In recent years, Samantha Fish’s most often-used guitar was this alpine white Gibson SG, but it ran into some issues last summer—“I ended up having to reglue the neck”—and it is now on hiatus.
Photo by Douglas Mason
Samantha Fish is moving in new circles these days—circles occupied by the kind of people you see a lot on classic-rock radio playlists. First there was the invitation from Eric Clapton to play at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in L.A. Then there was the summer ’24 slot on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour, followed by the Experience Hendrix tour, on which she dug into Jimi classics in the company of Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa, and other luminaries. And, oh yeah, she opened for the Stones in Ridgedale, Missouri, on the final date of their Hackney Diamonds jaunt. That’s right, the Rolling Stones.
If you’re already a fan of Fish’s tough Delta-mama singing and high-temperature guitar work, you’ll probably think that all this is just as it should be. You gotta reap what you sow eventually, right? And Fish has been sowing for a long time, from her bar-band days in Kansas City 15 years ago through eight rootsy, eclectic albums as a leader (not counting the two early-2010s discs she cut with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith as Girls with Guitars, or her 2013 outing with Jimmy Hall and Reese Wynans in the Healers, or 2023’s tangy swamp-rock collaboration with Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues) to her current tour schedule of about 150 dates per year in North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Still, even with such a solid career foundation to draw on, mixing and mingling in the flesh with folks you’ve known all your life as names on record covers could be a little intimidating. Is it? “You know, I don’t ever think about it in those terms,” Fish says on the phone from her home in New Orleans. “So when you lay it all out there like that, it feels like, ‘Aw shit, that’s crazy.’ I mean, it is crazy. When I think about the goals that I’ve made over the years … honestly, I’ve crossed off a bunch of things that I thought were even ironic being on the list, because they just seemed so far-fetched. Every interview I’ve ever done, they were like, ‘If you could ever open up for somebody, who would it be?’ And I always said the Stones, ironically. Cause when the hell’s that gonna happen? I’m a guitar player from Kansas. That’s nuts.”
With her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, heavy hitting style, and wide array of blues and rock influences, Fish is an artist of a different stripe.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Fish spits out the sentences above in a fast, excited spray, one word tumbling over another. Then she pauses for a second, and it’s clear that wheels are turning in her head. Her voice gets more playful. “I’m gonna start speaking some even wilder things into existence just to see what happens,” she cracks, her grin nearly audible over the line. “A billion dollars!No, money’s evil, but you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to lean into superpowers.”
Given her formidable chops, it’s not that daring a leap to suggest that Fish could be capable of playingsome wilder things into existence, too. She’s certainly off to a good start with the just-released Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. Whether your personal taste leans more toward nasty string-snapping riffs (the aptly titled “Can Ya Handle the Heat?”), sizzling slide escapades (“Lose You”), or high lonesome twang (“Off in the Blue”), you can’t deny that the album’s loaded with prime guitar moments. And its two longest tracks, “Sweet Southern Sounds” and “Fortune Teller”—“longest” being a purely relative term (they’re both under six minutes)—offer listeners just a taste of the neo-psychedelic fantasias that can occur when Fish stretches out in concert.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got to figure out a way to capture the live feeling on a record,’” she reports. “Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta make the song work for vinyl, so let’s cut it down,’ and you end up hacksawing away some of these parts that are kind of the feeling and heartbeat of the song. This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Fish made her recording debut in 2009 as the leader of the Samantha Fish Blues Band, with the punny-titled in-concert indie album Live Bait.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
That’s one way in which Paper Doll differs dramatically from its predecessor, 2021’s Faster, which delved into a poppier territory of synths, beats, and high-tech production (and, in this writer’s opinion, did so with great effectiveness; one of Faster’s highlights, “Hypnotic,” sounds like it could have been recorded at a late-night dance club hang with Prince and the Pointer Sisters). In contrast, obviously electronic sounds are nowhere to be heard on the new disc, and the music referenced stays firmly in the American roots category: soul, rock, country, juke-joint blues. For some artists, a stylistic shift like this could be seen as a retrenchment, but for Fish, it’s the result of a major departure. This is the first time she’s ever used her road band—keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass—to make a studio album.
“Everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
“Usually,” Fish explains, “I’ve worked in studio situations where there’s been a producer and they want to put the people they know together. So it was cool to bring in the band that I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years instead of session musicians. I feel like the dynamic was different—the familiarity, and just kind of knowing where the others were gonna go. It might be a minute difference to a listener, but for the players in the room, it helped breed another sensibility.”
Also helping in that department was producer Bobby Harlow, late of Detroit garage-rock revivalists the Go. Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.
“Last March, Bobby came out to a show we did in Detroit,” Fish recalls. “We went out to lunch, and because I was working on writing songs, I asked him to do some co-writing with me, because I love the songs he wrote for the Go. He’s really fun to be in a room with when you’re making something, because he’s incredibly devoted to it. So we started writing, and then a few months later the label was like, ‘We gotta make this album, who’s gonna produce it?’ Well, we’re on the road all summer, so I don’t know when y’all expect us to do this record. But Bobby was available, and it was like the universe bringing us back together. He was passionate about the kind of songs I was writing, and he understood where I wanted to go with it.”
Samantha Fish's Gear
Before finding her SG, Fish’s main guitar was her Delaney signature model thinline style, with a fish-shaped f-hole.
And where was that? “I wanted to lean into superpowers,” Fish quickly answers. “What are my strengths, what are the things that people know me for and recognize me for, and what can I amplify to make this a real statement record? It’s funny, because everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
Born out of the blues it may have been, but when the Paper Doll material reached the studio (actually, two studios: the Orb in Austin and Savannah Studios in L.A.), it went through some changes, partly due to the band’s contributions, partly due to Harlow’s conceptual leaps. “Bobby’s like a musicologist,” Fish says approvingly. “He’s deep. He pulls from so many different spaces, and he’s definitely introduced me to some things that I wasn’t hip to over the years. That’s done a lot to shape my musical tastes.” If you’ve had the significant pleasure of attending one of the many gigs in which Fish breaks out proto-punk nuggets like the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and Love’s “7 and 7 Is,” well, now you know the guy to thank.
“This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Paper Doll’s best tracks, “Rusty Tazor,” is a similar romp through the garage. In a rare case (for this album) of the producer bringing in someone he knows, Harlow tapped Mick Collins of cult faves the Gories and the Dirtbombs for backing vocals. “He adds such a personality to that song,” Fish says. “And I’m a punk rock fan. I love that whole era. I just love this raw, uninhibited way of playing. There’s nothing precious about it. Leaning into the edges—that’s where the real shit lies.”
Because the Paper Doll sessions took place in between periods of touring, Fish only brought her road instruments, including a new white Gibson SG and Stogie Box Blues 4-string cigar box guitar (see sidebar for more on her personal collection). But both the Austin and L.A. studios presented plenty of other options. “A ton of guitars,” Fish remembers with a laugh, “in varying degrees of disrepair. I used a rather unruly [Gibson ES-] 335 in Savannah for ‘Sweet Southern Sounds.’ You know how some guitars fight you when you play them? Well, I like a little bit of fight, but not so much that I’m pulling the strings out of the saddle, and it was fighting me like that. It was hard to push the strings down, I could only bend in certain places. But that just made the performance more intense, and it sounded good. There was also a Tele and a Strat that they had at the Orb. We had so many tools at our disposal, it was like, ‘Let’s go nuts and play with everything we can.’”
That choice of m.o. also sounds like a positive way to respond to a career moment that Fish calls “an incredible ride. Especially in the last year-and-a-half, two years, it’s just upped the ante even more. There’s nothing more to do, really. I went out, I played to the best of my ability and I did the thing that I’ve been working hard to do for the last 15 years or so. And it’s awesome to be able to show up in that capacity and perform alongside people that I’ve really looked up to. I just feel grateful. I know I’m lucky.”
Fish’s Favorites
Fish has a brawling style of playing slide, often on her cigar box. “Lose You,” on her new album, is especially representative of her approach to the classic blues technique.
