Music—and guitar—are therapeutic. The songs we write and riffs we play help reduce the pain, alleviate the stress, and produce some positivity in our lives. Microwave's singer/guitarist/lyricist Nathan Hardy has been using the studio and stage as his leather couch for nearly 10 years.
Stovall, in 2014, saw him question his Mormon missionary upbringing. Two years later, Much Love focused on realities versus the romance of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. And 2019's Death Is a Warm Blanket is a dark, heavier, raging deep dive into his nihilistic thoughts. All three albums are honest, coarse evaluations of the pushing and pulling in Hardy's head and heart.
Musically, the band has matured alongside Hardy's contemplative subject matter. Stovall and Much Love harness the teeter-totter dynamics mastered by Nirvana and also felt in Microwave's post-hardcore contemporaries like early Citizen and Turnover.
While their loudest, most aggressive tendencies were unleashed in Death Is a Warm Blanket, Microwave's melodies and hooks can still be sticky and sweet as honey. Finally able to tour in support of that album, Microwave packed Nashville's Mercy Lounge on October 15. Just after soundcheck, Hardy and guitarist Travis Hill introduced PG to their favorite battle axes, walked us through their Odd Couple pedalboards, and Hill explained how an outdated laptop and trial version of Logic Pro provides a universal "poor man's Kemper" for guitars and bass.
[Brought to you by D'Addario XPND Pedalboard: https://www.daddario.com/XPNDRR]
Classic Cruiser
Travis Hill took just one guitar with him during Microwave's fall U.S. tour—his beloved early 2000s Gibson Les Paul Classic 1960 reissue. (A guitar he swears he'll never sell.) The wine red beaut is completely stock including its 496R and 500T humbuckers. It takes Ernie Ball 2215 Nickel Skinny Top/Heavy Bottom strings (.010–.052).
Logic-al Logistics
The band practices in Atlanta using the Overloud plug-in on Pro Tools, and they're accustomed to its amp tones. Nathan wanted to travel with Kempers, but Travis suggested he could run guitars and bass through a free, bundled Slate version of Overloud via a trial version of Logic Pro and an old Focusrite Saffire Pro. Bass has one track, Nathan has two, and Travis has three with two going to FOH and one hitting his onstage cab for monitoring and feedback.
I Gotta Be Heard
While most of Hill's tone gets pumped through the PA and into his in-ear monitors, he still does require stage noise for live monitoring and feedback. He takes out the Orange Rockerverb 50 combo (bypassing its circuitry) and treats it like an extension cab. He prefers the open-back design and hasn't touched the stock Celestion Vintage 30s.
Organized Filth
The majority of Travis' tone comes from here. And at a quick glance you have two takeaways: He loves grimy gain (see the top row) and keeps a tidy workspace. His Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer is always on. ("It's just a slight push, but you notice it when it's not there.") The other top-row terrorizers are a Fulltone OCD, Fuzzrocious Cat Tail, Way Huge Swollen Pickle, Fuzzrocious Demon King, Walrus Audio Iron Horse, and, off to the side, an EarthQuaker Devices Data Corrupter. Anything that includes repeats, modulation, and clean sounds is supplied by the Boss GT-1000CORE. For maximum control, he has a Boss ES-8 Switching System and Boss EV-30 Dual Expression pedal.
Addendum Effects
Off Travis' main stomp station is an auxiliary board that holds a RapcoHorizon Straightline Passive Direct Box and an Electro-Harmonix 22500 Dual Stereo Looper that keeps some pre-recorded tracks.
Go For the Gold!
Frontman and Microwave cofounder Nathan Hardy unsuspectedly strolled into Atlanta's Earthshaking Music and walked out with this Rivolta Guitars Mondata II HB finished in a marvelous capo gold. The used score still has its original Rivolta "Brevetto" PAF-style humbuckers. Other highlights include a mahogany body—with a raised center block à la a Firebird—and a maple neck paired with a pau ferro fretboard.
