From the tough economics of touring to building a personal style without theory, the Welsh guitarist talks about his journey from social media to sold-out shows.
On this episode of Dipped in Tone, Rhett and Zack are joined by Wales-born guitarist Chris Buck. Buck is gearing up for a string of US tour dates with his fast-rising rock band Cardinal Black, including a date at Nashville’s Basement East after the original venue sold-out within a few hours.
Luke Ottenhof HED: How Chris Buck Went From YouTube to the Royal Albert HallTEASER: From the tough economics of touring to building a personal style without theory, the Welsh guitarist talks about his journey from social media to sold-out shows.On this episode of Dipped in Tone, Rhett and Zack are joined by Wales-born guitarist Chris Buck. Buck is gearing up for a string of US tour dates with his fast-rising rock band Cardinal Black, including a date at Nashville’s Basement East after the original venue sold-out within a few hours.Buck starts off digging into the details of his custom Yamaha Revstar and why he chose the versatile guitar over better-known offerings from legacy brands. Buck’s rise has been nearly meteoric: He started off posting videos on Facebook and Instagram before his wife suggested he give YouTube a try. His channel now counts 226,000 subscribers, thanks to his popular Friday Fretworks videos. But as Buck explains, his content is a tool to help fund his original music—a very successful tool.
Still, it’s not all sunshine. Buck details how he and his band navigate the brutal economics of touring, including some horror stories of how they ended up losing money on merch sales. Later, we learn how Buck built his signature playing style—mostly by ear and by accident. “I don’t think anyone has ever ended up sounding like themselves through sitting down and going ‘Right, im gonna try to sound unique,’” he says. “It just happens over time.”
He’s gone from YouTube to the Royal Albert Hall, but Buck reveals a quiet concern that he’s peaked too early. What do Rhett and Zach make of that fear? Tune in.
The ascendant roots shredder shares intimate details from his musical upbringing and gets philosophical on the past and future of bluegrass.
Millennial folk philosopher Billy Strings joins this episode of Wong Notes. The Grammy-winning acoustic picker is an open book—nothing is off limits with Billy, from recounting his days selling magic mushrooms in exchange for passing grades in math class, to an emotional drunk-driving revelation that might have saved his life.
Now, Strings can recount war stories of playing with his heroes in the bluegrass scene, and learning important lessons from the greats about respect while onstage. Strings is at the intersection of the old and the new, often stuck between the traditionalists and the new era of American folk music. He says he doesn’t belong to one or the other; his music is more of “a goulash of all the things put together.” Speaking of which, Billy and Cory connect for a brilliant mashup of Cory’s funk stylings and Billy’s bluegrass flatpicking, proving that music really can be a universal language.
Wong Notes is presented by DistroKid.
Use this link for 30% off your first year.
Shifty’s biggest guitar hero joins the podcast to run down his unique lead picking on the 1977 Love Gun hit.
Ace Frehley is the reason Chris Shiflett picked up a guitar in the first place, so it’s only natural that Shifty invites his original tone teacher onto the pod to recap one his iconic solos. Frehley, saddled with a classic black-and-cream triple-humbucker Les Paul, shares that “Shock Me” was the first KISS track on which he took lead vocal duty. The first time he sang it live, he remembers, was in front of 18,000 screaming fans at Madison Square Garden. As Frehley explains, that was quite a step up from how he recorded the vocals in the studio for Love Gun: lying flat on the floor on his back, racked with stage fright.
Frehley recalls that he ripped most of his solos through a dimed Marshall stack, and always on the bridge pickup. Turns out, he never went for pedals or boards because he’d trip over them onstage. “Wearing those boots?” he snorts. “Forget about it. It’s like a minefield!” His signature sauce, he says, is in the way he picks the strings: He holds his picks loose, but plucks in such a way that his thumb often hits the string at the same time, producing a sound just shy of a pinched squeal, but more spunky than a regular strike.
Frehley drops tons of golden bits of KISS history: the engineering behind his famous “smoke bomb” effect, the time he woke up in Paris with his eyes swollen shut from makeup, how he accidentally roadied for Hendrix, the shared genealogy between his technique and Eddie Van Halen’s, and which KISS member smelled the worst after shows.
Credits
Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editors: Dan Destefano and Addison Sauvan
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.
Vulfpeck bass ace Joe Dart joins his bandmate on Wong Notes to chop up all things bass, from how he developed his “voice” to his favorite practice regimes.
This time on Wong Notes, Cory is joined by his Vulfpeck and Fearless Flyers copilot Joe Dart. Wong doesn’t waste any time, diving in by asking Dart, by now renowned as a modern bass wizard with flawless fundamentals, how he developed he signature voice on the bass. As Dart explains, it came from listening to players who had their own distinct voice, who sound like “they’re singing a part within the song,” he says. These “philosophers of the low-end,” like Flea, imprinted the value of total intention and feeling in every note, as if any single one could be your last.
Dart throws it back to his first bass—a Samick—and remembers how it’s ridiculously high action was like weight training for the rest of his career. He still likes his strings suspended up higher than most, which allows his “brute force” slapping. Wong and Dart trade notes on practice regimes, and Dart offers advice for young players: Learn your scales, sure, but most importantly, “play with as many different people as you can.” Plus, Dart breaks down his differing approaches to instrumental and vocal tracks.
Later on, the bandmates ponder the mental trap of the social media comparison game, and wonder at how algorithms impact which music rises to the top of the heap. What does Dart hope to remembered for? With any luck, he’ll have works as iconic as his grandfather’s, Israel Baker, whose violin playing you’ll recognize not just from collabs with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, but some of the most famous film scores and TV show theme songs.
Wong Notes is presented by DistroKid.
Use this link for 30% off your first year.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ lead guitarist shows Shifty how he bottled an electric reaction to “The Waiting” on the song’s simple, iconic solo.
Mike Campbell knows how to write the perfect parts to a song, and records them with the perfect guitar, amp, and tone to match. That’s why Shifty has the Heartbreakers’ lead man on this episode to get a look under the hood at what drives Campbell’s solo on “The Waiting.”
The song, from 1981’s Hard Promises, was tracked at Sound City, where Campbell recalls the band had “every amp in the world lined up across the room, every amp you can imagine.” After miking and testing each, Campbell says they settled on a Fender Twin, which he brought to life with a white Les Paul he got from a pawn shop. Shifty notes the song’s music video led him to believe the solo was tracked with a Rickenbacker, but Campbell snickers that it was just for show: “I did that different just to fuck people up,” he grins. (“I hate that video, I think I look like a total idiot,” he adds.)
Campbell, who started playing guitar by ear at 16 on an “unplayable” Harmony acoustic, says he didn’t labor over the solo for “The Waiting,” favoring spontaneity and instinct instead. “I like to come in fresh and capture as I’m discovering what it is, there’s some electricity in that moment,” he explains. “The listener can hear that you’re discovering it as they’re discovering it at the same time.” That approach applies to his songwriting experience in general, too: “I don't even wanna talk about it too much, because its mysterious,” he says. “It comes to you when it wants to.”
Later, Campbell lays out how he and Petty balanced their guitar parts, and why Campbell favored “droning” open notes over complexity for many of his leads. And stick around to hear how he figured out Lindsay Buckingham’s guitar parts for Fleetwood Mac’s 2018 tour, the difficulty of backing Bob Dylan, and why original Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch almost got in a fight with Johnny Rotten.
Credits
Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editors: Dan Destefano and Addison Sauvan
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.