Universe: “Super Fuzz or Big Muff?”
Mudhoney: “Both!”
What else would you expect from a band that titled their mischievously visceral ’88 debut EP after both pedals (Superfuzz Bigmuff)?
Formed in the late ’80s by guitarists Mark Arm and Steve Turner after the dissolution of their band Green River (which included future Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam cofounders Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard), Mudhoney long ago solidified themselves as the Seattle scene’s big brothers and tightest pack. Through their 11 LPs, five EPs, and six live albums, Mudhoney has routinely diversified and further defined their eccentric brand of raucous, aggressive, unfiltered rock ’n’ roll. Possibly more impressive than the band’s wide influence and devoted authenticity is the foursome’s bond. Drummer Dan Peters and bassist Matt Lukin (also a founding member of the Melvins) were the rhythmic bedrock for Arm and Turner’s exploding-M-80 tones since the beginning. (Arm and Turner have been friends since high school and have been playing off each other since then.) But Lukin left the band in 2001 because tour life became too much, and Guy Maddison has been thundering ever since. To see a group’s career that’s pushing past 35 years and only have one member swap is as inspirational as it is baffling. How?!
“We like each other a lot. We get along. We love what we’re doing,” remarks Arm. “Why stop, even if no one gives a shit?”
Friendship matters to Arm and Turner, but gear isn’t a concern unless it points them in one direction—east. More specifically, toward Detroit, Michigan. And even more specifically, to the Stooges. Both namecheck the livewire band and their raw power several times in our Rig Rundown. However, in a 2018 interview with Premier Guitar, they acknowledged regenerating sounds that echo influences from Neil Young and the Byrds to Devo and the Dead Kennedys. But after chasing “I-Wanna-Be-Your-Dog” sizzle, what else leads them to the gear they use? Has that mentality changed since the late ’80s?
“If you think about the aesthetics of where we come from—garage punk, and punk rock in general—a lot of it was made with cheap gear, and a lot of it was reclaiming gear that guitarists had kind of dismissed as garbage. Like the Mustang. That was my ultimate guitar back when I was a kid, but it was poo-pooed when I finally got one. I could get them for $150. The Danelectro and Silvertone amps were kind of high-rated garbage when we were getting into them. We based a lot of our sound on cheap gear, so it makes sense to me that I still buy the cheap gear,” concluded Turner.
They’re still pragmatic about their setups, preferring equipment that’s familiar and reliable. Where they chase the dragon is in stompboxes. Turner trusts the Big Muff (his favorite iteration is from the mid-’80s), while Arm’s torrid tone burns with a Super Fuzz clone. However, both have additional hot-sauce stompboxes and other effects on their pedalboards that are being auditioned trial by fire.
Hours before Mudhoney’s headlining set at Nashville’s Basement East, Arm and Turner brought PG’s Chris Kies onstage to catalog their setups. Turner started the party by talking about a pair of guitars—his battle-tested late-’60s Guild Starfire IV and a recently-acquired Fender Gold Foil Jazzmaster before kicking on his Big Muff and other pedals that unlocked Dante’s inferno. Then, Arm joined the fun by showing off his Gretsch Vintage Select ’59 Duo Jet that eventually gets pulverized by three different fuzzes.
Beggar’s Banquet
Turner has always gravitated towards the Island of Misfit Toys, and says he was intrigued when he saw Fender’s Gold Foil Jazzmaster. “When we recorded Plastic Eternity, I used a Bigsby, but I don’t own a guitar with one. So, when Fender released this model I demanded one. I actually begged for one,” he jokes. “It’s essentially a knockoff of an old Silvertone, and I think it’s hilarious for Fender to do.” He’s enjoyed getting to know the instrument, whose bigger neck and brighter pickups offer an alternative flavor to his Guild. In recent years, Turner has dialed back his string gauges and currently goes with Dunlop Heavy Core strings (.010–.048). Both his guitars are always in standard tuning.
Red Rider
The past two decades, Turner has mainly been playing a pair of Guild Starfire IVs. One is from 1967 and the other is a ’68. He doesn’t know which one is which, but believes this one to be the “newer” one. He likes it more because “it’s a little heavier, it sounds woodier, it’s got better tuning pegs, and it’s got a slightly bigger neck.” He never thought the semi-hollow would work with Mudhoney because of the massive layers of fuzz he puts on his guitars, but after taking it to band practice as a “joke” and dealing with the “quick learning curve” to EQ his gear and change where he stands in relation to his amp, he’s been on cruise control with the Starfire IV.
Couple DeVille
When Mudhoney started, Turner had a 1965 Super Reverb. He still owns that amp, but says he keeps it at home. The closest amp to that benchmark he’s encountered and plugged into is this stock Fender Hot Rod DeVille III 4x10 combo.
Steve Turner’s Pedalboard
This is the fanciest pedalboard Steve Turner has ever brought on tour. His pal and owner of Hank’s Music Exchange in Portland wired this up for him. The one thing Turner requested of Hank was that he put the MXR Micro Amp, VOX V847A Wah, and Electro-Harmonix Little Big Muff Pi at the front of the chain. Turner likes pushing the amp with the MXR and then juicing the Muff with it, too. He prefers the wah earlier in the chain, so it has as much bite as possible. “I want it to sound like a Stooges record where the wah is twice as loud as everything else!”