Photo by Jim Summaria
For nearly a decade, Samantha Fish’s primary stage axe has been a 2015 alpine white Gibson SG that she bought new online. She’s still got it, but last year it ran into some trouble. “I ended up having to reglue the neck over the summer,” she says, “and it’s been having tuning issues. So Gibson sent me another white SG that’s just beautiful, in great shape. The neck’s a bit fatter, which is cool, different from mine. I’ve been using that one a lot”—indeed, the new SG is all over Paper Doll. “I’ve hung onto it, and I feel bad about that. I don’t want to be the person who borrows a guitar and keeps it. But it just played so great, and it was like, ‘I need this thing. What can I do to keep it?’ Luckily, the people at Gibson have been so good to me over the years.”
An even more recent addition to Fish’s electric arsenal is a Custom Shop Gibson ES-335 in silver sparkle finish, purchased in the fall at Eddie’s Guitars in St. Louis. “Because I played a 335 on ‘Sweet Southern Sounds’ in the studio, I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need one live, so of course I have to get this one!’ I’ve always wanted a silver sparkle, and this one is pristine. I’m so scared of the first scratch I get on it, or buckle rash. I’m probably gonna cry!”
Fish hasn’t been playing her Delaney SF1 Tele-style “Fish-o-caster” so much recently, but another Delaney model, the hollowbody 512, is still getting lots of action (often tuned to open D for slide use), as is her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, equipped with a P-Bass pickup. Her Danelectro baritone, Bohemian oil-can guitar, and clutch of Fender Jaguars are also safe at home, along with her current acoustic main squeeze, a new Martin D-45.
YouTube It
Samantha plays Jimi in this September 2024 performance from the most recent Experience Hendrix tour. The selection: “Fire.”
The Georgia-based sludge slingers rely on a Tele-to-Marshall combination for their punishing performances.
Since forming in 2010, Atlanta noise rockers Whores had only released one LP, 2016’s Gold.—until this year. Eight long years later, their new full-length, WAR., dropped in April, and Whores celebrated by tearing across the country and blasting audiences with their maelstrom of massive, sledge-hammering rock ’n’ roll.
The day after their gig at Cobra Nashville, Whores frontman Christian Lembach, dressed in his Nashville best, met up with PG’s Chris Kies at Eastside Music Supply to run through his brutal road rig.
When vocalist and guitarist Christian Lembach got sober over 20 years ago, he bought a FenderTelecaster off of a friend, then picked up an Esquire shortly after. That original Esquire stays home, but he brings this pine-body Earth Guitars Esquire out on the road. (It’s the lightest he’s ever played.) It’s loaded with a German-made reproduction of Schecter’s F520T pickup—aka the “Walk of Life” pickup intended to reproduce Mark Knopfler’s sound. (Lembach buys them in batches of five at a time to make sure he’s got plenty of backups.)
It’s equipped with a 3-way selector switch. At right, it bypasses the tone circuit; in the middle position, it’s a regular bridge-pickup configuration, with volume and tone activated; and at left, the tone is bypassed again, but an extra capacitor adds a bass boost.
Lembach installed six brass saddles in lieu of the traditional 3-saddle bridge. He often plays barre chords higher up the neck, and the six saddles allow for more accurate intonation.
All of Lembach’s guitars are tuned to drop C, and he plays with D’Addario Duralin .70 mm picks. They’re strung with heavy D’Addario NYXL sets, .013–.056 with a wound G. The 30-foot Bullet Cable coil cable attenuates some of the guitar’s top end.
Tuned-Up Tele
Lembach had this black Fender Telecaster—the one he bought from his friend—modified to his preferred Esquire specs, with a single bridge pickup and the same 3-way selector configuration as his other weapon. He prefers the 6-saddle bridge to this rusty 3-saddle version, but this one holds a special place in his heart all the same.
Favor From Furlan
When John Furlan of Furlan Guitars reached out to Lembach about building him a custom guitar, it was an easy sell. The two worked together on this beauty, based on a non-reverse Gibson Firebird body with a Fender-style scale length, roasted maple neck, and rosewood fretboard.
It’s got a bridge and locking tuners from Hipshot, and it’s loaded with Greenville Beauty Parlor P-90s. A typical Gibson-style toggle switches between neck, bridge, and both configurations, while another Esquire-style 3-way switch on the lower bout handles Lembach’s preferred bridge-pickup wirings: no tone, tone and volume, or bass boost.