Baritone Bruiser
Microwave's 2019 album Death Is a Warm Blanket requires some beefy bari parts, so Hardy found this Fender Blacktop Baritone Telecaster that originally started life in an HSS format. When he bought it, the previous owner had swapped in a set of TV Jones Filter'Trons. To better fit the crisp heaviness Microwave heats the stage with, Hardy had a tech friend drop in a set of EMG 81/85s. Nathan employs Ernie Ball 2220 Power Slinkys (.011–.048).
Nothing Stays Forever
If Travis Hill's pedalboard is Felix Unger, then Hardy's has to be Oscar Madison. Nathan admits in the Rundown that everything on his board has an expiration date. He loves swapping in and out stomps, chasing perfect pedal pairings. The current construct of his tone-tweaking platform harbors some powerfully paranormal boxes—specifically the Gamechanger Audio Plasma (high-voltage distortion pedal) and the Hologram Electronics Dream Sequence (sequencer, envelope shaper, pitch shifter, sampler, and more). The rest of the pedals are fairly standard: Boss BF-3 Flanger, DigiTech Whammy, Ibanez TS Mini Tube Screamer, EarthQuaker Devices Gray Channel, Greer Amps Super Hornet, Boss PH-3 Phase Shifter, Boss DD-500 Digital Delay, Boss GE-7 Equalizer, and TC Electronic Mimiq. The pair of guitars are kept in check by the Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner and a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus juices the pedals.
Singing Stomps
Hardy hits his voice with some effects from the Line 6 DL4, Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, and Pro Co RAT.
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Editorial Director Ted Drozdowski’s current favorite noisemakers.
Ted Drozdowski - Editorial Director
My favorite is my Burns Buzz, a stomp custom-made for me by Gary Kibler of Big Knob Pedals. Gary specializes in recreations of old circuits, and this Burns Buzzaround-inspired box has four germanium NOS transistors and sounds beautifully gnarly. It improves on the original, which Robert Fripp favored in early King Crimson, by adding a volume control. I went a little stir-crazy acquiring fuzzes during Covid lockdown and now have an embarrassing amount. My other current darlings are a SoloDallas Orbiter (which balances fuzz with core-signal clarity), a Joe Gore Duh (a no-nonsense, 1-knob dirt shoveler), and my Big Knob Tone Blender MkII 66, which taught me how smooth and creamy fuzz can be with carefully calibrated settings. These pedals allow me to cover all of my favorite fuzz sounds from the past 60 years. I do have one more secret weapon fuzz that only travels to the studio: an original Maestro FZ-1 that I picked up used for about $20 in the early ’90s. It’s banged up but functional, takes two 9V batteries, and is righteously juicy.
Nick Millevoi - Senior Editor
The two greatest fuzzes I’ve ever played are a Pigdog Tone Bender build and a Paul Trombetta Bone Machine. Both experiences will stick with me for decades to come. But creations by those two masters of fuzz come with a price tag high enough to keep my time with those pedals fleeting.
Instead, my favorite fuzz is an inexpensive, mass-produced pedal that hasn’t left my board since I reviewed and subsequently purchased it in 2021: the Electro-Harmonix Ripped Speaker, designed to emulate the distorted tones on ’50s and ’60s records that were created with broken or misused gear.
Retro inspiration is not all it has to offer though. The rip knob, which controls transistor bias, is the star of the show, interacting with the fuzz level to deliver everything from a smooth, mild fuzz to sputtery mayhem that can evoke a faulty channel strip or old tube combo that’s been set ablaze. I prefer to crank the rip knob and feed it to a phaser and slapback analog delay, which gives me a bit-crushed-like gnarliness. Pull back on the rip or add a boost in front of the pedal, and it has a more organic but still gated sound, which, for me, can be just the thing to set my sound apart in a more traditional setting.
For a cool $116, the Ripped Speaker, which seems to fly under most fuzz freaks’ radars, might be the special something that complements the rest of your board or just a tone you turn to on occasion. Either way, it’s a great deal.
Luke Ottenhof - Assistant Editor
You could give me the most powerful-sounding fuzz in the world, but if it was in a stupid-looking enclosure, I don’t know if I’d give it a second look. This is just how we operate: Vision is the sense we privilege most, even in matters of audio.
