Songwriter, performer, producer, author, actor, and activist Steve Earle has arguably influenced a paradigm shift in country music. His poetic storytelling mixed with folk, bluegrass, rock, and traditional country has expanded the music's boundaries and made him a pillar of the umbrella genre called Americana.
Before their August 30 sold-out show at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, Earle and longtime Dukes' guitarist Chris Masterson took me through their touring rigs.
[Brought to you by D'Addario XS Strings: https://www.daddario.com/XSRR]
Holey Moley!
Steve Earle's current No. 1 touring electric is his James Trussart Black Holey Steelcaster. This metal-bodied T-Style features a B16 Bigsby, an Arcane T-style bridge pickup, and an Arcane humbucker neck pickup. And if you can peek through the f-hole, you'll see the ventilated back that gives the guitar its name. This Trussart stays stung with D'Addario XL Nickel Wound Jazz Lights: .012–.052.
Rara Avis
Earle has a long history with Martin Guitars. They released an M-21 Steve Earle Custom Artist Edition a few years ago. Now Steve is touring with two black, custom M-sized Martins that are all mahogany, for better road durability. These are equipped with Fishman's Aura pickup and run into a Fishman Acoustic Guitar Aura Spectrum pre-amp/DI. These Martin's stays strung with D'Addarios, gauged .012–.053. For some tours, Earl plays up to 15 stringed instruments a night onstage.
Mando-tory Playing
Earle's standard mandolin is a Gilchrist, and he also brings this octave mandolin onstage. They're hand-built in Stephen Gilchrist's shop in Lake Gnotuk, Australia. They both take D'Addario strings and, like his electric guitars, go through the same 1/4" cable into his pedalboard. Steve is able to mute/tune, and direct the signal to the amp or DI. He plays Fred Kelly thumb picks—D5J-L-3 Delrin Bumblebee Jazz Lights.
Model Mando
Here's the other custom-made Gilchrist mandolin that Earle travels the world with.
50/50
Two newish, stock Peavey Classic 50 4x10 combos are his stage amps. Earle uses only one at a time, in the normal channel, with input gain around 7 and output volume about the same. The amps face across stage so it's easier on the audience as well as the live audio engineer.
Steve's Settings
Here's what Steve's cooking with on his main Peavey Classic 50.
The Chairman's Board
His axes hit a Boss TU-3 and run into a pair of MXR Carbon Copy analog delays (one set as a 1-second delay for a pre-song rippling effect, and one as a slapback/Echoplex), and a Fulltone Full-Drive 2 with two levels of gain. A Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 supplies the juice. Special thanks to tech T. G. "Chief" Frahn for his help on gear details.
Tele Time
Chris Masterson's No. 1 electric is his refinished 1958 Telecaster. The Fender pickups have been changed to some unknown model, but the guitar sounds amazing and Chris has not changed anything else. All of his electrics are strung with D'Addario NYXL1150BT medium tension sets, which run .011–.050.
This Guitar Tries Harder
Masterson's No. 2 is this Fender Custom Shop '57 Telecaster with a Parsons/White B-Bender. Note the original Tele-design bridge on this reissue.
Meant To Be Bent
Here's a look at the routing and mechanism of the Parsons/White B-Bender. Using the device fluidly definitely takes practice.
Hey Buck-O
For humbucker tones, Masterson goes with a Gibson Custom Shop '64 SG with ThroBak ESG-102B P.A.F.-style pickups.
Masterson's Waterloo
This Waterloo acoustic, by Collings, features a Fishman Rare Earth Humbucker soundhole pickup and it is strung with D'Addario NYXLs, gauged .012–.053.
The Low-down
For truly deep twang, a baritone is the right guitar for the job, and this Jerry Jones brings the spaghetti-Western tones when the time is right.
Double Jonesing
The other Jerry Jones onstage is a Neptune 12-string that's also stock. Masterson uses D'Addario heavy celluloid picks on his axes.
Piggyback Partners
Here's an oddity. This '64 Deluxe head runs a Fender cab with a Mojotone interior that houses a Celestion Creamback G12H-75.