No Logo
Lembach stays loyal to his twin Marshall Super Leads, with taped-over logos—an aesthetic Lembach picked up from Nirvana. A tech in Atlanta figured out that the one on the left is a 1973, which runs at eight ohms, or half power (Lembach removed two of the power tubes), into a 16-ohm cabinet. The power drop allows Lembach to coax feedback at lower volumes. The original preamp tubes from Yugoslavia—no longer a country, mind you—are still working in the amp.
The one on the right is a reissue 1959SLP from 2002 or 2003, which Lembach finds brighter than his vintage model. He goes into the lower-input second channel to dampen the edge.
Both amps run through Marshall JCM800 cabinets with Celestion G12T-75s.
Christian Lembach's Board
A Loop-Master Pedals Clean/Dirty Effects Switcher manages Lembach’s signal. Its A loop is used for verses, bridges, intros, and outros, and has the majority of the pedals in it. The first thing in the A loop is the ZVEX Fuzz Factory made specially for the band, followed by a Devi Ever Soda Meiser, Beetronics Swarm, Keeley Nova Wah, Spiral Electric FX Yellow Spiral, Boss NF-1, and Alexander Pedals Radical II Delay.
The B loop has a clone of the Electro-Harmonix Green Russian Big Muff, an EHX POG, and a ZVEX Super Hard On. The A loop is already pretty loud; B somehow gets even louder. An EHX Superego+ is a new addition that Lembach’s planning to integrate.
A CIOKS DC10 powers the board, and a Lehle device under the board cleans up unwanted hum and noise.
Guitarist Brandon Seabrook, architect of fretboard chaos, and his trusty HMT Tele.
Photo by Reuben Radding
“It’s like time travel,” says Brandon Seabrook, reflecting on the sonic whiplash of “Object of Unknown Function.” The piece, which opens the composer’s solo album of the same name, journeys jarringly from aggressive “early banjo stuff” up through “more 21st-century classical music,” combined with electronic found sounds from a TASCAM 4-track cassette recorder. The end result approaches the disorientation of musique concréte.
“The structure is kind of like hopping centuries or epochs,” he adds. “I [wanted] all these different worlds to collide. It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure.”
It’s a heady, thrilling idea—but no one who’s followed his zigzagging career will be surprised at the gumption. As he’s cycled through various projects (including the acclaimed power trio Seabrook Power Plant), he’s become a resident chaos architect within the Brooklyn avant-garde scene—exploring everything from jazz-fusion to brutal prog to other untamed strains of heavy rock, typically wielding his trusted 1928 tenor banjo and a modified “heavy metal Telecaster” acoustic-electric from 1989.
But Object of Unknown Function, his first solo album since 2014’s Sylphid Vitalizers, became his own real-life choose-your-own-adventure—a process of rejuvenation by playing with new toys. Along with his usual gear, Seabrook’s main compositional tools this time were a 6-string 1920 William O. Schmick Lyric guitar banjo and a 1998 Jerry Jones Neptune electric 12-string—both of which became vibrant “new relationships,” even if, at first, he felt like he was “stepping out on his guitar.”
“My other guitar [his Telecaster] is the only thing I’ve been playing for the past 25 to 27 years,” he says, laughing. “I was so afraid to try something else: ‘I can’t play another guitar because it’s like an extension of my arm. I know the topography of this neck so well. It’s my sound.’"
Brandon Seabrook's Gear
Seabrook’s 1989 Fender HMT Thinline Telecaster has seen enough wear to rival Willie Nelson’s Trigger.
