
Nicole Atkins and PG editors share favorite memories from the last concert they attended. Plus, current obsessions!
Q: What was the last concert you went to? Describe the best moment.
Nicole Atkins—Guest Picker
A: It was Spoon in Wilmington, North Carolina. I went to see them the night before in Knoxville, and their opener got Covid, so I hopped on their bus and opened for them the next day and just used Britt Daniel’s guitar. He let me sing “Jonathan Fisk” with them, and it’s one of my favorite songs!
Spoon "Jonathan Fisk"
Thank god I had the day off. It felt like my birthday! Spoon are one of those special bands that make every album and play every show like they did not come to fuck around. They’re very inspiring to me.
Nicole Atkins' Current Obsession:
Sam Cooke’s version of “Unchained Melody.” It’s low and slow and breaks your heart in the best way. Anytime it comes on, I’m completely absorbed in it. Also, a lot of Rodgers and Hart songs are entering my wheelhouse lately, and I need those feeling changes in my music right now. It makes me wanna scream!
Chris Laney—Reader of the Month
A: In April 2019, I saw Buckethead at the National in Richmond, Virginia. I took a painting with me, specifically for Bucket, hoping to hand it to him. I got a position in the front row, on the right side, and enjoyed the show from the best perspective possible.
About a third of the way into the show, Buckethead gave out toys to fans upfront. As he got closer to me, I edged the painting to where it was partially resting on the stage. He approached me and took the painting! He took it back to his amp setup, and P-Sticks eventually displayed it behind the amps where a good portion of the crowd could see it. After that, Buckethead came back and gave me a bag of magnetic letters and shook my hand. It was amazing to interact with someone I looked up to, literally and figuratively. I consider it the best concert experience ever, with meeting Joe Satriani coming in as a close second.
Buckethead - Full Show, Live at The National in Richmond Va. on 4/5/2019
This video of the concert shows the handoff at 53:14, and if you watch later into the video, you can see it on display behind where Bucket is playing.
Chris Laney's Current Obsession:
Sweep picking. Cramming so many notes into such a short space and making it flow is hard, but so big of a payoff when it finally happens.
Shawn Hammond—Chief Content Officer
A: As a longtime fan of Together Pangea, I was super excited to see them play the Maintenance Shop in Ames, Iowa, earlier this summer—especially after Covid’s long live-music drought. Their show was energetic and spot-on in every way, but even cooler was the fact that opening band Tropa Magica—which none of us had even heard of before—blew our minds.
Their hypercharged, incredibly nuanced blend of psych, punk, and cumbia alone would’ve made the four-hour round-trip drive worth it.
Tropa Magica’s David Pacheco on the Power of Distorted Delays
Best moment: Band founders/brothers David and Rene Pacheco holding their Tele and red Nord Electro keyboard, respectively, aloft behind their heads and playing a mighty fucking crescendo in front of the venue’s medieval-church-style stained-glass backdrop.
Shawn Hammond's Current Obsession:
Continuing to learn how best to ride the wild beast of hollowbody guitar at high-ish volumes.
Jason Shadrick—Associate Editor
A: About a month ago, I caught Bela Fleck’s touring bluegrass festival that he put on with Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas. All three bands were loaded with all-star pickers, and seeing Bela, Sam, Jerry, Sierra Hull, Bryan Sutton, and Michael Cleveland at the same time was incredible.
Where else can you see bluegrass legends rip off solos over a 5/4 groove in Bb?
Béla Fleck - Wheels Up (Live)
One of the absolute highlights was Justin Moses, who stepped up and played Dobro alongside Jerry, banjo alongside Bela, and fiddle alongside Michael—and kept up with all of them.
Jason Shadrick's Current Obsession:
Fundamentals. Every once in a while, I need to go back and break down my technique, fretboard knowledge, and improvisation skills to their bare bones. I then turn to transcribing because it’s all about vocabulary and sound for me.
Fifteen watts that sits in a unique tone space and offers modern signal routing options.
A distinct alternative to the most popular 1x10 combos. Muscular and thick for a 1x10 at many settings. Pairs easily with single-coils and humbuckers. Cool looks.
Tone stack could be more rangeful.
