I have been looking for a pedal to gig with and have a high opinion of Clark amplifiers so when I heard there was a pedal with the Clark name on it designed for use with their amps I decided to give it a try.
The “Gainster” is a three-knob pedal with a pushbutton footswitch designed to give the user control over gain, level, and tone. The pedal has been around in various forms since the ''90s; it is considered ideal for soloing in a live gig situation.
The version I played is manufactured for Clark by Barber Electronics, whose own brand is held in high regard by pedal freaks. It is painted white and fits a smaller pedal profile. Clark Amplification also sells the original Gainster via the Clark website. The original Gainster is a bigger pedal with hand-painted details and a gold cover. It has full-size components on a full-size circuit board (which is easier for modding), is wired with 22 gauge copper and is made by hand -- exactly what some people want. To many players, both function and sound like the exact same pedal except the white version has an internal pot designed to give you more control of the bass input. It''s the kind of thing that is meant to be adjusted rarely, which is why it can only be accessed with the cover off. More on that in a moment.
To know how to read this review it is probably important to know that I am not one of the above mentioned “pedal freaks.” I started playing in bands before amps had built-in reverbs and my first experience with altering the incoming waveform of the guitar was with a “BossTone” fuzz that plugged directly into the guitar. At that point I was playing a ’57 Strat into a ’61 Twin with an outboard reverb tank and I hated what that little box was doing to my tone; but psychedelia was all the rage and we needed to make that sound too.
I subsequently went through multiple pedals looking for one that might help preserve my tone and still give the singing sustain that was in vogue. Instead, I ended up sounding like a mosquito in heat, resulting from loss of pick attack and excessive intermodulation distortion inherent in the transistor circuits of the time. Tube pedals weren’t much better. What I needed then and now is “transparency” in a pedal.
I have tested the Gainster with multiple guitar/amp combinations including: a Tom Anderson Cobra Special-S, A ’94 Strat 40th Anniversary Model, an Epiphone “Elitist” Byrdland and Custom Alleykat with Gibson P-94 single coils, an SF Champ, an SF Princeton Reverb, a Clark Beaufort 2x10, an Allen Old Flame, and an early ''60s Ampeg Revervberocket. I played several gigs with different combinations of guitars/amps and in a nutshell the Gainster performed as expected, allowing the tone of the amp and guitar to survive while providing a louder, slightly more gainy solo tone. I’m not saying it was totally transparent, but close enough so that the transition between sounds was seamless if I planned just the right spot in the song to hit the magic button.
I thought the Gainster sounded best with low gain pickups. Hot humbuckers seemed to suffer some diminution of tonal quality.
The unit’s adjustment range is very useable and I found myself pretty much in the middle of the range on all combinations tested. It will put out some very nice high gain tone if that is your bag and still preserve most of the pick attack and string dynamics. To my ears, pick attack is a major component of electric guitar tone, thus I was very pleased to find that at my settings (level 1 o’clock, tone 1-2 o’clock, gain 10 o’clock) the attack of my Dunlop Jazz III came through like gangbusters. Distortion produced by increasing the gain adjustment seems free of IM distortion but has a bit of an edge like a 6L6 in clipping mode rather than a EL 34 which has a much harder sound in clip.
If you are playing a rig that comes through a bit thick or thin with the Gainster, there is an internal pot for adding/subtracting bass which works quite nicely but requires removing the bottom of the unit (four screws).
Construction is robust with a cast housing of pot metal, three cake knobs, and a heavy duty looking push button switch. A red pilot light lets you know when you are breaking the law. Personally, I think they should''ve put the pilot light on the end of the “gangster cigar” of the silk-screened logo.
Internally, all is neat and tidy and looks to be of reasonable quality. A 9 volt battery provides power or alternatively, a center-negative power supply.
My only beef, besides my preference that the internal pot should be more accessible, is that the footswitch requires some heavy pressure to activate. That will probably change over time and numerous stomps with my Doc Martens.
Summing up, the Clark Gainster pedal is designed for use with a good guitar connected to a good amp with a quality cord; boosting volume and adding a certain amount of “grit” to the sound while at the same time preserving overall tone, dynamics, and attack. It does this very well.
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Clark Gainster
White (Barber version) - List Price: $139.95
Gold (original version) - List Price: $235
www.clarkamplification.com
www.barberelectronics.com
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We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.
Grace Bowers just released her debut record, 2024’s Wine on Venus, with her band the Hodge Podge, but she’s already one the most well-known young guitarists in America. On this episode of Wong Notes, Bowers talks through the ups, downs, and detours of her whirlwind career.
Bowers started out livestreaming performances on Reddit at age 13, and came into the public eye as a performer on social media, so she’s well acquainted with the limits and benefits of being an “Instagram guitarist.” She and Cory talk about session work in Nashville (Bowers loathes it), her live performance rig, and Eddie Hazel’s influence.
Bowers plugs the importance of networking as a young musician: If you want gigs, you gotta go to gigs, and make acquaintances. But none of that elbow-rubbing will matter unless you’re solid on you’re instrument. “No one’s gonna hire you if you’re ass,” says Bowers. “Practice is important.
”Tune in to learn why Bowers is ready to move on from Wine on Venus, her takes on Nashville versus California, and why she hates “the blues-rock label.”