Photo by Scott Friedlander
Instruments
1928 Bacon & Day Silver Bell tenor banjo
1920 William O. Schmick Lyric guitar banjo
1989 Fender HMT Thinline Telecaster with Sheptone Pickups
1998 Jerry Jones Neptune 12-string electric
Amps
1962 Magnatone Custom 450
1971 Traynor YGM-3
Pedals
Arion SAD-1 Stereo Delay
Jam Pedals Dyna-ssoR compressor
Jam Pedals Rattler distortion
Strings and Picks
D’Addario XL Nickel Wound 10's
Dunlop Tortex .88 mm
Accessories
TASCAM PORTA 3 4-track cassette recorder
But Seabrook fell in love “right away” with the Jerry Jones, and new ideas started flooding out. “The 12-string is such a magic sound, and the Jerry Jones holds the intonation so well that you can detune some of the double-strings to make different intervals, kind of like a built-in harmonizer,” he says. “When you play chords on that and they ring; it’s some sort of majestic, angelic sound—or it can be.” Photo by Scott Friedlander
Seabrook found the 6-string banjo at Brooklyn shop RetroFret Vintage Guitars, intending to shop for a mandolin. He was struck by William Schmick’s construction (“It uses slightly heavier strings, and the neck is wide”) and, more crucially, the surprising intensity it harnesses: “It just sounded so metal to me or something,” he recalls. “So deep and rich and ominous, but beautiful.” These discoveries came at a pivotal time: “I don’t know what happened last year, but I felt the need to get some new instruments. And that opened up a new sound world.”
He eventually linked up with two key collaborators, producer David Breskin (John Zorn, Bill Frisell) and engineer Ben Greenberg (who plays guitar in noise-rock band Uniform), at the small Brooklyn studio Circular Ruin. That setting was ideal for the physical experience he hoped to capture: “I used contact mics on the guitar, and [sometimes on my body], to have a subtle sound design. It’s in there—you can kinda hear it [on the album] sometimes.”
One reason for that impact: This is, by and large, the most intimate record of Seabrook’s career—a downshift from the wall-to-wall wildness that has defined so much of his work. That said, make no mistake. Almost no one else could create the pogoing guitar madness of “Perverted by Perseverance,” which sounds like ’80s King Crimson being subjected to water torture. (“I actually was revisiting the ’80s King Crimson stuff while I was making this album,” he says. “I just came back to it after years of not hearing it. That’s straight-up Telecaster prepared with some alligator clips, and then I use my radio tape recorder on the pickups.”)
Object sometimes leans into a more traditional “solo” vibe, like on the dissonant, highly improvised banjo piece “Unbalanced Love Portfolio”; at other points, it piles instruments into towering overdub soundscapes, like on “Gondola Freak,” a heart-accelerating swirl of harmonized 12-strings.
Object of Unknown Functionis the guitarist’s first solo record since 2014’s Sylphid Vitalizers.
“I’ve been playing a lot of solo things over the past 10 years, and that’s on banjo and guitar,” Seabrook says. “I was kinda hesitant to make an album of that stuff, although some pieces are totally stripped-down to just me. But I thought I could make a more compelling studio listening experience now that I have a little more of a palette that these instruments are offering. The solo album I did 10 years ago had lots of layers, but I wanted to be a bit more vulnerable on this record and have some songs stripped-down and some full.”
The resulting project is a “blender” of all the things Seabrook loves, thrown together in a way that sparks his imagination. “I’m just trying to sound like the influences I have, whether it’s ’80s King Crimson or Eugene Chadbourne or Van Halen or Joni Mitchell—all these things I hear certain fragments of, and maybe it’s only for a measure or a section,” he says. “I guess I am conscious of messing with form. I love the juxtaposition of certain things.”
Seabrook is a long-time mainstay of the Brooklyn jazz and avant-garde scene, where, in addition to leading his own ensembles, he’s worked with a wide range of artists that includes Nels Cline, Anthony Braxton, Mike Watt, and Mostly Other People Do the Killing.
Photo by Luke Marantz
“I used to be even more of a hailstorm on the audience psyche,” he continues. “I just recorded a new album with this quartet of synthesizer, violin, bass, and guitar, and I want to bring more lyricism and less feeling of intentional surprise. I’m getting there slowly. A lot of the music I listen to is really lyrical, like folk music or soft rock. I try to put elements of that in here. I guess I do want to make weird twists and turns, but I do put a lot of thought into how to weave them and make them coherent.”
It’s not like Seabrook has suddenly recorded an Eagles album, but these more refined moments signal a desire to keep challenging himself—and his audience. “I think it’s getting older and being more vulnerable, more confident in your choices,” he says. “When I was younger, I never wanted one second of space. Now I just want to be more connected to the things I truly love. It’s a journey. I never want to think somebody wants to hear a certain thing from me.”