$999
Supro Montauk
supro.com
When you imagine an ideal creative space, what do you see? A loft? A barn? A cabin far from distraction? Reveling in such visions is inspiration and a beautiful escape. Reality for most of us, though, is different. We’re lucky to have a corner in the kitchen or a converted closet to make music in. Still, there’s a romance and sense of possibility in these modest spaces, and the 15-watt, 1x10, all-tubeSupro Montauk is an amplifier well suited to this kind of place. It enlivens cramped corners with its classy, colorful appearance. It’s compact. It’s also potent enough to sound and respond like a bigger amp in a small room.
The Montauk works in tight quarters for reasons other than size, though—with three pre-power-section outputs that can route dry signal, all-wet signal from the amp’s spring reverb, or a mixture of both to a DAW or power amplifier.
Different Stripes and Spacious Places
Vintage Supro amps are modestly lovely things. The China-made Montauk doesn’t adhere toold Supro style motifs in the strictest sense. Its white skunk stripe is more commonly seen on black Supro combos from the late 1950s, while the blue “rhino hide” vinyl evokes Supros from the following decade. But the Montauk’s handsome looks make a cramped corner look a lot less dour. It looks pretty cool on a stage, too, but the Montauk attribute most likely to please performing guitarists is the small size (17.75" x 16.5" x 7.5") and light weight (29 pounds), which, if you tote your guitar in a gig bag and keep your other stuff to a minimum, facilitates magical one-trip load ins.
Keen-eyed Supro-spotters noting the Montauk’s weight and dimensions might spy the similarities to another 1x10 Supro combo,the Amulet. A casual comparison of the two amps might suggest that the Montauk is, more-or-less, an Amulet without tremolo and power scaling. They share the same tube complement, including a relatively uncommon 1x6L6 power section. But while the Montauk lacks the Amulet’s tremolo, the Montauk’s spring reverb features level and dwell controls rather than the Amulet’s single reverb-level knob.
“High reverb levels and low dwell settings evoke a small, reflective room with metallic overtones from the spring sprinkled on top—leaving ghostly ambience in the wake of strong, defined transient tones.”
If you use reverb a lot and in varying levels of intensity, you’ll appreciate the extra flexibility. High reverb levels and low dwell settings evoke a small, reflective room with metallic overtones from the spring sprinkled on top—leaving ghostly ambience in the wake of strong, defined transient tones. There are many shades of this subtle texture to explore, and it’s a great sound and solution for those who find the spring reverbs in Fender amps (which feature no dwell control) an all-or-nothing proposition. For those who like to get deep in the pipeline, though, the dwell offers room to roam. Mixing high level and dwell settings blunts the amp’s touch sensitivity a bit, and at 15 watts you trade headroom for natural compression, compounding the fogginess of these aggressive settings. A Twin Reverb it ain’t. But there is texture aplenty to play with.
A Long, Wide Strand
Admirably, the Montauk speaks in many voices when paired with a guitar alone. The EQ sits most naturally and alive with treble and bass in the noon-to-2-o’clock region, and a slight midrange lean adds welcome punch. Even the amp’s trebliest realms afford you a lot of expressive headroom if you have enough range and sensitivity in your guitar volume and tone pots. Interactions between the gain and master output controls yield scads of different tone color, too. Generally, I preferred high gain settings, which add a firecracker edge to maximum guitar volume settings and preserve touch and pick response at attenuated guitar volume and tone levels.
If working with the Montauk in this fashion feels natural, you’ll need very few pedals. But it’s a good fit for many effects. A Fuzz Face sounded nasty without collapsing into spitty junk, and the Klon-ish Electro-Harmonix Soul Food added muscle and character in its clean-boost guise and at grittier gain levels. There’s plenty of headroom for exploring nuance and complexity in delays and modulations. It also pairs happily with a wide range of guitars and pickups: Every time I thought a Telecaster was a perfect fit, I’d plug in an SG with PAFs and drift away in Mick Taylor/Stones bliss.
