This month I’ve decided to take a crucial side trip into an area that is extremely useful for discovering exactly how you sound to both yourself and your respective audience. What it is you ask? The answer is the art of recording. The importance of this to your self-discovery cannot be overstated. Before the emergence of the good old two-track cassette reel-to-reel tape recorder there were all kinds of hassles involved in making any type of multi-track recording. Most of us were challenged in this department because at the time a standard consumer quality two-track tape deck was quite expensive – fetching even more money than a good Gibson or Fender electric guitar.
Fortunately, things are much different today – you can now create decent recordings of yourself, even on a budget. Several of the most important tools you should own in this day and age of high quality, bang-forthe- buck multi-track digital recorders are a few decent quality microphones, such as the Shure SM 57 and the Sennheiser e609 S Silver model. Both are dynamic mics, ideal for close mic’ing an amp’s speaker. You will also want a decent condenser microphone for distant mic’ing, such as the Audio-Technica AT4040. The Shure and Sennheiser should cost approximately $89 to $110, while the condenser mic can be found for around $300.
So why are we talking about microphones? I’ll admit that I got into recording very late in the game – I should have had a simple four-track machine 20 years earlier than I did. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When I finally stumbled into multi-track recording, I first tried to capture myself as I truly sounded. I had a unique opportunity to review microphones beforehand, so I took my time in listening to about 20 different models of both dynamic and condenser mics, and then chose the models that sounded the best to my ear – in other words “like me.” This early multimicrophone experiment was the critical glue that eventually led me to discover that everything matters in the reproduction of what we refer to as sound. Chances are if I hadn’t done such extensive listening I wouldn’t be writing this column now.
Your objective should be to simply observe what happens any time the signal chain gets altered, and it just so happens that the very best way to find out how these alterations change the soundscape is to record them and then compare the differences side-by-side. There are huge benefits on many levels to trying this. First, you’ll get an honest glimpse at how you sound at that moment. And second, you’ll be able to experiment to your heart’s content until you tweak everything to where it sounds how you want it to sound.
There are two basic components I want to concentrate on right here: tone and style. The second component – style – is the direct result of the first element – tone.
These two components will co-exist and flow into each other as long as you pay attention to how your playing evolves from any tonal changes that have been made to your signal path.
Let’s use a simple fuzz pedal as an example. There are a ton of fuzz boxes on the market today and they all have their own sound to offer. However, all of them will severely affect how you play the guitar, partly as a result of their sound, but more importantly in the way the pedal feels. Have you ever noticed that some players sound incredible playing a particular model of fuzz, while others will sound quite bad using the very same fuzz?
This is one of those things that may take some time, on a few levels. There is generally a learning curve where your mind will have to completely surrender to and accept the given effect in order to properly adapt your fingers and touch for getting the optimal results with any given fuzz pedal. Remember, touch includes your picking hand, too.
This is just one example of how you can use the technique of recording yourself to see whether something really works for you or not. Any way you look at it, this technique will immensely increase your ability to weed out any component that isn’t “you,” while at the same time giving you ample opportunities to find the things you need to create your own personal stamp. The key issue here is to be open-minded and flexible, as you can never know what will give you what you’re looking for. But most importantly, have fun experimenting.
Dean Farley
Dean Farley is the chief designer of "Snake Oil Brand Strings" (www.sobstrings.net) and has had a profound influence on the trends in the strings of today
LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Sokolow
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Sokolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Sokolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Sokolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Sokolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Sokolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Sokolow's Gear
Sokolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos” Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero” Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”
