Here is Ravonettes' frontman/guitarist Sune Rose Wagner's current pedalboard setup.
From Gene Vincent on up to the War on Drugs, rock has always been about rebellion. So why is it that we guitarists are often so staid?
Tattoos, “extreme” hair, makeup, leather jackets, and chain wallets are everywhere—the Disney Channel, commercials for kitchen-floor cleaner. But they don’t signify nonconformity any more than cranked stacks or low-slung guitars. We like to think we’re badasses, but the truth is, all this stuff isn’t half as risky as buying your clothes at L.L. Bean and playing an ’80s Hondo through a Gorilla practice amp.
So let’s just admit it: Despite all our stylistic trappings, we’re a pretty conservative lot.
But maybe we just mistakenly believe there are no new trails to blaze—no new gear combinations, no new tone settings, no new scales or chords or songs. Or maybe, despite our deep-seated desires and best efforts to shirk tradition, we think there are still no-nos—stark lines delineating no-fly zones that are preposterous to consider.
Many of us restrict ourselves with certain “givens” before even picking up our instrument. We think tube amps are the route to great tone. We might tussle a bit over where a fuzz box or wah belongs in a signal chain, but we pretty much agree that after that it’s compression, dirt, modulation, delay, then reverb. It’s all very elementary.
But we’re not in elementary school anymore.
For the record, I’m not talking about different for different’s sake. Actually, I kind of am—but not as some stupid attention-getting gambit. How about for the joy of discovery? How about to expand your horizons and bulldoze ruts?
Despite the mightily entrenched views of the 6-string majority, there are plenty of inspiring examples of wacky adventurers over the years. Players who did stuff that sounded different and new, but once you knew how they did it you thought, “Oh god—really?”
The new album Pe’ahi from Danish surf/garage-pop duo the Raveonettes.
The new album Pe’ahi from Danish surf/garage-pop duo the Raveonettes has recently made me rethink my own assumptions. As guitarist/songwriter/co-vocalist Sune Rose Wagner detailed in our recent interview, despite his addiction to vintage Jazzmasters and Mosrites, and despite his love of the Everly Brothers and Mark Knopfler, he hasn’t used a guitar amp on any of his band’s seven albums over the last 13 years.
All of Wagner’s influences used traditional guitar gear in traditional ways, but he and fellow Raveonette Sharin Foo did things differently to create a signature sound. Besides eschewing amps and recording direct through a Neve-style preamp, Wagner uses an ass-backward pedalboard. First in line is a Catalinbread Echorec delay, then two Boss RV-5 reverbs—always running in tandem with different settings—followed by five dirt boxes, ranging from WMD’s bit-crushing Geiger Counter fuzz to a ZVEX Box of Metal, an EarthQuaker Devices Bit Commander, an old Rat, and MXR’s La Machine.
It gets “worse,” too: Wagner has played drums since he was 5—he says they’re his favorite instrument—but every Raveonettes album since their 2003 debut, Whip It On, has featured percussion loops exclusively. “I’m not a fan of ‘real’ drum sounds—it all sounds the same to me,” he admits. “I love samples—they’re so diverse. I love mixing various drum sounds together, maybe have three or four different kicks and four or five different snares. I want them to sound interesting and special.”
Conventional logic says this is all a recipe for “unique” ugliness, but in reality the Raveonettes sound—a cross between Dick Dale twang, My Bloody Valentine fuzz mayhem, and the Jesus and Mary Chain’s melancholy melodies, with Phil Spector-esque “wall of sound” production—is not only instantly recognizable, but it’s also beautiful and organic sounding. And it’s built them a sizable following around the world.
Maybe different for different’s sake is something worth exploring after all. Turn on your ears and turn off the judgment. There’s a universe of fun waiting for you.
Admittedly, the 41-year-old Sønderborg, Denmark, native’s approach also has a lot to do with being as big a devotee of the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, ’60s girl bands like the Ronettes, and Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” production style as he is of the Cramps, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and ’80s hip-hop pioneers like Eric B. & Rakim. But with sweetly morose lines like “Flowers in the daytime and Lucifer at night” (“Observations” from 2012’s Observator) being commonplace in the Raveonettes repertoire, there’s got to be more going on in Wagner’s mind than a hodgepodge of musical influences.
How else do you explain a guy who says drums are his favorite instrument to play (he picked them up at age 5), yet insists on using loops rather than live drums on all his albums? Not to mention, on every Raveonettes release—from their 2002 debut, Whip It On, on up to this summer’s Pe’ahi—it seems the more constraints Wagner puts on himself, the more he’s inspired.
