Raised on blues rock and Strats, this spunky shredder is now aiming to attract headbangers and mosh pits with headless Strandbergs and brand-new signature Lace Sensor pickups.
Erin Coburn grew up on blues and classic rock. That background has afforded her a spotlight onstage for over half her life, including opening slots ahead of Marcus King and Blackberry Smoke. She released her first album Chaos Before Conformity in 2015 at just 14 years old. She was starting to cut a groove in the blues-rock genre, but the needle stopped when her ear latched onto the darker moods of Alice in Chains, more dynamic music of Sleep Token, and the technical proficiency from modern guitar whisperers Tim Henson and Scott LePage of Polyphia. Since then, her playing has sped up, her tunings have dropped—including the addition of a 7-string Strandberg—and she’s joined the heavier side of riffing with one goal in mind.
“I’m going more towards hard-rock and metal because I love it and that’s where my soul is—I just want to open up mosh pits someday!”
It’ll be interesting to see how she fuses her backbone of blues-rock with the new injection of musical blood. Regardless of the destination, we’re just glad to be sitting shotgun for the ride.
Before her band’s headlining show at Nashville’s Eastside Bowl, Erin Coburn welcomed PG’s Chris Kies onstage for a conversation about gear, music, and surprises in her lunchbox. She dished on how she gravitated (and possibly levitated) towards Strandberg guitars during a NAMM Show visit and then divulged a brand-new offering from Lace that includes some of her own signature of sweet ’n’ heat.
[Brought to you by D’Addario Strings & XPND Pedalboard.]
Bodacious
Erin started her guitar journey playing Strats and semi-hollows, but a fateful trip to the 2019 NAMM Show was all it took for her to be drawn in by headless horsemen of Strandberg. “I had seen guitarists play them on Instagram, but I never seen one in person, until I was walking by Strandberg at NAMM and I levitated towards their booth because I thought ‘those look so cool!’” She used her blues angle—a weak spot in their artist roster at the time—as an in with the company and they’ve been thick as thieves ever since.
This is one of two Strandberg Boden Classic NX 6 she had on tour. It has an alder body, quartersawn maple neck with a maple fretboard that has a 20" radius and Luminlay dots, Jescar 51100 stainless steel frets, the company’s trademarked EndurNeck profile, and Strandberg’s EGS Rev7 tremolo system & string locks. The typical Boden Classics come with Suhr pickups, but Coburn rocks Lace models in her Strandbergs—this HSS configuration takes the Sensor Dually Red-Blue humbucker in the bridge and a pair of Sensor Silver single-coils in the middle and neck slots. All the Strandberg models you’ll see weigh in at just five pounds!
Teal Steel
Here’s Coburn’s Strandberg Original NX 6 Tremolo Neck-Thru that features a chambered swamp ash body featuring a solid maple top capped a flame maple veneer. It also has a roasted maple neck with bird’s-eye maple fretboard that’s carbon-fiber reinforced. The major difference to a player like Coburn is the neck-thru construction that removes any need for a heel so she can grab every note packed on this 24-fret, 25.5"-scale shred stick.
Fresh Mags
Here is seemingly just another beautiful Strandberg Boden Classic NX 6, but if you look closely it’s stacked with a mint set of signature Erin Coburn Lace pickups. There are two highlights to point out in this H-S-S setup. First, is the bridge humbucker that’s a brand-new design blending Lace’s Purple and Gold Sensors that strive to be equally powerful as they are articulate. Second, the single-coils feature ceramic magnets, which is a first for Lace products. The middle single-coil features reverse-wound, reverse-polarity (RWRP) winding enhancing the second and fourth positions. The neck single-coil to Erin’s needs that require “robust power delivering a strong foundation for deeply rich and fuzzy warm tones.”
Tin Can Alley
Coburn gets rough and rowdy with this duo of lunchbox bruisers built by New Egypt Folk String Instrument Company. They only have four strings but offer enough attitude you won’t be missing the other two.
Shredulele
And if lunchbox rippers weren’t enough, Coburn busts out a Kala KA-20CE Concert Uke for a medley of covers. The mini monster is made of burled meranti and runs through her rig just like the rest of her instruments.
Strings & Things
For this run, all her guitars used DR Strings Veritas .010–.046, but as she’s started exploring lower tunings and test driving her new Strandberg Boden Prog NX 7 she’s began experimenting with DR’s DDT lineup of strings. She uses custom DR Strings straps to secure all her instruments, too.
Erin Coburn’s Pedalboard
We caught Coburn during a rig rebuild. During the Rundown, she alluded to a future layout that will be in stereo and feature two Bad Cat amps that will certainly rage and roar. However, during her stop in Nashville, she filled the room with rock thanks to the Neural DSP Quad Cortex. Her core tone centered around Rabea Massaad’s preset Clinic Vibes, but she changed a few things that she needed including the addition of the unit’s freeze feature and enabling her to run Clinic Vibes preset in mono. She’ll introduce a drive or a combination of two for dirty and lead tones, and she has a wah on tap, too. On the left side of the Quad Cortex rests a Mission Engineering SP1-ND Quad Cortex Expression pedal and on the right is a Boss FV-500 Volume pedal.
Shop Erin Coburn's Rig
Strandberg Boden Classic NX 6
Strandberg Boden NX 6 Neck-Thru
Strandberg Boden Prog NX 7
Neural DSP Quad Cortex
DR Strings Veritas 10-46
DR Strings DDT 13-65
- Rig Rundown: Yvette Young [2023] ›
- Rig Rundown: Nita Strauss ›
- Shred Sisters: Nita Strauss and Jennifer Batten ›
We’re giving away more gear! Enter Stompboxtober Day 24 for your chance to win today’s pedal from Maxon!
Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Pedal
The Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Effects Pedal may look like your old favorite but that's where the similarity ends. Improved circuitry with a new chip yields the ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive guitarists crave. Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume while the Hi-Boost/Hi-Cut tone controls adjust brightness. Features true bypass switching, a die-cast zinc case, and 3-year warranty. From subtle cries to shattering screams, the Maxon OD-9 delivers a huge range of tones.
Features
Improved circuitry with a new chip yields ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive
Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume
Hi Boost/Hi Cut tone controls adjust brightness
True bypass switching
Die-cast zinc case
AC/DC operation (order optional Maxon AC210N adapter)
Product Specs
Input: 1/4" mono jack
Output: 1/4" mono jack
Power: 9V DC, 6 mA, center pin minus (not included)
Dimensions: (WxDxH) 74 mm x 124 mm x 54 mm
Weight: 580g
Founding Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh has died at 84.
Official statement from Phil Lesh's Facebook page:
He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.
This is a developing story.
Vintage-style reverb, tremolo, and vibrato sounds abound in a 3-in-1 stomp that might be the only box you need.
Here’s part two of our look under the hood of the funky rhythm guitar master’s signature 6-string.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this edition, we’re continuing our journey through the Fender Cory Wong Stratocaster wiring, bringing it all together.In the previous installment, the last feature on the funky 6-stringer’s signature axe that we discussed was the master volume pot and the corresponding treble-bleed circuit. Now, let’s continue with this guitar’s very special configuration of the tone pots.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!