Guest Picker - Gina Gleason of Baroness
A: One of my most embarrassing stage moments was during my time playing guitar for Michael Jackson: ONE by Cirque du Soleil. I remember feeling very confident as I ran across the stage to reach the top of a large multi-tiered light-up set piece. I jumped to the first step fine and then tripped over my own feet, sending myself (and worse yet, my guitar) flying face and fretboard-first into the next two huge steps. I’ll never forget the sound of my open strings clanging and feeding back. As I crawled my way to the top of my destination to finish the song, I felt a cold, oily surge rushing down the front of my shin. At the end of the show, I had to peel my costume pieces away from the river of then-dried blood that encased my leg. I jumped in my car to head to urgent care and received 17 stitches to the front of my shin. I guess I was running a little too hard that night!
Current obsession: The double-edged sword of music obsession is that, as your passion for consuming music heightens, you are no longer capable of being a passive listener or casual fan! It’s fun to begin to pay attention to things like the air between cymbal crashes, but your ability to let music just play in the background without having an active role in the experience begins to diminish.
Brett Petrusek - PG's Director of Advertising
Brett Petrusek onstage with his band, Fuzzrd.
A: Circa 2015, my former band was slotted on a festival-style show at Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis. On the first guitar switch, a very green tech handed me my Les Paul perfectly tuned, but one half-step sharp! Two songs later, a nasty storm rolled in and blew two backline Marshall stacks over, nearly killing our bass player. I’m not sure if it was embarrassing or just plain horrible. We dusted off and finished our set.
Current obsession: Having been raised on 100-watt Marshalls, I’ve always snubbed my nose at amp simulation, but lately, I’ve been experimenting with blending plugins and big amps in the studio. Neural DSP has been my go-to. I really like the way they sound, and more importantly, feel, for big rock and higher-gain tones. Learning to trust your ears is a good thing: If it sounds good, it is good.
Ted Drozdowski - PG Editorial Director
Ted Drozdowski
A: In 2011, I was playing a post-Deep Blues Festival gig at a dive bar called Big V’s in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I’d walked bars hundreds of times, and always made it a point to suss out obstacles before the show. During the first number, I’m on the bar and suddenly a drunk throws her head and shoulders on the bar exactly where I’m about to put down my raised foot. Instinctually, I pulled up to avoid her, and a rusty metal ceiling fan like the propeller of a Cessna caught me right above the eyes. I staggered, but kept playing all the way from the bar to the restroom, where I saw I’d been sliced to the (exposed) bone. I still kept playing. After all, there were paying patrons! At one point, a local promoter ran to a nearby 24-hour CVS for bandages, and he came up onstage to try to tape the wound while I played. No luck. When this photo (below) was taken, I’d gone outside, where Mississippi bluesman T-Model Ford was watching the show from the open door of a van, and I grabbed his Jack Daniel’s bottle to play some slide. An hour later, after the gig, I sold merch, packed up, and then went to the hospital. I have a scar.
Ted Drozdowski
Current obsession: Never walking into another ceiling fan!
Chris Reichl - Reader of the Month
Chris Reichl
A: It so happened that as we were setting up, we forgot the important rule of setting up a stage PA. If I remember correctly, it was that the amps weren’t on the same circuit as the PA was, so as a result, as I would approach the microphone to sing, I would get zapped. I would also get zapped while playing the guitar if I was making contact with the microphone.
Current obsession: I wouldn’t necessarily call it an obsession, but I tend to listen to Pandora a lot, mostly on a progressive rock station. Recently I expanded my playlist to include guitarists like David Gilmour’s solo work, Jeff Beck, Eric Johnson, and some Allan Holdsworth when he was with the band U.K. Also, I’ve been trying to play more guitar, as in, just play, without overthinking it.
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Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst have been making music as Shovels & Rope since 2008. The husband-and-wife duo from South Carolina specialize in rootsy, bluesy rock, Americana, and alt-country, but they don’t confine themselves to traditional two-piece arrangements. They switch off on vocal, guitar, percussion, and synth duty throughout their shows, orchestrating a full-band ruckus with all available limbs.
Their seventh full-length, Something Is Working Up Above My Head, released in September last year, and while touring in support of it, they stopped at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl in late February. PG’s John Bohlinger caught up with Trent before the gig to see what tools he and Hearst use to maintain their musical juggling act.
Brought to you by D’Addario.Black Bird
Trent’s not a guitar snob: Generally speaking, he plays whatever he can get his hands on. While playing Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Fest, someone loaned him this Gretsch Black Falcon, and he fell in love with it. He likes its size compared to the broader White Falcon. It’s also the band’s only electric, so if it goes down, it’s back to acoustic. Hearst takes turns on it, too.
Trent loads the heaviest strings he can onto it, which is a set of .013s. It lives in standard tuning.
Ol' Faithful
As Trent explains, he and Hearst have done some DIY decorating on this beautiful Gibson J-45—it’s adorned with sweat droplets, stains, and fingernail dust. It runs direct to the venue’s front-of-house system with an LR Baggs pickup. This one is strung with Martin heavy or medium gauge strings; lighter ones are too prone to snapping under Trent’s heavy picking hand (which holds a Dunlop Max-Grip .88 mm pick). And it rolls around in an Enki tour case.
On Call
These second-stringers—a Loar archtop and an LR Baggs-equipped Recording King—are on hand in case of broken strings or other malfunctions.
Need for Tweed
Trent doesn’t trust amps with too many knobs, so this tweed Fender Blues Junior does the trick. It can get fairly loud, so there’s a Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box on hand to tame it for some stages.
Shovels & Rope's Pedalboard
Because Trent and Hearst trade off bass, guitar, keys, and percussion duties, all four of their limbs are active through the set. Whoever is on guitars works this board, with an MXR Blue Box, Electro-Harmonix Nano Big Muff, EarthQuaker Devices Hummingbird, and Boss OC-5, plus a pair of Walrus Canvas Tuners for the electric and acoustic. Utility boxes on the board include a Walrus Canvas Passive Re-Amp, Radial J48, Livewire ABY1, and a Mesa Stowaway input buffer.
A Roland PK-5 MIDI controller, operated by foot, sits on the lower edge of the board. It controls the board for “Thing 2,” one of two MicroKORG synths onstage.
Thing 1 and Thing 2
There’s no one backstage helping Hearst and Trent cook up all their racket; they handle every sound themselves, manually. During the first few sets of a tour, you’re liable to see some headaches, like forgetting to switch synth patches during a song, but eventually they hit a rhythm.
Affectionately given Seuss-ian nicknames, this pair of microKORGs handles bass notes through the set, among other things, via the foot-controlled PK5. “Thing 1” is set up at the drum station, and runs through a board with an EHX Nano Big Muff, EHX Bass9, EHX Nano Holy Grail, and a Radial Pro DI. A Walrus Aetos keeps them all powered up.
The board for “Thing 2,” beside the guitar amps, includes an EHX Mel9 and Bass9 powered by a Truetone 1 SPOT Pro, plus a Radial ProD2.
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