For Whip It On—where the Raveonettes’ now-signature ambience envelopes huge dance-club beats driving fuzzed-out spaghetti-western riffs that sound like someone slipped Chet Atkins LSD and a cranked RAT pedal—Wagner willingly strapped himself into the dungeon-master garb of playing every tune in Bb minor. For the follow-up, 2003’s Chain Gang of Love, it was nothing but Bb major. And for this year’s LP named after the famous Maui surfing spot, the longtime L.A. resident decided to challenge himself both physically and mentally: He switched to gargantuan flatwound strings—.014–.055 sets—and based his writing sessions on a willfully obtuse set of diametrically opposed lyrical themes.
“If you commit to a certain … not necessarily a theme, but a way of thinking—a certain inspiration—it makes it worthwhile. It’s a lot easier,” Wagner explains. “It’s the contrast in music that makes it interesting. If you can take a song and lure people in with a great guitar line, or a great melody, or a fantastic beat, all of a sudden they realize that they’re in a very different universe. This is not just a happy song, this is about something else. It doesn’t have to sound evil to be evil.”
We recently spoke to Wagner about his creative process, his recently revamped pedalboard, how he sounds nothing like his early 6-string heroes (including Mark Knopfler, Jimmy Page, and Randy Rhoads), and how the surf and skate culture and Pearl Harbor inspired the lush, addictively gripping tunes on Pe’ahi.
You often choose themes or strict parameters to work within when you’re writing for a new album—like the key restrictions for Whip It On and Chain Gang of Love. This time around, the album title and songs like “Endless Sleeper,” “Z-Boys,” and “Kill!” reflect another set of thematic restrictions. Does confining yourself that way make you more productive as a songwriter?
Yeah, I think it’s great. I know this is a strange analogy, but I have always been fascinated with fashion designers. They have to make at least four collections a year: spring, summer, fall, and winter. They’re inspired by what’s coming up next, what the colors are, what people are into, and all that stuff. I think it’s the same when you make music. If you commit to a certain … not necessarily a theme, but a way of thinking, a certain inspiration, it makes it worthwhile. It’s a lot easier.
For a lot of musicians, powerful, unexpected events tend to inspire new songs—you hear a touching news story, have a really cool experience out in nature, or whatever. But a theme is kind of the opposite. What kind of headspace do you have to get into to really feel inspired by your theme? Is there a trick to getting inside your theme and having it work for you instead of against you?
Yeah, I can use the new album as an example. The inspiration with this album was war. It was southern California surf culture and the prettiness and beauty of Polynesia, especially Hawaii. If you take those things and put them together, you quickly realize that there’s something wrong. Why would you take something innovative, exhilarating, and exciting, like surfing and skateboarding history, and add it to something really beautiful like Hawaii or some exotic island, and then add a different theme about war—something that’s destructive and ugly and despicable? You see pictures from the attack on Pearl Harbor, and what you see in the foreground is beautiful palm trees, a tropical island—sort of heaven on earth—and then in the background you see the USS Arizona on fire, people dying and screaming, Japanese bombers unloading their evil bombs on this pretty island. When you look at it, it doesn’t make any sense—because how could you have so much beauty and destruction at the same time? It doesn’t make sense.
It’s sort of like Bikini Atoll, the atomic-bomb test site: If you see that famous picture, in the foreground there’s a beautiful, tranquil, serene beach with palm trees, little huts, and a really beautiful ocean. Then, in the background, there’s a mushroom cloud. It doesn’t make any sense! But as long as humans have lived, it actually does make sense. That’s why we have black and white. It’s why we have night and day. It’s why we have beauty and the beast. That’s why we have happiness and sadness. To me, there’s nothing weird about it. I just like to find things that people maybe don’t think about that much.
How would you say the Raveonettes sound—both the band’s overall vibe and your guitar approach—has evolved over the years?
The guitar approach has pretty much always been the same. We never used any amplifiers in the studio. We were strictly into recording into the computer and not using amp simulators or anything like that. We’d basically just go through our pedalboard and then into whatever mic pre we had available at the time. The only thing that’s really changed in that sense is that sometimes we would have a Neve preamp, sometimes we would have a Shadow Hills preamp, sometimes something else. It depends on where we are, I guess.
The first three albums had more of a punk/indie feel mixed in with the surf vibe, and then starting with 2008’s Lust Lust Lust, it’s increasingly become more of this dichotomy of haunting, addictively sweet melodies and chaotic ambience. What inspired that—was it organic or something you consciously moved toward?
