The Los Angeles League of Musicians—LA LOM for short—brought the vintage vibe with them on the road last year.
It wasn’t long ago that LA LOM—guitarist Zac Sokolow, bassist Jake Faulkner, and percussionist Nicholas Baker—were cutting their teeth together as the house band at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, playing poolside for guests. Now, with eight EPs and a full-length record (2024’s The Los Angeles League of Musicians) since 2021, they’re a full-blown sensation, celebrating and interpreting instrumental tropical guitar traditions.
The trio played Nashville’s The Basement back in December, where PG’s John Bohlinger caught up with Sokolow and Faulkner to see what road rigs they use to bring their psychedelic cumbia and Peruvian chicha dreams to life.
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This vintage National Val-Pro, circa 1960 to 1962, belongs to Faulkner, who received it as his very first electric. When he switched to bass, the Val-Pro took a backseat, so Sokolow had been more than happy to borrow it long-term. All the controls are disconnected except for the volume knob. Sokolow strings it with a .012–.052 gauge set of roundwounds, and he’s partial to D’Andrea Pro Plec 1.5 mm picks.
Leader of the Pack
Sokolow’s other sidekick is this Kay Style Leader from 1960. Each of the three pickups has a volume and tone control. The body’s been mostly routed out, so it lends the resonance and darkness of a semi-hollowbody.
Live and Loud
While he’ll often play through Fender Deluxe Reverbs at home, Sokolow trusts the Twin Reverb to get the job done in performance settings. The stage volume is loud enough that he and his bandmates often don’t need monitors: They can just listen to each other’s instruments onstage.
Zac Sokolow's Pedalboard
From his guitar, Sokolow’s signal runs through a spicy-red Voltage Cable Co. coil cable into his board. A TC Electronic Polytune 2 starts things off, followed by a Fulltone Full-Drive 3 for just a hint of dirt, then a Boss DM-3 delay, followed by a Catalinbread Topanga spring reverb. A TC Helicon VoiceTone handles some more echo work along with the DM-3.
Flight-Friendly Upright
Jake Faulkner’s traveling upright is thisJohnson bass, which has been modded by Tom at Fantastic Musical Instruments in Pasadena, California. Tom gave the upright a bolt-on neck that comes off easily, making it a perfect travel mate. For amplification, Faulkner uses pickups from Underwood, based in Palm Springs. On a tip from Tom, he glued a small piece of wood to the side of the pickups to reduce noise issues, and two sound posts have been installed inside the body to reduce feedback concerns.
Thumbin' Through
For electric needs, Faulkner uses this Fender Vintera II ’60s Precision Bass; he’ll switch between the two basses depending on what he feels best suits the song. He uses a thumb pick from time to time to accentuate certain rhythms.
Lightweight Low End
Faulkner’s been converted to this Ampeg Venture V12, a compact bass head weighing less than nine pounds—a godsend for sore-backed bassists. It’s set for a pretty neutral, SVT-style sound and runs into a Fender Bassman 410 Neo cabinet, which has four neodymium-loaded speakers.
Jake Faulkner's Pedalboard
Rather than at the start of his chain, his Korg Pitchblack Advance tuner goes at the end, with everything running out of it to the Venture V12. An Origin Effects Bassrig Super Vintage lends color and tone to the V12, then the Fire-Eye Development Red-Eye Twin acts as an A/B switch to maintain output and gain between the Johnson and the P-bass. An MXR Ten Band EQ helps balance out the upright’s tone.
A full-featured console preamp based on the Trident A-Range desk designed to give you everything from rich cleans to amp-melting fuzz.
The Trident A-Range console dominated the UK recording scene in the late ‘60s to early ‘80s. The heart of the beast consists of a discrete germanium-and-transformer-equipped preamp that can be adjusted to suit all tastes, from the tones of Lou Reed to the fuzzy freakouts of Frank Zappa.
Catalinbread's Airstrip intends to distill these legendary tones into a stompbox-sized console preamp with a handful of extras on offer. A discrete op-amp based on a vintage UREI design pushes the front end of the console into blissful gain if you want it. On the back end, a tasteful treble filter sets the luminosity of the pre to suit your rig and a specially-selected transformer adds a touch of iron to the signal. Capable of every gain sound imaginable from warm, “mastered”-style cleans to gnarly collapsing fuzz, the Airstrip puts the mixing desk on your pedalboard in a much more manageable package.
$179.99.
Although inspired by the classic Fuzz Face, this stomp brings more to the hair-growth game with wide-ranging bias and low-cut controls.
One-ups the Fuzz Face in tonal versatility and pure, sustained filth, with the ability to preserve most of the natural sonic thumbprint of your guitar or take your tone to lower, delightfully nasty places.
