While RubyRed Productions in Santa Monica has a superb stash of gear, for the Rig Rundown, songwriter-guitarist-producer Butch Walker gathered these 6-string sweethearts that he uses to create on a daily basis.
(Far left) Butch’s newest tool in the chest is this Taylor 517e Grand Pacific Builder’s Edition V-Class finished in a wild honey burst. The round-shoulder dreadnought features Taylor’s new V-Class bracing designed by PG contributor Andy Powers, torrefied Sitka spruce top, and tropical mahogany back and sides decked out with sapele binding. Butch bonded with it because of its unique, pronounced midrange voice. He says in the Rundown its natural mid-heavy voice lets it potently sit in the mix even among full instrumentation from drums, bass, and electrics.
To its right, Butch has a Japanese-made Yamaha LL56 Custom ARE (an updated, evolved continuation of the company’s LL53 favored by John Denver). Butch loves its beefier voice that works well accentuating electric parts for a wider sound.
The last of three acoustics is one of his oldest flattops, but it’s had a complete makeover to give a second life. From a glance, it appears to be a vintage 1960s Harmony Sovereign completely overhauled, upgraded, and rebuilt by luthier Scott Baxendale. He disassembles the instrument piece by piece and starts from scratch (including reconstructing the bracing into his own formula of scalloped X-bracing heavily influenced in his 30 years of specializing in pre-war Martins). The “new” instrument has its original tonewoods is original, but that’s it. The rest is reformed by way of Baxendale’s expertise and attention to detail. Butch’s opinion on its resurrection: “it plays and sounds like butter.”
The far-left electric is a 1972 Gibson Les Paul Custom he bought from Norman’s Rare Guitars. It’s his only Les Paul in California and the guitar only had one previous owner before Butch— illustrious studio-and-stage guitarist Jimmy Stewart (not the guy from It’s a Wonderful Life). Stewart put that Custom to good and featured it on over 1,200 recordings, worked prominently alongside Gábor Szabó, added guitar to Broadway productions (West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and TV (The Mike Douglas Show and The Tonight Show) and authored Guitar Player’s “The Complete Musician” column from 1971-1981. You’ll see Stewart added some mini toggles to open up the pickups for even more tonal options by splitting/isolating coils.
Next one on the right is a custom, one-off triple-humbucker Yamaha SA2200 semi-hollow loaded with Lollar pickups. Walker went mad scientist on the normal SA2200 layout and requested that it have a master volume (moved that to where the original pickup selector was) and master tone (normally each pickup has its own independent controls). He used the allocated cavity space to add mini toggles to split the humbuckers’ coils, and moved the pickup selector to the pickguard.
Another new friend to the collection is a 2020 Ernie Ball Sabre with a honey suckle burst. Butch has really enjoyed playing and recording with this double-hum guitar because it’s “spanky, spongy, has a pleasing top-end clarity, and can still bite for solos or rocking.”
Last up is a Fender Custom Shop Telecaster Custom that screams Andy Summers and Joe Walsh. Butch had put in an order to the heralded custom shop for a Telecaster. The wrong guitar (the sunburst Tele Custom) showed up, but before letting Fender know their error, he plugged it in. Game over—he wasn’t parting ways with this stud so he cancelled the other order with Fender and has rocked with this one ever since.
All of Butch’s electrics take Ernie Ball Power Slinkys (.011–.048) and he bashes away with Herco HE211P Flex 75 1.01 mm.
Three of these were in the previous frame except for the shedding Strat in the middle-right position. It’s a Fender Custom Shop 1960 Stratocaster Relic Shoreline Gold over 3-Color Sunburst Frankenstein’d with a ’69 reverse headstock, left-handed neck, and beefed up with a pair of Fender ShawBuckers.
For the Rundown and most of his recent L.A.-based sessions, Butch has turned to this Bad Cat Cub IV 40R. He likes its single-channel platform, tonal flexibility (toggle or footswitch between 12AX7 or EF86 preamp sections) paired with sparkly, robust EL34-voiced flavorings.