I think it’s just what you’re into at that point. We try as much as possible not to repeat ourselves too much. We understand that we have a certain sound, and people can always hear that it’s a Raveonettes song. But to do two of the same albums in a row is not really interesting to us. We always try to mix it up a little bit. The last album we did, Observator, wasn’t really a noisy album. It was more of a nighttime-driving, dreamy, flowing, very depressing kind of album. This time we wanted to do something that was more in your face—more like a big rock album, but that still had some unusual song structures with great parts.
What got you into the whole approach of going direct with your pedalboards?
It was just a sound that I liked—I really enjoyed the sound of it. It was different from other stuff that I heard. I love old sounds and what you can do with amplifiers and stuff, but I never really thought it fit our music very well. We tried many times to record through amplifiers, but we would always just go back and plug it straight in. That’s the Raveonettes sound.
So the allure was mainly that you felt it enabled you to achieve a more distinctive tone?
Yeah. Guitar pedals work very differently when you do that compared to plugging them into an amp. There are certain harmonics and overtones you get that you wouldn’t get through a guitar amplifier. A guitar amplifier is much more sophisticated. That’s why it’s always been really hard for us to find guitar pedals. You go to a guitar store, and you can try out a bunch of pedals through an amp and they sound amazing. Then when you go home and try them out without an amp, they sound completely different. Some of them sound better than you expected, but some of them sound worse and then you have to drive back and return them. It’s always a gamble.
Sune Rose Wagner's Gear
Guitars
1963 Fender Jazzmaster
1960s Mosrite Ventures II
1959 Fender Musicmaster
Effects
Vintage Pro Co RAT
Two Boss RV-5 Digital Reverbs
Catalinbread Echorec
WMD Geiger Counter
ZVEX Vexter Series Box of Metal
EarthQuaker Devices Bit Commander
MXR Custom Shop La Machine
Recording Gear
Pro Tools
Neve 1073 preamp
Shadows Hill preamp
Crane Song Falcon compressor
Waves S1 Stereo Imager plug-in
Soundtoys EchoBoy plug-in
Strings and Picks
.014–.055 sets
.010–.046 sets
Do the ones you end up buying offer more sonic possibilities through the direct recording method than if you used them through an amp, or is it just different?
It’s just different. You can’t compare the sounds. One of them is a really nice, round, tube kind of thing, and the other is very digital—static almost. It’s a very unusual sound, especially when you have reverb pedals and stuff. The harmonics and overtones react with the reverb very differently than if you had just plugged it into an amp. It’s not really a pretty sound, but it works for what we need it for. Also, the way we route the pedals is different: We basically go from a guitar straight into all the reverb pedals, then we have the distortion at the end. Before we even hit the distortion pedal, the signal has gone through two or three other types of pedals. That messes up the harmonic spectrum of whatever distortion unit we’re using.
It must make the whole process less predictable, too.
Yeah, exactly. You never really know what you’re going to get. That’s also why we don’t do demo recordings—we commit to what is there. We’re basically just recording the album as we write the songs. Most of the time it’s just impossible for us to create a sound again. If we have a song and really like it, maybe I’ll say, “Oh, we should add another section to the song,” but if we do, it has to be a very different kind of section, because there’s no way that I can recreate the guitar sound—even if I took a picture of the pedals. It just won’t be the same. We have to loop or copy and paste a lot of guitars to make the sound fit at the end of the song compared to the first part of the song. There’s a lot of work with it, but in a fun kind of way.
So you always track guitars with the pedals engaged from the outset?
Yeah, we commit to the sound immediately. If you like that sound, you have to commit to it. You can’t recreate it. That’s the sound, and that’s it.
Sune Rose Wagner's pedalboard.
Do you use plug-ins on the guitar tracks, too?
I always EQ the guitar, yeah. There are some pretty harsh overtones that you need to get rid of. Maybe I’ll compress it a little bit. Again, it depends on what it’s needed for. Usually the only plug-ins I use on guitar are ones that help the guitar spread out. If I want a little bit more stereo widening, then maybe I’ll use, like, a Waves S1 Stereo Imager, or maybe go through a Soundtoys EchoBoy plug-in with very minimal settings, just to give a bit of wideness to the guitar. Very rarely … well, lately I’ve been using it a little bit more, because sometimes it’s nice to have a big stereo-reverb sound, kind of like a Chris Isaak vibe. I’ll go through a reverb to make a nice, big sound—sort of like what you hear in “Z-Boys,” that clean guitar with a nice, big stereo sound. But I don’t record my guitar in stereo—it’s all mono. So if I want to do something stereo, then I’ll put a stereo plug-in on.
In the past, you guys have used Fender amps when you play live, right?
Yeah. We used to have Fender amps with us live, mostly because we wanted something onstage that we could listen to that wasn’t just a harsh, monitor kind of sound. This was before we played with in-ear monitors.
