Just like your car will eventually sputter to a halt and die if you never change the oil, your amp will eventually develop problems if you neglect to devote some time to maintenance. It’s a lot better to “change the oil” in your equipment during those rare pockets of downtime than it is to be standing in front of an audience with a dead amp. Let’s take a look at a few things you can do to tune-up your gear. Tubes
This one almost goes without saying, but it’s surprising how many people fail to remember it: the best time to get fresh, good sounding tubes is before you need them. If there is a spare set of tubes that you’ve already tested in your amp and know work fine, you can simply replace a dead one, even on stage or between sets. As an added bonus, you’ll pay less for your tubes this way, because you’ll have time to hunt for good deals.
Fuses
Fuses can wear out. Heat from current pulses causes the element to flex slightly, eventually developing thin spots and breaking. How soon this will happen depends on how close to the normal blowing current it carries. It could be months or it could be centuries. Rather than take a chance, it makes sense to put in a new one every few years. You can keep the old one for a known-good spare, or better yet, get a fresh box of five to keep in your gig bag.
Socket Contacts
Your tube sockets get hot. Over time, a layer of corrosion will eventually develop on the contacts. Bad contacts make for erratic sound – strange crackling noises and dropouts. The fix is to clean the tube socket contacts and tube pins.
Cleaning your tube pins is simple enough; rub a Scotch-Brite cleaning pad on the pins just enough to make them shiny again. Leave the tubes out of your amp for the socket cleaning steps. Cleaning your socket contacts will require a little more caution. I’ve spelled it out for you below, but if you can’t follow safety instructions, don’t try this – have your tech do it for you.
- Unplug your amp and leave it off and unplugged for a least one (1) hour.
- Use that hour to obtain electronic contact cleaner, pipe cleaners and wooden dowels, wooden or plastic chopsticks or bamboo barbecue skewers.
- Wind a pipe cleaner around one end of your wooden stick, leaving about 1” of the pipe cleaner extending from the end of the stick. Wind some tape over the pipe cleaner on the stick to hold it down firmly.
- Hold the wooden stick at least 1” from the pipe cleaner. Do not touch the pipe cleaner while you are scrubbing! This is important for your safety; if you can’t be sure you will not touch the pipe cleaner while doing this, get a tech to clean your sockets for you.
- Saturate the free length of the pipe cleaner with cleaning solution and stick it into the opening in the tube socket. Scrub the pipe cleaner in and out of the opening, cleaning the inside of the contact pin. Repeat this for every tube socket hole.
Loose Nuts
The sound from your amp can loosen any fastener over time. Spend some of your tune-up time inspecting your amp and tightening things back down. Amps can also sometimes develop a hum not related to the litany of normal hum-inducing causes, and in some cases can start picking up radio stations. When the bushings of the controls and jacks no longer make good contact with the chassis, hum and RF signals can creep in. So, if you’re not in the mood for NPR, tighten them up. Use a socket wrench to fit over the end of your jacks and tighten the nut on the jack firmly. Remove your amp’s knobs and do the same for the controls. Jacks with a plastic bushing do not cause hum if loose, but it still makes sense to make sure they’re tight enough not to rotate and break the attached wires. Don’t over-tighten; just make sure they’re nicely snug with the chassis.
Do the amplifier safety dance again by leaving it unplugged for an hour before opening the back up and retightening the nuts that secure your speakers. There is no need to crank the nuts until the speaker bends – just make sure they are tight. Do the same for the handle fixing bolts and nuts, and the screws that hold the chassis. For your own safety, avoid touching anything inside the electronics chassis.
In the process of your tune-up, you may find things that really need looked at by a tech. Make a list and haul it down to the shop. Just like tubes, the best time to have an amp in with the doctor is when its not sick!
R.G. Keen
Cheif Engineer
Visual Sound
www.visualsound.net
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Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.