The Verdict
Because the gain, master, tone, and reverb controls are fairly interactive, it took me a minute to suss out the Montauk’s best and sweetest tones. But by the time I was through with this review, I found many sweet spots that fill the spaces between Vox and Fender templates. There’s also raunch in abundance when you turn it up. It’s tempting to view the Montauk as a competitor to the Fender Princeton and Vox AC15. At a thousand bucks, it’s $400 dollars less than the Mexico-made Princeton ’68 Custom and $170 more than the AC15, also made in China. In purely tone terms, though, it represents a real alternative to those stalwarts. I’d be more than happy to see one in a backline, provided I wasn’t trying to rise above a Geezer Butler/Bill Ward rhythm section. And with its capacity for routing to other amps and recording consoles in many intriguing configurations, it succeeds in being a genuinely interesting combination of vintage style and sound and home-studio utility—all without adding a single digital or solid-state component to the mix.
Stretching the boundaries of reverb’s realm through dynamic and pitch control.
Nice core reverb sounds. Invites cool compositional and arrangement directions. High quality.
If you lack patience, it will be hard to unlock its coolest secrets.
$329
Gamechanger Audio Auto Reverb
gamechangeraudio.com
When the first Moog synthesizer appeared, it freaked out a lot of musicians—not least for the way it blurred the divisions between instruments and their roles. Was it percussion? A keyboard? A reed instrument? Many effects makers build from this philosophical foundation. The Latvian company Gamechanger often seems to revel in it—an attitude that’s manifest in the company’s Auto Series pedals, which includes the Auto Reverb.
There’s no reason you can’t use the Auto Reverb in a very straightforward fashion. The plate, spring, and hall settings are all very nice digital representations of their analog inspirations—and I’d be perfectly happy playing an instrumental surf set with the spring mode, for instance. But because you can control the parameters like the reverb’s level, decay, tone, and the filter with changes in pitch and dynamics, the Auto Reverb can function in highly orchestral ways, transforming itself from subtle to outlandish as a musical piece shifts in intensity or rises from low to high keys toward a blurred, hyper-spacious climax. While these attributes make the Auto Reverb a great fit for prepared guitar and conceptual pieces—and invites many themes and compositional ideas within those forms—it can just as easily be configured to create an especially dynamic and dramatic pop song arrangement on stage or in the studio that might otherwise be relegated to automations within a DAW. It’s fun to use, if not always intuitive. But knowing its ways can expand your musical options significantly.
Black Sabbath to Reunite for First Time in 20 Years—Ozzy Osbourne’s Final Performance
The original Sabbath lineup will reunite on July 5 in Birmingham, England, and be joined by Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, and more.
The concert will feature founding members Tony Iommi on guitar, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward, and singer Ozzy Osbourne. Profits from the show, called "Back to the Beginning," will be donated to charities including Cure Parkinson's.
On future Black Sabbath plans, Ozzy's wife, music manager, and TV personality Sharon Osbourne had this to say (via Reuters) about Ozzy: “While other bandmembers might continue to make records and perform, Black Sabbath's gig at the birthplace of the band will certainly be the 76-year-old's final performance.
"For Ozzy right now, it's definitely: 'I love you and good night'," she said.
The shredder and son of legendary artist Frank Zappa gives a tour of his up-to-date gear, including a complex stereo switching system, four racks of pedals, and some of his father’s favorite guitars.
Dweezil Zappa was always going to end up being an incredible guitarist. His dad, Frank Zappa, is celebrated as one of the most talented and creative guitarists in history, and by age 12, Dweezil was recording music produced by Eddie Van Halen. (Little surprise that he’s covering Van Halen’s 1981 stunner “Push Comes to Shove” lately.) He’s been a bona fide guitar star ever since, releasing seven original solo records, six tribute records, two LPs with his brother Ahmet Zappa, and guesting on recordings across the music universe.
Ahead of his gig at Memphis’ Minglewood Hall on his 2024 Rox(postroph)y tour, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe (') and Roxy & Elsewhere records, Dweezil gave PG’s John Bohlinger a boot-to-bonnet look at his current road setup. There’s a lot of ground to cover between his and his father’s catalogues, and Dweezil loves the challenge, which he meets with a mix of his own gear and some special vintage assists courtesy of his dad.