But you were also sending a direct signal to the front-of-house board?
Yeah. That’s all he gets—he doesn’t use the amp sound live. All you hear live is the direct signal, like on the album.
A month or so before Pe’ahi came out, you posted a picture of your pedals on Facebook and said the EarthQuaker Devices Bit Commander, WMD Geiger Counter, ZVEX Box of Metal, and Catalinbread Echorec were “essential” to the new album.
Yeah, 100 percent.
Which ones did you use the most—or did you often use them simultaneously?
Oh, I always try to experiment with each song and see what it needs. But on each song there’s a lot of guitars—anywhere from 10 to 30 guitar tracks, and they all basically have a different sound. There might be five tracks of Geiger Counter and five tracks of Box of Metal. Obviously there’s also the RAT—which has been my go-to pedal for over 20 years. It really depends on what sounds good together. It’s basically just trial and error.
What’s your favorite preamp to use with your pedals when you’re recording direct?
What I’ve been using for a long time is a Neve—the 1073—which then goes into an API 550 EQ. That goes out to a Falcon—a really great tube compressor that Crane Song did. It takes a little bit of the harshness off.
And that’s the entire signal path, post-pedalboard?
Yes.
YouTube It
Do you record into Pro Tools or Logic or…?
I use Logic and Pro Tools, but for this album I opted to use Pro Tools. There’s really no rhyme or reason for that. I just started a couple of sessions really got rolling, so it was like, “Oh, I’ll just stick to Pro Tools.”
What guitars did you use for this album?
My ’63 Fender Jazzmaster and my 1959 Musicmaster. I also have a Mosrite Ventures II. I don’t know the exact year for that, but I had it appraised once and he was pretty sure that it was mid ’60s.
Are they pretty much stock?
They’re all original.
Do you use multiple guitars on each song, or do you tend to stick with one for all the different layers?
Again, it depends. I will say that the Jazzmaster is what I always start with, and then I sort of work my way up and try to experiment with some of the other sounds. If there’s a guitar theme, maybe I’ll try it on some of the other guitars to see what it sounds like.
Do you look for a different sound from the Mosrite and Musicmaster, or is it more for a change of scenery?
It’s a change of scenery. Sometimes if you sit there for hours with a Jazzmaster and take a break for food, when you come back and look at the Mosrite you think, “Fuck, I love that guitar—I want to play that now!” Also, on the Musicmaster and the Jazzmaster, I have very heavy-gauge strings.
What gauge?
They’re .014 to .055, flatwound.
In standard tuning? Yeah, but we always tune down one half-step, so we’re always in Eb.
Sune Rose Wagner's 1963 Fender Jazzmaster.
What made you decide to switch to such heavy strings?
I like the sound of it. That was really the only reason. I experiment a little bit. I do a lot of music that’s not just for the Raveonettes. I’m always writing songs. I’d done this song that was really pretty, like a lullaby kind of song. I put really heavy guitar strings on for it, and I just loved the sound. I figured I should just keep them on and do the new Raveonettes album that way. I decided to put heavy strings on the Musicmaster as well, and I keep the Mosrite with regular strings—.010 to .046 roundwounds.
So this is a relatively recent development for you?
Yeah, I’ve never tried it before.
What specifically do you like about the heavier strings—is it because it sounds more robust?
Yeah, I think so. You can’t really bend the strings that much, so there’s not a lot of noodling you can do. You have to figure out how to make everything sound pretty interesting using things like arpeggios or other ways of playing. It’s a challenge to come up with something. I kind of like that. You think about playing a little bit differently, which is always a good challenge.
You guys have been huge fans of Boss reverb pedals for a long time. You’ve got two at the beginning of your pedalboard, right?
Yeah. We don’t use the RV-2s anymore, because they’re old, they break, and they don’t have spring reverb [simulations]. When the RV-5 came out, we immediately changed over to those. I have two of them on my board, and Sharin has three.
Would you go as far as saying RV-5s are crucial to the Raveonettes sound?
Oh, they’re 100 percent crucial. I don’t think I could play a show without them. It’s the best-sounding spring reverb I’ve ever heard. Nothing compares to it. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s absolutely amazing. I haven’t heard a plug-in, an amplifier, or anything that sounds as good as that spring reverb. I have no idea how they were able to get such an amazing sound. It’s pretty crazy.
Do you ever use them to process vocals or drums in order to have a cohesive feel in the ambience?
No, not really. We have in the past a little bit while re-amping stuff, but mostly we don’t. There are other signal processors that I prefer, like an old Yamaha SPX90 or a Lexicon PCM-60. Those two we use all the time. All the reverb sounds you hear on Lust Lust Lust are the SPX90, all the drum sounds.