Enhancing the versatility of the Bad Cat IV 40R is the above Universal Audio Ox Box. (For the Rundown, we heard a direct sound with an emulation of a custom 2x12 cabinet loaded with alnico 50-watt speakers. The mics he chose were approximations of a Beyerdynamic M 160 ribbon, Neumann U67 diaphragm, a blended-in room mic with a 1176 compressor tightening up everything.)
His real-deal pedalboard is host to a TC Electronic PolyTune, JHS Pedals Pulp 'n' Peel, his signature JHS Ruby Red Signature 2-in-1 Overdrive/Fuzz/Boost, Way Huge Conspiracy Theory, MXR Echoplex Delay, MXR Stereo Chorus, MXR Reverb, MXR Carbon Copy, and an Audio Sprockets ToneDexter (for acoustic DI/preamp). Beneath the board, the MXR Iso-Brick brings everything to life.
For quick gigs, sit-in sessions, or fly gigs, Butch will rely on this simple stomp station compromised of a Line 6 HX Stomp, his signature JHS Ruby Red Signature 2-in-1, and a TC Electronic Polytune Noir Mini 2. In the middle rests a Disaster Area DMC.micro MIDI controller while to the right you see a Line 6 G10S Wireless System and a Dunlop DVP4 Volume (X) Mini.
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On their 12th album, The Unraveling, the Drive-By Truckers use rootsy rock and incisive lyrics to describe life in modern America as they see and feel it. With songs like "Babies in Cages," "Heroin Again," and "Grievance Merchants," it's not for the faint of heart. Left to right: Jay Gonzalez, Mike Cooley, Patterson Hood, Matt Patton, and Brad Morgan.
Okay, so the Rolling Stones frontman wasn't exactly there to see the Truckers. He'd been scouting locations, with author Peter Guralnick, for a film based on Guralnick's monumental biography Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, which chronicles the wild life and times of the irascible Sun Records founder and producer. But to DBT's Patterson Hood, whose radar for potentially cool situations always seems to be on high alert, it might have felt for just a fleeting moment like ol' Mick had dropped in to pay his respects and sit in with the band.
Listen to “Thoughts and Prayers" from The Unraveling, DBT's 12th album.
“Mick was there with Peter, the film's production designer, the screenwriter—and three bodyguards," says Hood, barely suppressing a laugh. “And yeah, it was awesome. They had spent the day at Sun with Jerry Lee Lewis, and then they parted ways with him and came over to Sam Phillips, where we were. It was incredible."
The wonderful irony of the encounter isn't lost on Hood. He and the ever-stalwart Mike Cooley, who together founded the Truckers back in 1996 in a quest to reshape Southern rock and alt-country on their own terms, both hail originally from the Muscle Shoals region of Alabama, just a few hours southeast of Memphis. (Hood's father is bassist David Hood, from the monumentally groove-gifted Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, which defined the sound of producer Rick Hall's historic FAME Studios.)
The Stones, of course, have a special affinity for the Memphis blues and soul canon defined by the likes of Furry Lewis, Sleepy John Estes, Sun, Stax, and Hi Records. In the late '60s and early '70s, they channeled it into a few collaborations, including the Sticky Fingers staple “Wild Horses" with the late Jim Dickinson—whose sons Luther and Cody, co-founders of the North Mississippi Allstars, are dear friends with Hood and Cooley. And let's not forget the opening verse of “Honky Tonk Women," where Jagger so coyly name-checks the city now long known as the Birthplace of Rock 'n' Roll. Could the stars have been more perfectly aligned?