Brought to you by D’Addario.Shut Up ’n Play Yer Les Paul
This coveted Gibson Les Paul Custom, featured on the cover of Frank’s 1981 record Shut Up ’n Play Yer Guitar, came out on the road this tour. Dweezil says that around 1986, his dad swapped in Dan Armstrong-made ceramic pickups. At one point, Frank installed a second input to try to use the guitar as a synth controller, but it didn’t track well enough to continue the experiment.
Along with the standard controls, the guitar includes switches to turn on different parts of the onboard preamp, which boosts the signal and adds plenty of gain. A rotary knob controls a wired-in parametric EQ set up to emulate different settings along the sweep of a wah pedal. Dweezil didn’t get much of the lowdown from his father on the complex operations; it was more trial-and-error. “You just have to turn knobs until you find something that you like,” he says. He connects to his rig with ZZYZX SnapJack magnetic cable connectors.
Rockin' with Roxy
Also out on the Rox(postroph)y tour is Frank’s iconic Roxy & Elsewhere-era Gibson SG. Like the Les Paul, it’s got a preamp circuit to boost the signal, a sweepable EQ, and can achieve acoustic, piezo-adjacent sounds. The preamp configuration in this one is red-hot; it dishes out tons of gain.
Signature Shabat
For Strat-style tones, Dweezil calls on his signature Shabat Lynx DZ, which has been used to dial in his cover of “Push Comes to Shove.” Per Shabat, it has a “body-mounted HSS configuration with a push/pull phase shift on the middle pickup, simplified single-knob layout, custom-cut 3-ply parchment/gold pickguard, and … a Vega-Trem VT1 tremolo."
The Lynx DZ is constructed with an alder body and a quartersawn hard maple, medium-C-profile neck with a 25.5" scale length. It’s loaded with Lollar Special S and Lollar El Rayo pickups, and the middle Special S is wired for phase shift. The Lynx, as well as the SG and Les Paul, are strung with Optima Gold-Plated 2028 FZ Frank Zappa strings (.008–.046), and struck with D’Addario .50 mm celluloid picks. (Dweezil likes them for pick slides.)
On the Ground
Zappa keeps a significant board at his feet, which he controls with a Fractal FC-12 controller. He runs his sound in stereo, with different effects going to each side, so he keeps volume pedals for each side in front of him, plus a wah and expression pedal.
The row of pedals perched atop the pedalboard includes a TC Electronic Polytune 3 Noir, a Marshall-style prototype pedal, J. Rockett Audio Designs PXO, Union Tube and Transistor Lab, SoloDallas Orbiter, a Jext Telez White Pedal (to nab a specific tone for playing “Nanook Rubs It”), and a 29 Pedals FLWR.
In the Rack
On our 2013 Rig Rundown, Dweezil was using the Fractal Axe-Fx II, and this time around, he’s upgraded to the Axe-Fx III as the basis of his sound. Given the sonic territory covered in his shows, it simply became too unwieldy and expensive to tour an analog rig.
The brains of his show are held in a rack system. A couple of out-of-sight splitter boxes help with the complex stereo signal paths, as do a pair of Voodoo Lab HEX audio switchers. The Axe-Fx III lives on the top shelf, and just below it are an Eventide H90 and TC Electronic TC 2290 that go to both sides.
The next rack down runs only to the left side, and includes a BK Butler Tube Driver, DigiTech FreqOut, Red Panda Radius and Raster, Krozz Devices Airborn Analog Flanger, and a Paul Trombetta Design Tornita! fuzz.
The level below it runs to the right side, with a “Clown Vomit” fuzz, Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl, Korg FLG-1 Flanger, Chase Bliss Generation Loss, Goochfx Holy Cow, and another Red Panda Raster.
Wrapping up the rig is the bottom rack, which again runs to both sides. It carries most of Zappa’s exquisite dirt sounds, thanks to a Union Tube and Transistor Tsar Bomba, Chase Bliss Automatone Preamp MKII, Goochfx Dirty Hippie, Tru-Fi Two Face, Foxrox Electronics Paradox TZF2, and a Paul Trombetta Design Rotobone that … somewhat reasonably apes a trombone sound. Paul Trombetta, we salute you.