Wow—you’re still using those?
Every single day. It’s all over the new album, as well. That’s my number-one, go-to signal processor, the SPX90.
Those were all the rage back in the ’80s.
Yeah, you can get one on eBay for 90 dollars!
You expanded the sound palette in a number of ways on the new album. You’ve got the massive hip-hop beats, harp parts, a choir, the fuzz is more extreme than ever—sometimes it’s borderline industrial—and you’ve gotten into bit-crushed sounds. Yet it’s still gorgeous and haunted like classic Raveonettes. When you find yourself itching to expand your sonic palette like that, is it difficult to make it feel consistent with your sound, or does it all just happen pretty naturally?
It happens pretty naturally. I don’t think about it. It’s not something that we discuss or anything. We just do it. I knew I wanted to make a little bit more brutal sound. That’s why I went out and got all these pedals like the Geiger Counter, Bit Commander, and all that—to see if I could find some kind of combination with guitars that I could achieve that sound with. God knows what’s going to happen on the next album—we’re probably going to take all the pedals away and just have an acoustic guitar or something. You never know! That’s the beauty of it. I’m already looking forward to making a new album, because I can’t wait to see where it’s going to go.
Speaking of a more forceful guitar sound, “Sisters” has one of your craziest solos ever. What was going through your mind there?
I was trying to achieve something that was … I guess melodic, in sort of a strange way. It’s not like a super melodic solo—it doesn’t have any tones that aren’t within the pentatonic scale until halfway through the solo, where I broke a guitar string. That solo was played on the Mosrite. I broke my high E string, and things went completely out of tune, so that’s why the last half of the solo sounds very frantic and kind of neurotic. To me, that was just beautiful. It was a one-take solo, and I achieved exactly what I wanted to achieve.
Let’s talk about your guitar influences. You’ve said in the past that, growing up, you were into players like Mark Knopfler, Robert Johnson, Hendrix, Page, even Randy Rhoads—players no one would’ve guessed based on your playing. Did you consciously move away from a guitar-centric mentality, or did those influences just organically blend together with other bands you got into?
I think I just became more interested in songwriting. I used to just be a guitar player until I was 19 or 20 years old. I was strictly just a guitar player. Actually, I was a drummer since the age of 5, so drums were really my main instrument—and actually the instrument I enjoy playing the most. But it wasn’t really until I became more of a songwriter and a singer that I thought I’d much rather have a really nice bridge or something instead of just throwing in a solo. If I did have to throw in a solo, sometimes I could make it crazy, but other times I could make it super melodic. There are a lot of really beautiful solos on the Lust Lust Lust album. Very slow, melodic solos. Most of that stuff is sort of my Mark Knopfler influence—the way he’d repeat a certain motif or pattern over chord changes. I learned a lot from these guys when I was a kid. I started to use it in my own way, I guess.
Sune Rose Wagner's mid-'60s Ventures Mosrite.
You say drums are your favorite instrument, yet you guys don’t use real drums in the studio—only on tour. Why?
I’m not a fan of real drum sounds. It all sounds the same to me. I love using samples—they’re so diverse and interesting. I love mixing various drum sounds together … maybe have three or four different kicks and four or five different snares. I love drums but I want them to sound interesting and special.
When you’re writing a song, which parts typically come to you first—vocal melodies, guitar melodies, chord progressions, lyrics?
Lyrics always come last. I usually start off with a melody line of some sort, because I write mostly on piano. I find it to be an easier way to write, because it’s a very melodic instrument—you can have chords and melody play at the same time. To me, that’s just a no-brainer. Sometimes, you have to come up with certain guitar things or things that sound a little bit more guitar driven. Most of them are written sitting in front of the TV, watching whatever with a guitar in my hand. Something comes up, and I just record it really quick on my iPhone to look at later. Mostly, I write melodies and certain motifs and themes on the piano.
For many songwriters and guitarists, the way bandmates react to riffs and progressions often helps them evolve in fresh new ways. Is it difficult to come up with these rich tapestries of sound when it’s just you and Sharin doing everything?
Yeah. Essentially, it’s just me, because Sharin doesn’t write. I knew on this album that I couldn’t complete it myself. I needed help, because I had so many ideas—I was so inspired. The ideas were all over the place, and I needed someone to sit down with me and dig out the good stuff and make some crazy arrangements. That’s why I asked Justin Meldal-Johnsen [Beck, Nine Inch Nails] to help me and Sharin produce. There’s no way this album would have sounded as good without him. He was invaluable, for sure.
So he was sort of a sounding board for song ideas and arrangements?