Turner told PG in 2018 that his favorite modern Muff is the EHX Nano edition, which he says best approximates his pinnacle pedal (a mid-’80s Big Muff). “My favorite is the Nano, the cheapest ones they make. They’re like 60 dollars or something. They’re almost disposable—because they do break. But oh, well. Buy another one! Going off memory and feel, to me the Nano sounds the most like that. In the studio, I bring in a whole bunch [of other fuzzes], but then sometimes I just get lost trying to fix something that doesn’t really need to be fixed, you know what I mean?”
Speaking of fuzz, Turner was experimenting with the Before finding a friend in Gretsches, Arm had been playing SGs, Jaguars, Hagstroms, and others. He acquired his 1991 Gretsch G6129T-59 Vintage Select ’59 Silver Jet reissue because he wanted to look like Billy Zoom. This black stallion G6128T-59 Vintage Select ’59 Duo Jet is a more recent reissue he prefers for its chambered body, which is lighter and more resonant. After reading the Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe biography by Mick Wall where he learned that Iommi played light strings, he made the move from Ernie Ball Skinny Top Heavy Bottom Slinkys (.010–.052) down to Ernie Ball Super Slinkys (.009–.042). while pursuing the ’60s Fuzzrite nastiness felt on the Stooges’ early rippers. Signal swayers include a Strymon Flint and a vintage script-logo MXR Phase 90. And an Ibanez TS9DX Turbo Tube Screamer joined the bunch when gifted from former Green River bandmate Stone Gossard. A Peterson Stomp Classic Strobotuner keeps his guitars in check and a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus ignites his stomps.
A Goodie!
Before finding a friend in Gretsches, Arm had been playing SGs, Jaguars, Hagstroms, and others. He acquired his 1991 Gretsch G6129T-59 Vintage Select ’59 Silver Jet reissue because he wanted to look like Billy Zoom. This black stallion G6128T-59 Vintage Select ’59 Duo Jet is a more recent reissue he prefers for its chambered body, which is lighter and more resonant. After reading the Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe biography by Mick Wall where he learned that Iommi played light strings, he made the move from Ernie Ball Skinny Top Heavy Bottom Slinkys (.010–.052) down to Ernie Ball Super Slinkys (.009–.042).
“Slide in Standard Tuning Sounds Like Shit”
Turner admits that the band’s earliest work features some earache moments where he played slide on his Hagstrom in standard. He now puts the ’60s Hagstrom III (with a Filter’Tron neck pickup) in a custom open-A tuning for slide playing.
Set It and Forget It
Arm bought this ’70s Fender Super Six Reverb years ago and hasn’t worried about touring amps ever since. The 100-watt combo has a sextet of 10" speakers, a quad of 6L6 power tubes, and a quintet of 12AX7 preamp tubes.
Mark Arm’s Pedalboard
Arm isn’t a gearhead, but he definitely loves fuzz. His current pedal playground includes three variants—an EarthQuaker Devices Life Pedal V3 octave/distortion/booster, an Ibanez Soundtank FZ5 60’s Fuzz (housed in the gray box), and a Stromer Mutroniks Superfuzz.
Arm on the Ibanez: “In the ’90s, one of the boxes that I landed on that I liked most was this Ibanez Soundtank-series 60’s Fuzz. I think they only made it for a year or two, because they’re made of this cheap plastic—they look like a little black Volkswagen Beetle—and they just break. Anytime I’d find one in a music shop, I’d just buy it and have a buddy put the guts into a metal box.”
Then, Arm recounts when, after a few shows during an early Mudhoney tour with Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo asked him, “What are you going for?” Mark responded: “Ideally, it’d be like ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ where Ron Asheton plays the opening chords, and it just hangs there and breaks up. I want that sound, all the time.” That sound Arm was approximating was coming from a Super Fuzz. His current copy for the vintage eviscerator is the Stromer Mutroniks edition. The remaining pedals are all from Portland’s Catalinbread: Epoch Boost preamp/buffer, Belle Epoch tape echo, Valcoder tremolo, and Sabbra Cadabra overdrive. A Peterson Stomp Classic Strobotuner puts Arm’s guitars in the sweet spot.
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![Rig Rundown: Emily Wolfe [2023]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/rig-rundown-emily-wolfe.jpg?id=41738020&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
Emily Wolfe doesn’t play guitar. She bends it to her will. Like a bronco buster taming a stallion, she saddles up on her signature Sheratons and lets it rip. Much of the magic felt and heard on her self-titled debut was pure adrenaline hitting your speaker. Her second album, 2021’s Outlier, incorporated Wolfe’s love of Motown grooves and modern-pop stickiness, both of which refreshed her songwriting with backdrops of more polished, waxy tones, but tumbleweed oscillation, helicopter, square-wave chops, and barbed-wire fuzz are still howls welcomed in this Wolfe pack.