Whether or not Hood lends anything other than a passing credence to such notions, he certainly had Memphis on his mind when he and Cooley began writing songs for their 12th studio album. “Looking back, we'd even planned on recording American Band there," he says, referring to DBT's compact, politically charged 2016 release, “but at the last minute, we ended up moving it to Nashville because that's where our tour was ending." Tracked at Cowboy Jack Clement's Sound Emporium, American Band found the Truckers—Hood, Cooley, keyboardist/guitarist Jay Gonzalez, bassist Matt Patton, and drummer Brad Morgan—in rare form, delivering punk-influenced slabs of wisdom and soul-flavored workouts with pointed urgency.
When the band's Memphis-based engineer Matt Ross-Spang suggested Sam Phillips Recording for The Unraveling sessions, the implication was that the next album would be a radical departure from the sharp immediacy of American Band. Hood heard an expansive, flowing, cinematic sound in his head, and he knew the studio's custom echo chambers could help the band achieve it.
“It's almost like Sam Phillips should have a personnel credit on the record," Hood says, “because his presence so inhabits everything in that room. And whether you're superstitious enough to believe in ghosts or not—and I tend to not be that way—there is an undeniable presence there. I mean, he designed the echo chambers, so it's more than just his name on the building. It was absolutely his lair and his dream studio. Plus, back in '62 or so, it's state-of-the-art, which worked perfect for our thing because recording analog is important to us, and there'd been just enough '70s upgrades along the way to make it the best of both worlds."
TIDBIT: The Truckers trekked to Memphis to track their 12th studio album at Sam Phillips Recording. “It's almost like Sam Phillips should have a personnel credit on the record," says Patterson Hood. “His presence so inhabits everything in that room."
Working again with longtime producer David Barbe, the band played most of the basic tracks together from the studio floor, with very few overdubs afterwards. Two songs by Hood—the eerie opener “Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun" and the lilting alt-country anthem “21st Century USA"—were augmented with strings, which add another rich layer to an already wide-angle mix. On Cooley's riff-heavy “Slow Ride Argument," which takes its snarky title from the classic-rock radio hit by Foghat, the interlocking guitar parts are panned hard left and right, with Cooley's lead vocal awash in slapback echo. “Thoughts and Prayers," the album's riled-up first single, finds Hood leaning into his 1948 Melody Ranch Gene Autry acoustic, restored by luthier Scott Baxendale.
For Hood and Cooley, Baxendale is practically a member of the band. He makes an art out of restoring old acoustic guitars from his shop in Athens, Georgia, where he also custom designs and builds beautiful electric guitars. He's just a stone's throw from the Truckers' warehouse headquarters and a block from Barbe's Chase Park Transduction Studios, where the band has mixed or recorded numerous albums, starting with their double-disc magnum opus Southern Rock Opera, released in 2001.
Hood and Cooley both have several Baxendales, acoustic and electric, and they all figured prominently in the making of The Unraveling. For Cooley in particular, his two Tele-style Baxendales have helped him develop a wider sonic palette, which comes through in the single-coil sizzle he brings to “21st Century USA," and the humbucker growl he dials in on the Tom Petty-style rave-up “Armageddon's Back in Town."
“I've kind of brought that second sound into the mix," Cooley explains, “so now I use both about equally. The Baxendale guitar I've had for years has a really loud humbucker in the bridge, and it drives the amp really hard. And then I've always loved standard Teles, and some of the songs we're doing now seem to call for that sound a little more, so that's where the newer Baxendale comes in. It's about 50-50, with a classic single-coil Tele and a big fat loud humbucker going back and forth. 'Armageddon's Back in Town' is probably a favorite of mine for the fat sound. That song was mostly brand new when we went in to record it. In fact, I think Patterson was still trying to learn it—that's how new it was."
Premier Guitar met with Mike Cooley, Patterson Hood, and Jay Gonzalez of the Drive-By Truckers before their window-rattling show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Sharing a love of the odd, these players rely on unusual instruments to create their genre-blending sound.
Mike Cooley’s Gear
Guitars
Patterson Hood’s Gear
Guitars
Jay Gonzalez’s Gear
Guitars