Yeah, everything. Like a sparring partner. Whenever I was in doubt or had questions, I’d call him up or shoot him an mp3, or he’d come to my place. We would sit down and talk, sometimes for four or five hours. We’d just talk about music and listen to little snippets of ideas. It was done very musically, very hands-on in talking about certain chord progressions or the way to play certain chords or whatever. But at the same time, we also talked very abstractly about things like feelings and what you get out of playing a certain way as compared to playing it another way. It was an amazing experience. I absolutely loved it.
What’s an example of one of those situations where he suggested you try playing things in a different way?
For instance, on “Wake Me Up” I wrote a little string motif and said, “You know, it’d be nice if you could expand on it.” He’d be, like, “Yeah, but the way the song is now, it doesn’t really translate.” Then I’d write a new chorus, and the idea would be to write some weird, disharmonic chords and stuff. I did, and he liked it, and immediately we could hear what we needed next. Then we needed to get a string arranger. He knew this guy who was a film composer, so we got him involved and it tied the whole thing together. There’s no way I would have ever finished that song without him. It was just one of those songs where I had no idea what to do. I was completely stuck.
Before we wrap things up here, let’s get a little abstract. If you were interviewing yourself for a guitar website, what would you ask?
I would say, “You have a very unique style, and you have influenced so many bands and people. Everybody’s into surf music and girl groups all of a sudden. Why is it that you are never mentioned among all the great guitar players or all the guitar bands that are out—all the Jack Whites or whatever?”
What would your answer be?
It would be, “I have absolutely no idea why—Jesus Christ!” I play a mean blues, as well. Trust me, I can play exactly like Mark Knopfler but nobody knows it [laughs]. I can even play the same fingerstyle things that he does with three fingers!
If you could ask one of your guitar heroes—living or dead—a single question, who would it be and what would you ask?
I wouldn’t ask anything, I would just say, “You know Mark—Mr. Knopfler—that song “King’s Call” that you did with [Thin Lizzy singer and bassist] Phil Lynott? It’s fantastic—such an amazing solo!” I’d basically just congratulate him on that, I think.
Okay, last question. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, relax, and—as lucidly as you can—envision yourself playing guitar onstage or in the studio. Think about the minutest details of how you approach your instrument. Put it under a microscope. Now, what’s the single most important part of how you approach your instrument—what is it that defines your sound?
It’s emotion. It really is—I need the music to dictate to me where I want to go with whatever guitar I’m playing. It’s strictly just based on emotion.
Yeah, yeah. In a way, my sound is pretty simple. Most of the time it’s really just a digital reverb and the RAT pedal. I can pretty much do any song with just that setup. If I always have that at hand, I’m ready for whatever the music needs me to do.
Raveonettes frontman/guitarist Sune Rose Wagner wants to
seduce you, lure you in, lull you into a false sense of pop-melodic
security so strong that you don’t notice the darkness until
it’s too late. And that’s been the MO for him and his Raveonettes
counterpart, singer/bassist Sharin Foo, from their acclaimed 2002
debut, Whip It On all the way to this year’s Raven in the Grave.
“It’s like when you meet new people,” Wagner explains,
“You see them from the outside and you have a certain
notion of what they’re about, but you don’t really know what
lurks behind there. Sometimes it’s nice to make music that’s
incredibly appealing and almost sweet and very innocent
sounding, but then when you read the words you figure out
that this has nothing to do with innocence.”
 Ventures Jazzmaster at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City on March 26, 2008. The guitar has become Wagner’s favorite because “It doesn’t have all the s witches that a normal Jazzmaster has, and it feels a little bit heavier. It feels like one of those guitars that you can really travel with and nothing will break it.” |
Roots of the Rave
Wagner and Foo met in Copenhagen and were immediately drawn to each other by their shared fondness for the Everly Brothers. Foo came from a musical family and grew up surrounded by music. “My very first instrument was actually piano when I was like 7 years old,” she remembers. “That was what I started out with. My dad was a guitar player, so there were lots of guitars at home—and keyboards and pianos and 4-track and 8-track recorders. There was always that element around.”
Wagner, on the other hand, was lured to the guitar at age 15 after seeing a Dire Straits concert on television. He soon branched out, drawing inspiration from great players in a wide range of genres. “Back in the day, it was mostly a lot of blues—a lot of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and B.B. King and stuff like that. And then, gradually, I got into players like Jimi Hendrix. I was always a huge Randy Rhoads fan and a huge Jimmy Page fan, as well. Those were the big influences when I was growing up.”