“When I go up there, something could hit me at any point—an emotion that I felt 10 years ago could come out in a bend on the low E. There’s so much rawness [to classic rock]; the edges are not perfect, but there’s a magic in that,” Wolfe told PG in 2021.
But how do you marry earworm poppiness with a gunslinger’s approach to guitar?
“Some of my rock friends say, ‘Pop isn’t relevant,’ and I’m like, ‘What are you talking about—it’s everywhere!’ It’s so sticky for people, and that’s really fascinating to me. I want my music to have that quality … but also the realness of a raw guitar tone. [With Outlier] I wanted to make something that would be classic 10, 20, 30 years from now,” she explained in our profile. “That was the goal, and I think we achieved it.”
Before Wolfe’s headlining show at Nashville’s Blue Room (located inside the Third Man Records compound), PG’s Chris Kies joined the shredding songwriter onstage to talk shop. The resulting conversation covers the development behind her Epiphone Sheraton, how a boring night in Cleveland spent with her “Chex-mix-crushing, brother-in-tone” bass player Evan Nicholson convinced her to play a doubleneck guitar, and we discover what three pedals work together to make what she describes as “the sound that belongs to me.”Brought to you by D'Addario XPND.
Signature Steed
Emily Wolfe’s first “real” guitar was an Epiphone Sheraton. (She really wanted a Gibson ES-355 like blues hero B.B. King, but Wolfe was just a strapped college student.) That first experience with a semi-hollowbody guitar had a seminal influence on her guitar-playing journey, contributing to her singular sound. “Every decision I made with my gear was as a result of building my tone around that first Sheraton.” Now honored with a signature Epiphone Sheraton of her own, the Stealth is a modern take on John Lee Hooker’s longtime favored ride. It has a layered maple body with a mahogany neck, signature bolt inlays, a Tune-o-matic bridge, CTS pots, two volume controls and one tone control, and Epiphone’s Alnico Classic PRO pickups. She discreetly put her John Hancock on the back of the headstock. She uses Ernie Ball Slinky Cobalt strings (.010–.046) and strikes them with Dunlop Tortex Jazz III .88 mm picks. This one stays in either standard or drop-D tunings.
The White Wolfe
The “White Walker” edition of Emily’s signature Stealth features all the same specs of the black model aside from the aged bone white finish. This one does take a custom set of Slinkys (.012–.060) and holds a Wolfe-tweaked open-C tuning (C–G–C–E–A–D).
You could win your own if you enter this giveaway before October 20, 2023. Click here to enter
Double Trouble
How does a boring night in a Cleveland hotel lead to Wolfe owning a doubleneck Epiphone? Well, her bass player (and best friend) Evan Nicholson wondered if Wolfe had ever tried a doubleneck guitar. She said ‘no,’ and so started the quest to prove that women can rock a pair of necks, too! She acquired this Epiphone G-1275 and uses it mainly for her cover of T. Rex’s “The Slider” by using the lower 6-string (in drop-C) for the rhythm parts and the 12-string for the song’s solo. The two necks tuned separately allow her to put both guitar parts under her hands with one guitar.
Dancing with the DeVille
Saying an amp has “no character” might be seen as negative by some, but Wolfe prefers the “middle-of-the-road” base tone in this Fender Hot Rod DeVille 410 III. It packs plenty of volume, and Wolfe adds, “I get to pick what character I want with my pedals.”
Emily Wolfe's Pedalboard
“If I get a new piece of gear, I have to figure out every single part of it before I can really use it,” Wolfe confessed to PG while talking about Outlier. That sensible curiosity has led her to dialing in precise parameters on the pedals and creating colossal combos with singular Wolfe gain staging. Her silver bullet is the EarthQuaker Devices Tentacle analog octave-up pedal, running into a Fulltone OCD, and an MXR Six Band EQ. She claimed to PG, “That’s the sound that belongs to me.” The sequence creates a “crazy fuzztone” from the overdrive. Then she uses the EQ to reduce some of the lows and boost the mids for a sound she says will get her guitar to cut through any mix.
Other spices in the rack include an Analogman King of Tone, an EarthQuaker Devices Dirt Transmitter fuzz, an Ibanez Analog Delay Mini, an Origin Effects Cali76 Compact Deluxe, a Walrus Audio Julia chorus/vibrato, and a Strymon Flint. The Empress Buffer puts the Delay Mini and Flint outside the RJM Mastermind PBC’s control.
But Wait... There's More!
Underneath the hood, Wolfe has tucked in a pair of MXR M109S Six Band EQ pedals (one hitting the King of Tone and the other hitting the OCD), an Electro-Harmonix Pitch Fork, an EarthQuaker Devices Tentacle analog octave up, and a couple of Strymon power supplies (Ojai and Zuma).
Shop Emily's Rig
Epiphone Emily Wolfe "White Wolfe" Sheraton
Ibanez Analog Delay Mini Pedal
Origin Effects Cali76 Compact Deluxe
Empress Buffer
Strymon Flint
Walrus Audio Julia Analog Chorus/Vibrato V2
Electro-Harmonix Pitch Fork
MXR M109S Six Band EQ Pedal
EarthQuaker Devices Tentacle
Strymon Zuma
Strymon Ojai