Guitar and bass legends Steve Morse and Andy West showcase their contrasting rigs—two amps vs. no amps—and custom instruments on a Dregs reunion tour date in Nashville.
Steve Morse and Andy West are legendary players. In addition to co-founding the Dixie Dregs together in Augusta, Georgia, in 1970, both virtuosos have colorful personal resumes.
Guitar giant Morse’s is more high-profile. He remains the leader of the Steve Morse Band, who opened the Dregs’s late April show at Nashville’s CMA Theater, where this Rundown was filmed, with 45 minutes of smart shred. He’s also been a member of Kansas and Deep Purple, as well as another instrumental powerhouse, Flying Colors.
Besides his tenure in the Dregs, West has recorded with Vinnie Moore, the Steve Morse Band, Paul Barrere, and Henry Kaiser, with whom he’s been a member of the Mistakes, Crazy Backwards Alphabet, and Five Time Surprise, which also includes Messthetics guitarist Anthony Pirog. (Full disclosure: I recorded a version of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” with Kaiser and West as part of Kaiser’s Moods & Modes of Halloween video quarterly in 2023.)
The Music City show was classic Dixie Dregs, with more than two hours of high-wire playing, all anchored by the bold melodies that mark their compositions. Joined by longtime Dregs drummer Rod Morgenstein, violinist Allen Sloan, and special guest and former Dregs keyboardist Jordan Rudess, now from Dream Theater, the concert was an affirmation of Morse and West’s vitality and musical partnership after sharing stages for more than 50 years.
In the video, Steve and Andy explain their rigs in person and in detail. Their setups:
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The Warhorse
Steve’s number one guitar is literally serial No. 1—the first Steve Morse signature model to come out of the Ernie Ball Music Man shop in 1985. Its appointments include a Tune-o-matic bridge with thumbwheel height adjustment, a roasted maple neck, Schaller tuners, a graphite-acrylic-resin-coated body cavity and aluminum-lined pickguard, master volume and a highly responsive tone control, 22 frets, and DiMarzio’s Steve Morse signature pickups. Two toggles control his mix of humbuckers and single-coils. The wear makes this instrument a thing of beauty—it’s clearly, like its owner, led a storied life. At the headstock, you’ll notice a homemade foam mute (with Ernie Ball’s name on it) that Steve fashioned to compensate for the arthritis that makes it painful to bend his hand. That said, it doesn’t seem to slow him down a bit.
The Mute
Here’s a close-up look at Steve’s handmade mute. Currently, it’s in muting mode. Flip it up and the strings ring open.
Next!
Steve’s backup signature model has a little more chunk in its voice, and the neck pickup has more clarity, he tells us. “I could pick it up and play it all night long.” He is using Ernie Ball Paradigm Slinky strings, gauged .009–.042. And his picks are flexible nylon Ernie Balls with a serrated edge. “The hard celluloid picks really impact my wrist,” he says.
Synth-tillating!
There’s a Roland GK-3 divided pickup at the heel of Steve’s main axe, so he can use a synth to add strings and pads to accompany himself as he plays in the Steve Morse Band.
The Engl's Have Landed
Steve plays through a pair of 3-channel Engl Steve Morse signature 100-watt amps—one wet, one dry—but his volume can go down to a whisper without losing a bit of tonal depth thanks, in part, to the amps’ careful tube interaction and circuitry. In fact, Steve says he can play his nylon-string acoustic guitar through these powerhouses. He keeps the amps on their sides to disperse the sound to the left and right.
Stack of Synths
And Steve’s synth of choice is the Roland GR-55. It comes stock with 910 tones, 93 effects, and three foot-pedal controllers.
Pedal On!
His pedal chain is a Keeley Compressor, two Ernie Ball volume pedals, two TC Flashbacks, a Korg Polytune, and a foot controller for his 3-channel Engls.
Wet or Dry?
Perched atop an amp head is a GigRig wetter box, which allows Steve to fade reverb or delay into his dry-signal cabinet. The reverb and delay are generated by two adjacent TC Electronic Flashback pedals (using his own TonePrint settings) and a TC Hall of Fame reverb.
The Bass-ics
Two key components of Andy’s rig are his main G. Gould 6-string bass and these flat-response EV monitors, which serve as his instrument’s audio feed on stage. Between them is a Line 6 Helix floor unit—the sonic spine!
Good as Gould
The G. Gould was custom-made for Andy about six years ago. Despite being a 6-string, it has a 5-string neck, because he plays with a pick and prefers tight string spacing. It has a pair of EMG pickups. The neck is graphite, made by Goeff Gould, and it has two volume controls and a coil-splitter.
Second Bass
Built in 1985, this bass was designed by Andy and Geoff Gould, who was the founder of Modulus Graphite guitars. It has a graphite neck and originally had a tremolo bridge, but it started to crack the neck, due to its additional tension, so Andy had a wood block inserted plus a more conventional 6-string bass bridge. It has EMG pickups, too. The robust flame-maple finish is killer.
What's My Line 6?
Andy’s amp is a Line 6 Helix floor model and he uses a few key tones, with a lot of midrange focus, some chorus, a lower octave, and overdrive—“all really subtle,” he observes. And the signal goes directly to the EV monitors onstage. They have two 12" speakers and tweeters, and the signal also goes direct to house, of course.
Shop Dixie Dregs' Rig
Roland GK-3 Divided Pickup
Engl Steve Morse Signature 100-Watt Amps
ENGL Amplifiers E412VSB 240-watt 4 x 12-inch Amplifier Cabinet
Roland GR-55 Synthesizer
Keeley Compressor
TC Electronic Flashback
TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb
Ernie Ball 2023 Super Slinky Paradigm Electric Guitar Strings - .009-.042
Line 6 Helix Guitar Multi-effects Floor Processor
Electro-Voice ZLX-12P-G2 1000W 12-inch Powered Speaker Pair
Once you have the “Cowboy” chords together there are thousands of songs that are suddenly under you hands. But what if you want to make those chords a bit more interesting? Barre chords cat be stretchy and difficult, but there are ways to create new sounds out of old chords.
LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Socolow
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 Socolow’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 Socolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Socolow—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.
Socolow’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, Socolow’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 Socolow's Gear
Socolow 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.”