But Wagner also developed a love of melodic songs by bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Velvet Underground, and through them he discovered the classic sounds of the 1950s and early ’60s. “I think there’s a certain vibe to the music that I like,” Wagner says. “Sometimes it’s like an innocent or nostalgic feeling, but the main reason is because a lot of it is really good songwriting by really good performers—y’know, great singers, great players. It’s always been appealing to me when people can really play their instruments.”
When Foo first met Wagner, she was deeply absorbed in the Danish jazz scene. “I was in the conservatory circuit, which was more the jazz cats, and there were some incredible musicians. So I was going out a lot late at night, listening to and watching a lot of jam sessions—but not participating that much, because I’ve always been completely intimidated by jam sessions.”
But under Foo’s cool jazz-cat exterior beat the burning heart of a true rocker, and it didn’t take long for Wagner to lure her into the indie-rock scene. “It was kind of a new place,” she recalls, “but I felt very comfortable there because my heart really did belong to the Stones, the Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan. I was finding the place that I felt very comfortable.”
From the beginning, the two found working together completely natural. Their shared enthusiasm for old-school rock ’n’ roll gave them plenty of common ground, and they soon found they also had a knack for lush vocal harmonies. “When we started out, we talked a lot about being inspired by the vocals of the Everly Brothers and how seamlessly they sing together and how extremely fluid and eloquent it is,” Foo explains. “Right when we started singing together, it was just a very organic thing. We would record stuff and say, ‘Who sang that? Was that you or me?’ Sometimes we couldn’t hear if it was a guy or a girl, and we were getting into that ... I wouldn’t say androgynous, but that weird place where you can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl.”
A Constant Metamorphosis
Wagner and Foo’s partnership bore fruit in the form of their first EP, Whip It On, which was named Best Rock Album of the Year at the 2003 Danish Music Awards. One notable aspect of the album was that Wagner set an interesting and deceptively simple challenge— each song could have no more than three chords, and all had to be in the key of Bb minor. Their follow-up and first full-length album, Chain Gang of Love, was all in Bb major. These seemingly draconian limitations were inspired by the Dogme 95 school of filmmaking started by Danish director Lars Von Trier, and Wagner insists that the effect was anything but stifling. “It was actually really great,” he says, “because it made me incredibly inspired, and I really had to be on top of my game to make songs that still sounded interesting while not using a lot of things that people normally do.”
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On 2009’s In and Out of Control, Wagner and Foo mixed it up in a new way by collaborating with Danish pop star Thomas Troelsen, who co-wrote seven of the album’s 11 tracks and took on production chores. The result was a more polished effort than Lust, Lust, Lust, with two of the album's songs being featured on the popular cable show Gossip Girl.
For their latest creation, Raven in the Grave, the Raveonettes have changed the formula yet again. The ’50s-style sounds that have been so prominent on their past records have in large part been replaced with dark, ambient washes of guitar and keyboards that seem to swirl around you. “We always try to make very cinematic music, because we’re big fans of film scores and movies,” says Wagner. “A lot of the lyrical content on this album wouldn’t have fit very well had it been more of a surfy kind of vibe—it just wouldn’t have been powerful enough. So it was nice to move away from that a little bit and make something that’s more un-surfy and un-twangy.”
But Wagner remains the ever-restless artist, already anticipating— albeit humorously—another stylistic about-face. “Right after you finish the album you immediately think ‘This is a great album.’ I’m very proud of it, but now I really want to make a 100-percent surf album with eight Jazzmasters and more twang than anyone has heard before,” Wagner laughs.
Kicking the Clichés
While the Raveonettes’ music may shift gears from one album to the next, Wagner’s songwriting approach is both consistent and beautifully self-contained. Rather than piecing together riffs and parts with guitar in-hand, he prefers to do the initial writing in a more internal way. “We try to make music that is fairly simple,” he says, “and after playing guitar for so many years, I don’t really need it to write songs anymore—I know how chords work and I know what I like. I just try to come up with riffs and things in my head first, and then, if I have a riff or an idea for something, I’ll grab the guitar and make a little demo recording. But I usually sit and just think about riffs and rhythmic patterns and stuff like that, and then I pick up the guitar and figure out how to do it.”
Writing this way helps Wagner avoid some of the obvious guitar clichés that come from dependence on shapes and patterns. Another method he employs to create out-of-the-box guitar parts is to write on another instrument. “I play the piano as well, so a lot of the stuff I write on piano I transfer onto guitar. I’ll play different things on the guitar that I normally wouldn’t think of.”