Just for Effects
First stop: an Analog Man Sun Lion. From there the signal hits a Boss Waza Craft Chromatic Tuner, an Origin Effects Cali76 Compressor, an Analog Man King of Tone, a Strymon Mobius, and a Strymon TimeLine. Strymon's Zuma supplies power and a Radial footswitch turns amps and reverb and tremolo on/off. Masterson uses Divine Noise cables.
In recent years, Samantha Fish’s most often-used guitar was this alpine white Gibson SG, but it ran into some issues last summer—“I ended up having to reglue the neck”—and it is now on hiatus.
If you’re already a fan of Fish’s tough Delta-mama singing and high-temperature guitar work, you’ll probably think that all this is just as it should be. You gotta reap what you sow eventually, right? And Fish has been sowing for a long time, from her bar-band days in Kansas City 15 years ago through eight rootsy, eclectic albums as a leader (not counting the two early-2010s discs she cut with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith as Girls with Guitars, or her 2013 outing with Jimmy Hall and Reese Wynans in the Healers, or 2023’s tangy swamp-rock collaboration with Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues) to her current tour schedule of about 150 dates per year in North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Still, even with such a solid career foundation to draw on, mixing and mingling in the flesh with folks you’ve known all your life as names on record covers could be a little intimidating. Is it? “You know, I don’t ever think about it in those terms,” Fish says on the phone from her home in New Orleans. “So when you lay it all out there like that, it feels like, ‘Aw shit, that’s crazy.’ I mean, it is crazy. When I think about the goals that I’ve made over the years … honestly, I’ve crossed off a bunch of things that I thought were even ironic being on the list, because they just seemed so far-fetched. Every interview I’ve ever done, they were like, ‘If you could ever open up for somebody, who would it be?’ And I always said the Stones, ironically. Cause when the hell’s that gonna happen? I’m a guitar player from Kansas. That’s nuts.”
With her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, heavy hitting style, and wide array of blues and rock influences, Fish is an artist of a different stripe.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Fish spits out the sentences above in a fast, excited spray, one word tumbling over another. Then she pauses for a second, and it’s clear that wheels are turning in her head. Her voice gets more playful. “I’m gonna start speaking some even wilder things into existence just to see what happens,” she cracks, her grin nearly audible over the line. “A billion dollars!No, money’s evil, but you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to lean into superpowers.”
Given her formidable chops, it’s not that daring a leap to suggest that Fish could be capable of playingsome wilder things into existence, too. She’s certainly off to a good start with the just-released Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. Whether your personal taste leans more toward nasty string-snapping riffs (the aptly titled “Can Ya Handle the Heat?”), sizzling slide escapades (“Lose You”), or high lonesome twang (“Off in the Blue”), you can’t deny that the album’s loaded with prime guitar moments. And its two longest tracks, “Sweet Southern Sounds” and “Fortune Teller”—“longest” being a purely relative term (they’re both under six minutes)—offer listeners just a taste of the neo-psychedelic fantasias that can occur when Fish stretches out in concert.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got to figure out a way to capture the live feeling on a record,’” she reports. “Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta make the song work for vinyl, so let’s cut it down,’ and you end up hacksawing away some of these parts that are kind of the feeling and heartbeat of the song. This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Fish made her recording debut in 2009 as the leader of the Samantha Fish Blues Band, with the punny-titled in-concert indie album Live Bait.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
That’s one way in which Paper Doll differs dramatically from its predecessor, 2021’s Faster, which delved into a poppier territory of synths, beats, and high-tech production (and, in this writer’s opinion, did so with great effectiveness; one of Faster’s highlights, “Hypnotic,” sounds like it could have been recorded at a late-night dance club hang with Prince and the Pointer Sisters). In contrast, obviously electronic sounds are nowhere to be heard on the new disc, and the music referenced stays firmly in the American roots category: soul, rock, country, juke-joint blues. For some artists, a stylistic shift like this could be seen as a retrenchment, but for Fish, it’s the result of a major departure. This is the first time she’s ever used her road band—keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass—to make a studio album.
“Everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
“Usually,” Fish explains, “I’ve worked in studio situations where there’s been a producer and they want to put the people they know together. So it was cool to bring in the band that I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years instead of session musicians. I feel like the dynamic was different—the familiarity, and just kind of knowing where the others were gonna go. It might be a minute difference to a listener, but for the players in the room, it helped breed another sensibility.”