Pushing the bias hard can create compromising note decay. Difficult to control at extreme settings.
$144
Catalinbread StarCrash
catalinbread.com
Filthy, saturated fuzz is a glorious thing, whether it’s the writ-large solos of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s live “Ball and Chain,” the soaring feedback and pure crush of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” or the sandblasted rhythm textures of Queens of the Stone Age’s “Paper Machete.” It’s also a Wayback Machine. Step on a fuzz pedal and your tone is transported to the ’60s or early ’70s, which, when it comes to classic guitar sounds, is not a bad place to be.
Catalinbread’s StarCrash is from their new ’70s collection, so the company is laying its Six Million Dollar Man trading cards on the table—upping the ante on traditional fuzz with more controls and, according to the company’s website, a little more volume than the average fuzz pedal, while still staying in the traditional Fuzz Face lane.
The Howler’s Viscera
Arbiter Electronics made the first Fuzz Face in 1966. The StarCrash is inspired by that 2-transistor pedal, but benefits from evolution, as did almost all fuzz pedals in the ’70s, when the standard shifted from germanium to silicon circuitry to improve the consistency of the effect’s performance. The downside is that germanium is gnarlier to some ears, and silicon transistors don’t respond as well to adjustments made via a guitar’s volume control.
While Fuzz Faces have only two knobs, volume and fuzz, the silicon StarCrash has three: volume, bias, and low-cut. Catalinbread’s website explains: “We got rid of that goofy fuzz knob. We know that 95 percent of all players run it dimed, and the remaining 5 percent use their guitar’s volume knob to rein it in.”
I suspect there are plenty of players who, like me, do adjust the fuzz control on their pedals, but the most important thing is that the core fuzz sound here is excellent—bristly and snarling, with a far girthier tone than my reissue Fuzz Face. It’s also, with the bias and low-cut controls, far more flexible. The low-cut control allows you to range from a traditional, comparatively thinner Fuzz Face sound (past noon and further) to the StarCrash’s authentic, beefier voice (noon and lower). Essentially, it cuts bass frequencies from 40 Hz to 500 Hz, resulting in an aural menu that runs from lush and lowdown to buzzy and slicing. And the bias control is a direct route to the spitty, fragmented, so-called Velcro-sound that’s become a staple of the stoner-rock/Jack White school of tone. The company calls this dial a “dying battery simulator,” and it starves the second transistor to achieve that effect.
Sweet Song of the Tribbles
Playing with the StarCrash is a lot of fun. I ran it through a pair of Carr amps in stereo, adding some delay and reverb to mood, and used a variety of single-coil- and humbucker-outfitted guitars. While both pickup types interacted well with the pedal, the humbuckers were most pleasing to my ears with the bias cranked to about 2 o’clock or higher, since the ’buckers higher output allowed me to let notes sustain longer before sputtering out. Keeping the low-cut filter at 9 o’clock or lower also helped sustain and depth in the Velcro-fuzz zone, while letting more of the instruments’ natural voices come through, of course.
With the low-cut filter turned up full and the bias at 10 o’clock, I got the StarCrash to be the perfect doppelganger of my Hendrix reissue Fuzz Face. But that’s such a small part of the pedal’s overall tone profile. It was more fun to roll off just a bit of bass and set the bias knob to about 2 or 3 o’clock. Around these settings, the sound is huge and grinding, and yet barre chords hold their character while playing rhythm, and single-note runs, especially on the low strings, are a filthy delight, with just the right schmear of buttery sustain plus a hint of decay lurking behind every note. It’s such a ripe tone—the sonic equivalent of a delicious, stinky cheese—that I could hang with it all day.
Regarding Catalinbread’s claims about the volume control? Yes, it gets very loud without losing the essence of the notes or chords you’re playing, or the character of the fuzz, which is a distinct advantage when you’re in a band and need to stand out. And it’s a tad louder than my Fuzz Face but doesn’t really bark up to the level of most Tone Bender or Buzzaround clones I’ve heard. In my experience, these germanium-chipped critters of similar vintage can practically slam you through the wall when their volume levels are cranked.
The Verdict
Catalinbread’s StarCrash—with its sturdy enclosure, smooth on/off switch and easy-to-manipulate dials—can compete with any Fuzz Face variant in both price and performance, scoring high points on the latter count. The bias and low-cut dials provide access to a wider-than-usual variety of fuzz tones, and are especially delightful for long, playful solos dappled with gristle, flutter, and sustain. Kudos to Catalinbread for making this pedal not just a reflection of the past, but an improvement on it.