Luckily, the most seismic, monstrous fuzz I’ve ever heard also happens to come in a beautiful package. The Mile End Effects Kollaps, built by Justin Cober in Montreal, measures an elephantine 7 3/8" x 4 5/8" x 1 1/2", and its MuTron-meets-’60s-Soviet aesthetic matches the sounds its guts produce. The Kollaps is modeled after the nasty Univox Super-Fuzz circuit, and carries a few of that pedal’s hallmarks, including its use of germanium diodes and midrange boost control. Cober added a switchable Baxandall active EQ circuit, with up to 12 dB of boost and cut to both low and high frequencies. Coupled with the mid-boost toggle, this gives the Kollaps a shockingly broad range of tonality to play with.With the mids off, the Kollaps is jagged and ruthless, a deafening turbojet of upper mids and chest-vibrating lows that yanks me toward the darker, less commercially successful corners of ’90s doom and noise rock. Kicking on the EQ circuit and boosting the lows turns it titanic. With the balance (volume) and expand (gain) controls maxed, the Kollaps starts to live up to its name, crumbling into a thick, overextended chaos in a way more polite fuzz circuits rarely do.
My favorite Kollaps sounds occur when the mids are engaged, for an articulate, deeply textured fuzz sound that retains your attack. Playing with your guitar’s volume knob, you can coax a range of EQ profiles and take advantage of the upper- and lower-octave content in the fuzz. With guitar volume lower, you can access some unbelievably emotive and sensitive sounds that still teeter on the edge of chaos and violence. It’s a rich, volatile circuit that gets as close as I’ve heard to a sound and physical feeling I’d call “planet-destroying.”
Charles Saufley - Gear Editor
My first fuzz, A Sovtek Big Muff, remains tied for first place among many favorites. The pedal’s most famous virtues—corpulence and sustain—are among the reasons I treasure it. But the way the Sovtek pairs with a Rickenbacker 330 and Fender Jaguar, which were once my two primary guitars for performance and recording, made it invaluable in various projects for a long time. Neither the Ricky nor the Jag are sustain machines, but the wailing mass of theBig Muff makes their focused voices an asset—inspiring tight, concise fuzz phrases, hooks, and riffs as well as articulate chords.
A silicon Fuzzrite clone built by good pal Jesse Trbovich (long-time member ofKurt Vile’s Violators) runs second place to the Sovtek in terms of tenure, and is a very different fuzz. It’s a piercing, hyper-buzzy thing, but a perfect match for a squishy 1960s Fender Bassman head and 2x12 I adore. Perversely, I sometimes couple it with a Death By Audio Thee Ffuzz Warr Overload or Wattson FY-6 Shin-Ei Super-Fuzz clone. These tandems create chaos and chance, but sing loud and melodiously too—at least when I’m not intentionally bathing in feedback. The Jext Telez Buzz Tone, a clone of the mid-’60s Selmer circuit, is often my go-to now. It’s a low-gain affair compared to the other fuzzes here, and I use it in its even-lower-gain (and vintage-correct) 3-volt setting. It’s pretty noisy, but it is thick, dynamic, detailed, raunchy, and plenty trashy when the occasion demands it. It’s also a very cool overdrive when you back off the gas.Jason Shadrick - Managing Editor
I rarely need fuzz in my everyday gigs, but it's one of the most fun effects to explore when I'm noodling around. At a NAMM show a few years ago I plugged into Mythos' Argo and as soon as I hit a note my eyes lit up. The sound of the fuzz wasn't unwieldy or hard to manage. It gave me the illusion of control while the octave was the magic dust on top. I knew right then I wasn't leaving the show without one. After I spent some time with it, I became enamored by how much more the Argo can do.
It's inspired by the Prescription Electronics C.O.B. (Clean Octave Blend), so the control set is similar. The octave is always present in the signal path, but you can dial it out with the blend knob. The fuzz and volume knobs are self explanatory, but dialing the fuzz and octave knobs all the way down gives you a killer boost pedal. I find my favorite settings are at the extremes of the fuzz and blend ranges. Typically, both are either all the way up or all the way down. Another great experiment is to turn the fuzz down and then pair it with a separate drive pedal. And in octave mode, Argo is one of those pedals that inspires you to head directly for the neck pickup and stay above the 12th fret.