Also helping in that department was producer Bobby Harlow, late of Detroit garage-rock revivalists the Go. Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.
“Last March, Bobby came out to a show we did in Detroit,” Fish recalls. “We went out to lunch, and because I was working on writing songs, I asked him to do some co-writing with me, because I love the songs he wrote for the Go. He’s really fun to be in a room with when you’re making something, because he’s incredibly devoted to it. So we started writing, and then a few months later the label was like, ‘We gotta make this album, who’s gonna produce it?’ Well, we’re on the road all summer, so I don’t know when y’all expect us to do this record. But Bobby was available, and it was like the universe bringing us back together. He was passionate about the kind of songs I was writing, and he understood where I wanted to go with it.”
Samantha Fish's Gear
Before finding her SG, Fish’s main guitar was her Delaney signature model thinline style, with a fish-shaped f-hole.
Photo by Frank White
Guitars
- Alpine white Gibson SG
- Gibson Custom Shop ES-335
- Delaney 512
- Stogie Box Blues 4-string
- Danelectro baritone
Amps
- Category 5 Andrew 2x12
- Fender Hot Rod DeVille
Effects
- Dunlop volume pedal
- Analog Man King of Tone
- JHS Mini Foot Fuzz
- Electro-Harmonix Micro POG
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Boss PS-5 Super Shifter
- Voodoo Lab Pedal Power ISO-5
Strings, Picks, & Slides
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010-.046)
- 1.0 mm picks (any brand)
- Various brass and ceramic slides
And where was that? “I wanted to lean into superpowers,” Fish quickly answers. “What are my strengths, what are the things that people know me for and recognize me for, and what can I amplify to make this a real statement record? It’s funny, because everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
Born out of the blues it may have been, but when the Paper Doll material reached the studio (actually, two studios: the Orb in Austin and Savannah Studios in L.A.), it went through some changes, partly due to the band’s contributions, partly due to Harlow’s conceptual leaps. “Bobby’s like a musicologist,” Fish says approvingly. “He’s deep. He pulls from so many different spaces, and he’s definitely introduced me to some things that I wasn’t hip to over the years. That’s done a lot to shape my musical tastes.” If you’ve had the significant pleasure of attending one of the many gigs in which Fish breaks out proto-punk nuggets like the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and Love’s “7 and 7 Is,” well, now you know the guy to thank.
“This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Paper Doll’s best tracks, “Rusty Tazor,” is a similar romp through the garage. In a rare case (for this album) of the producer bringing in someone he knows, Harlow tapped Mick Collins of cult faves the Gories and the Dirtbombs for backing vocals. “He adds such a personality to that song,” Fish says. “And I’m a punk rock fan. I love that whole era. I just love this raw, uninhibited way of playing. There’s nothing precious about it. Leaning into the edges—that’s where the real shit lies.”
Because the Paper Doll sessions took place in between periods of touring, Fish only brought her road instruments, including a new white Gibson SG and Stogie Box Blues 4-string cigar box guitar (see sidebar for more on her personal collection). But both the Austin and L.A. studios presented plenty of other options. “A ton of guitars,” Fish remembers with a laugh, “in varying degrees of disrepair. I used a rather unruly [Gibson ES-] 335 in Savannah for ‘Sweet Southern Sounds.’ You know how some guitars fight you when you play them? Well, I like a little bit of fight, but not so much that I’m pulling the strings out of the saddle, and it was fighting me like that. It was hard to push the strings down, I could only bend in certain places. But that just made the performance more intense, and it sounded good. There was also a Tele and a Strat that they had at the Orb. We had so many tools at our disposal, it was like, ‘Let’s go nuts and play with everything we can.’”That choice of m.o. also sounds like a positive way to respond to a career moment that Fish calls “an incredible ride. Especially in the last year-and-a-half, two years, it’s just upped the ante even more. There’s nothing more to do, really. I went out, I played to the best of my ability and I did the thing that I’ve been working hard to do for the last 15 years or so. And it’s awesome to be able to show up in that capacity and perform alongside people that I’ve really looked up to. I just feel grateful. I know I’m lucky.”
