped in an aluminum neck from Electrical Guitar Company. It was his main weapon for recording sessions, and it has dethroned the Guild for live use, too. Telecasters already sounded clean and cold to King. “When I threw the aluminum neck on it, it’s just ice-cold,” he grins. “I like a really trebled-out guitar tone. It just sounds fucked up. It’s my dream guitar tone.
“This band has been an experience in learning how to play guitar better,” King continues. “When I started, I wasn’t exactly good, and I’m still not a shredder, let’s put it that way. But I can write better songs than I ever have.” A big part of that process is experimenting, and when King began toying with modulation, inspiration hit. “It’s more or less exploring. I feel like shit got interesting for me when I got a chorus pedal and started messing with that,” he says. “That’s really the main thing: just kind of fucking around.”
Portrayal of Guilt’s work might scan as pessimistic, but King doesn’t see it that way. “Whereas a lot of people try to look at the best of things, I just choose to look directly at what it is,” he says. “Is it the beginning of the end? Who knows? But to me, it feels like we’re on a steady decline."
Few companies have shaped the sound of modern music like Electro-Harmonix. From soaring fuzz to lush chorus, sweeping flanger, and expansive analog delay, their pedals have defined countless recordings for generations of musicians and producers. Now, MixWave has developed in collaboration with Electro-Harmonix the EHX Classics Bundle delivering 6 legendary pedals across four plugins. Each effect has been recreated using detailed component-level modeling, faithfully capturing the behavior of the original analog circuitry and signal paths while integrating seamlessly into modern production workflows.
Big Muff Pi Fuzz
Crafted to share the foundational fuzz’s story through 3 iconic circuits: the Big Muff Pi, Ram’s Head Big Muff, and Russian Big Head. These versions all share the same unmistakable character while expressing their own unique personalities.
Deluxe Memory Man Analog Delay
Known for its musical balance of warmth and clarity, the Deluxe Memory Man is lauded as the pinnacle of BBD analog delays. Lush chorus, expressive vibrato, and pitch-warped textures emerge from the same circuitry that shapes its echoes, making it as effective for movement and color as it is for traditional delay.
Electric Mistress Flanger/Filter Matrix
A truly flexible classic modulator capable of dream chorus-like textures, jet plane woosh, and everything in between. From subtle movement to dramatic, soaring sweeps, its sound has defined countless recordings across rock, post-punk, and ambient music.
Small Clone Chorus
Simple but extremely effective, the Small Clone creates a lush movement and depth with featuring both shimmer and warmth. It helped define the chorus textures of the early ’90s and remains a go-to effect decades later.
Each plugin is available from MixWave in the EHX Classics Bundle or as individual downloads.
Pedal compression can make a flat guitar sound much more exciting. To many players, though, pedal compressors themselves are not very exciting at all. I understand why some folks feel this way. Pedal comps are not sexy, and they won’t instantly, overtly transform your tone the way a fuzz or delay will. This dilemma makes mini compressors a cool proposition—you reap the sonic benefits without allotting much floor space. Wampler’s new Mini EGO 76 compressor certainly does a great job of being small. But it does a better job of being interesting to use. It’s certainly not boring. And even comp averse players may want to take note.
Inspired by the sound and circuitry of the Urei/Universal Audio 1176 studio compressor, the FET-based Mini EGO 76 is an attractive alternative to simpler OTA-based Ross/Dyna Comp circuits. And the extra features that make the Mini EGO 76 look a little cluttered on the surface are far from superfluous. Besides the wet/dry blend control, which opens up tone and tactile frontiers all by itself, the Mini EGO 76 compressor also features two 3-position switches that shape the attack and release. Simple pedal compressors often lack attack and release controls, and here, they make the Mini EGO 76 more functionally aligned with the 1176. They might not make the Wampler sound or respond exactly like a real $3K studio 1176 (or a $15K blue-stripe vintage version, for that matter). But they give the Mini EGO 76 range to cover both adventurous compression applications and the most pedestrian ones.
Comps for Comps When a company compares a floor compressor to a real 1176, it’s important to keep a few grains of salt on hand. A more useful benchmark for the Mini EGO 76 might be Origin’s much more expensive Cali 76 comp. Both compressors make use of a wet/dry blend, both employ a FET-based circuit, and critically, both offer control over attack and release. Space constraints mean the Mini EGO 76 does not feature rotary knobs that sweep the whole attack and release range, like the Cali 76 and the Mini EGO 76’s big brother, the EGO 76.
Instead, the Wampler uses clever 3-way switches. The attack switch moves between fast attack (10ms,) medium (105ms,) and slow (166ms.) The release switch features settings for fast (297ms,) medium (579ms,) and slow (1770ms) release. In general, the medium attack and release switch positions correlate with common guidelines for setting up a real 1176 like the “Dr. Pepper” 10-2-4 setting (10 o’clock attack, 2 o’clock release and 4:1 compression.) The medium settings sound great without any dry signal in the blend. And just as on a genuine 1176, they make the Mini EGO 76 a reliable tone sweetener even at very modest compression ratios. Next to a Ross-derived mini comp, the Mini EGO 76 in medium attack and release modes had a roughly equivalent compression effect but sounded more alive in the high-mid range. The Wampler feels less grabby than the Ross-derived comp at these settings too, but the Wampler’s extra air and immediacy don’t make it any less effective at taming spikes from a distortion or fuzz.
The Mini EGO 76 distinguishes itself in another way: it’s quiet. And when you want to push the output or situate gain pedals in front of it, you won’t hear a wall of hiss.
Blooming Along Other Trajectories
While the Mini EGO 76 excels at the most basic compression tasks, it shines in less conventional applications. The streamlined design makes it easy to integrate sounds from the radical end of the pedal’s envelope, and the wet/dry blend knob, in particular, is an asset when exploring more aggressive compression. Players generally like wet/dry blends because they can add compression in very specific amounts—like a chef adding a touch of finishing salt. The Mini EGO 76’s blend control is great for summoning more naturalistic guitar tones in this fashion. But it also enables you to be fearless about using weird ones. For example, chasing super-compressed 1966 Byrds 12-string tones made me fall in love with the Mini EGO 76’s fast attack and long release functions. In contexts other than “Eight Miles High,” such settings might feel suffocating. But the clarity added via the wet/dry control provides contrast that can actually highlight the lag and otherworldly bloom of the fast attack/slow release effects while restoring the body and air that goes missing at extreme comp levels. It’s a lot like slightly shifting a photo transparency on top of an identical one—you don’t lose a lot of clarity in the image, but you gain a very arresting sense of extra dimension.
The Verdict
There’s no wanting for choice when it comes to mini compressors these days. There are some good ones. But while the $149 U.S.-made Mini EGO 76 can leave you longing for some features—most notably the tone control on its big brother the EGO 76—the little Wampler’s features feel complete, well balanced, and accommodating, whether you’re a player who relishes squishing tones to strange artificial ends or one that prefers their compression to be nearly inaudible.
During a recent visit to the Twin Cities, John Bohlinger & the PG video squad stopped by Stevie's Guitars — a relatively new store to the area — that is jam packed with vintage gems from Fender and Gibson, custom, one-off builds, badass boutique beauties. All these remarkable instruments and cool pieces of gear are looked over and maintained by an enthusiastic, attentive, knowledgable crew of guitar lovers.