When it comes to gear, Wagner and Foo have a relatively simple setup that allows them to create enormous, space-filling ambient sounds when they play live. Like many indie rockers, Wagner is a devoted fan of the quirkier Fender models. “I mainly use a 1963 Jazzmaster and a 1963 Jaguar,” he explains. “One of my favorite guitars, mostly for touring, is the 1996 Fender Jazzmaster Ventures model that they did limited editions of when they had their 50th or 40th anniversary or something. I got it from Japan on eBay, and I just bought another one. So now I can really go on the road. It just seems like a really sturdy guitar. It doesn’t have all the switches that a normal Jazzmaster has, and it feels a little bit heavier. It feels like one of those guitars that you can really travel with and nothing will break it. I’m very happy about it.”
Amp-wise, Wagner favors the tried-and-true Fender Twin Reverb, particularly the popular ’65 Twin Reverb reissue. “We’re not much for vintage amps, because it’s a little shaky touring with them sometimes. And I always really liked the ’65 reissue—it sounds wonderful, and it’s one of those amps you can get anywhere. It doesn’t matter where you play in the world, you can always order two ’65 Twin reissues, so you know you will always have your sound.”
Foo relies on a Fender Mustang. “Because it’s a short-scale, it’s good for my fingers.” She runs it into an Ampeg SVT Classic with a healthy dose of effects. While she is a multi-instrumentalist, Foo insists her favorite instrument is bass. “It’s a very natural instrument to me,” she says. “It’s that kind of grounded, heartbeat-y feel. I love that. I feel like it suits my personality better than the guitar. And also I would prefer not to be in front so much. To be a guitar player, you have to love the spotlight.”
Both Wagner and Foo rely on a few trusted pedals to recreate their atmospheric sound in concert. The secret, says Wagner, is not distortion, but chaining several reverb pedals together for massive, ambient harmonic overload. “The thing is, because we do make a lot of noise when we play live, people always think that noise comes from hooking up 10 distortion pedals,” says Wagner. “But we actually only use one distortion pedal, and it’s a Pro Co RAT—which is not even turned up a quarter of the way. Our guitars are actually not that distorted, but when you run them through three reverb pedals that are blasting, it creates so many overtones and so much craziness that you get that wall of sound—but it’s not really a distorted wall of sound. It’s just more crazy harmonics going on there.”
Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo onstage with their trusted Fender Jazzmasters
and a backline of ’65 Twin Reverb reissues.
When we talked with Wagner and Foo, they were just a week away from rehearsals for the Raven in the Grave tour, and both were clearly excited to get underway. This tour, not surprisingly, will find the pair exploring yet another new lineup—one that will include two drummers. “That was actually the initial thought for the Raveonettes when we started back in 2002,” Wagner insists. “But we got into it so fast and started touring, and we got signed really early on in our career, so we just didn’t have time to make things work like that. But now we have a substantial amount of time off, and I said to Sharin, ‘Why don’t we do the two-drummer setup?’ And it would be great for this album, too, because it has very simple beats that are just looped so it’ll look great when you have two drummers play identical beats. It’ll be very powerful, like a machine that just runs through the whole thing. And also, they can both play guitar as well, if we need to change it up a little bit.”
Foo adds that the two-drummer lineup also allows them to incorporate samples without losing a live feel—a sense of immediate physicality. “When we toured on the last record, we played without tracks and samples, which was a completely new thing for us,” she recalls. “Now we want to reintroduce the electronic sound, but in a way where it’s less fixed. So we can trigger a lot with just the drums. We also like the visual, very physical feeling of two drummers.”
So when you listen to the Raveonettes—or if you’re lucky enough to catch them live—don’t say we didn’t warn you. Just behind the heady mixture of undeniable hooks, dark waves of sound, and ethereal harmonies lurk some dark and diabolical intentions. But even once you know the score, the seduction is still hard to resist. And what fun is resisting anyway?
Sune Rose Wagner's Gearbox
Guitars
1963 Fender Jazzmaster, 1963 Fender Jaguar, 1996 Fender Jazzmaster Ventures model, student model Yamaha nylon-string acoustic
Amps
Fender ’65 Twin Reverb reissues
Effects
Pro Co RAT, Boss RV-5, Boss DD-20 Giga Delay, Boss TR-2 Tremolo, Dunlop JH-OC1 Jimi Hendrix Octave Fuzz, Z.Vex Fuzz Factory
Strings and Picks
Fender Super Bullets (.010–.046), Fender medium
Miscellaneous
Mogami cables
Sharin Foo's Gearbox
Basses
1976 Fender Mustang bass
Amps
Ampeg SVT Classic
Effects
Pro Co RAT, two Boss RV-5 Digital Reverb units, Boss TU-2, T-Rex FuelTank Classic
Strings and Picks
Fender Super 7250 (.040–.100), Fender medium
Miscellaneous
Mogami cables