YouTube It
Video Caption: In this mind-melting performance of “brutalovechamp,” captured May 20th, 2023 at Brooklyn’s Public Records, Seabrook is joined by the epic proportions octet, including everything from cello to recorder.
Cory Wong and his Flyers comrade Mark Lettieri do a little show-and-tell at their summer camp.
Back in March 2022, we caught up with Cory Wong in the middle of an international tour to film a Rig Rundown. This time around, we found Wong with his Fearless Flyers pals sticking in one spot, at Cory Wong’s Syncopated Summer Camp. The four-day, four-night summit, held in Nashville, brought together ace players like Ariel Posen, Larry Carlton, and Sonny T to offer clinics on all things rhythm. Aside from the camp, Wong and his fellow guitar Flyer, Mark Lettieri, both had new releases to celebrate: Lettieri’s recent solo record, Can I Tell You Something?, dropped in July, and Wong’s Live in London and Starship Syncopation came out in May and July, respectively—plus, the Flyers’ new EP was released in February.
Both Lettieri and Wong toured us through the guitar gear they brought along for the camp.
Wong’s starter is, unsurprisingly, his Fender Cory Wong Signature Stratocaster. This is an off-the-rack model, and the sapphire blue transparent satin lacquer finish demonstrates the beautiful alder beneath it: “Sometimes a guitar is made out of the right piece of a tree,” says Wong. Other features on the model include deluxe locking tuners, a 6-screw tremolo system, Seymour Duncan Cory Wong Clean Machine pickups, and an American Ultra Modern “D” neck profile.
Founder's Keepers
At John Mayer’s suggestion, Wong had Fender create him a “founder’s model” of his signature guitar, with some just-so appointments that can’t be had on the standard production instruments. Those include a bound fretboard and a unique, one-off finish.
But Wong doesn’t get too attached to his guitars. He often auctions them off to benefit a non-profit that gets free guitars into the hands of kids who need them.
Another Wong novelty: his fingers don’t sweat much, so he only changes his strings about once every three months, despite plenty of playing time. When the time comes, he uses Ernie Ball .010s from either the Slinkys or Paradigm series.
Neural Network
Through a Shure GLXD16 wireless system, Wong runs his guitar into his Neural DSP Quad Cortex, which runs a beta version of his Archetype: Cory Wong plugin, based off of a melding of a Dumble and a Fender Twin. The signal hits an onboard envelope filter and rarely used pitch shifter, then exits out the effects loop into a Wampler Cory Wong Compressor, Jackson Audio The Optimist, and a Hotone Wong Press. The signal goes back into the Quad Cortex, where there’s a preset phaser, stereo tape delay, and modulated reverb, plus a freeze effect. Two XLR outs run to front of house, while two run to Wong’s Mission Engineering Gemini 2 stereo cabinet.
Fiore di Latte
Lettieri flies with his signature PRS Fiore (and wears a matching shirt to boot). The model, which he began designing with PRS in 2019, has a swamp ash body, maple neck, 25 1/2" fretboard, nickel frets, and a pickup system that allows for 11 different combinations—the ultimate studio weapon. He runs it to his board with Revelation Cable Company cables. Lettieri strings it with Dunlop .010s, and strikes them with Dunlop celluloid picks.
Lettieri Goes Low
Lettieri also calls on this PRS SE 277 baritone guitar. He’s swapped the pickups for a Lollar P-90 in the neck position and a gold-foil in the bridge. He tunes it to A standard and runs .014–.072 strings on it.
Little Wing
Lettieri sticks with tubes, running into a PRS HDRX 20—a 20-watt combo intended to capture the roar and power of Hendrix’s Marshalls in a more practical package.
Chopping Block
Guitar pedals weren’t the intended application for Lettieri’s pedalboard—it was meant for chopping veggies, but that didn’t stop him from slapping his stomp tools on the cutting board.
His signal first hits a Keeley Monterey Custom Shop Edition, followed by an MXR Deep Phase, J. Rockett HRM, J. Rockett Melody OD (Lettieri’s signature), Pigtronix Octava, and a Dunlop DVP4, all powered by a Strymon Ojai. A TC Electronic TonePrint Plethora X5 pedalboard handles coordination and switching between the devices.
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