Fish’s Favorites
Fish has a brawling style of playing slide, often on her cigar box. “Lose You,” on her new album, is especially representative of her approach to the classic blues technique.
Photo by Jim Summaria
For nearly a decade, Samantha Fish’s primary stage axe has been a 2015 alpine white Gibson SG that she bought new online. She’s still got it, but last year it ran into some trouble. “I ended up having to reglue the neck over the summer,” she says, “and it’s been having tuning issues. So Gibson sent me another white SG that’s just beautiful, in great shape. The neck’s a bit fatter, which is cool, different from mine. I’ve been using that one a lot”—indeed, the new SG is all over Paper Doll. “I’ve hung onto it, and I feel bad about that. I don’t want to be the person who borrows a guitar and keeps it. But it just played so great, and it was like, ‘I need this thing. What can I do to keep it?’ Luckily, the people at Gibson have been so good to me over the years.”
An even more recent addition to Fish’s electric arsenal is a Custom Shop Gibson ES-335 in silver sparkle finish, purchased in the fall at Eddie’s Guitars in St. Louis. “Because I played a 335 on ‘Sweet Southern Sounds’ in the studio, I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need one live, so of course I have to get this one!’ I’ve always wanted a silver sparkle, and this one is pristine. I’m so scared of the first scratch I get on it, or buckle rash. I’m probably gonna cry!”
Fish hasn’t been playing her Delaney SF1 Tele-style “Fish-o-caster” so much recently, but another Delaney model, the hollowbody 512, is still getting lots of action (often tuned to open D for slide use), as is her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, equipped with a P-Bass pickup. Her Danelectro baritone, Bohemian oil-can guitar, and clutch of Fender Jaguars are also safe at home, along with her current acoustic main squeeze, a new Martin D-45.
YouTube It
Samantha plays Jimi in this September 2024 performance from the most recent Experience Hendrix tour. The selection: “Fire.”
Versatile guitarist Nathaniel Murphy can be seen and heard on YouTube and Instagram, where he has over 450,000 followers, and demos for Chicago Music Exchange.
Guest Picker - Nathaniel Murphy
A: My signature pedal wouldn’t even really be my sound. It would have all of The Edge’s exact sounds and settings in one pedal as presets. No messing with switches or dialing in tones, just cycle through presets and it sounds exactly like “Pride (In the Name of Love),” “Mysterious Ways,” or “Where the Streets Have no Name.” It would be purely just for fun to jam at home. My own pedal would probably just be a reverb!
While recovering from a hand injury, Nathaniel Murphy “really got into picado technique and would watch Paco De Lucia and in particular Matteo Mancuso (above) vids and lessons.
Obsession: Well, I’ve just spent six weeks in a cast after a wrist fracture—very scary. During that time I couldn’t use my fretting hand so I worked on my picking hand. I really got into picado technique and would watch Paco De Lucia and in particular Matteo Mancuso vids and lessons. It’s been really refreshing and also fun working on a new technique for me, even though it’s incredibly tricky and progress is slow. But I love the challenge of it.
Reader of the Month - Steve Eisenberg
A: My signature pedal would be simple to use, have the capability of being shaped with iPhone-app based effects, and expand features as my guitar adventure grows in scope. I’m very much in the experimentation stage with my pedal work, and having direction and guidance available on an iPhone has helped me navigate in a way that ensures I’m meeting some of my guitar-adventure goals.
Obsession: Through the guidance of my instructor, I am exploring fingerstyle guitar, as it has motivated me away from just chord shapes and scale work. I was feeling a little stuck, and using the fingers of the right hand has allowed me to increase my dexterity and coordination, and motivated me to practice more often.
Gear Editor - Charles Saufley
Mr. Saufley, represented by a mallard.
A: The foundation of my signature pedal is the guts of a 1968 Vox Starstream guitar, which is made up of a Vox Distortion Booster fuzz, a Vox Repeat Percussion tremolo, and Vox Treble Booster. Sonically speaking, this is like donning a psych-punk freakbeat cape. Just before the Distortion Booster there is a Grampian 636 reverb preamp circuit to fatten up and color the works. After the freakbeat section, there will be a de- and re-constructed Roland RE-201 Space Echo. Most of the pedal enclosure will be made up of clear Lucite (illuminated by alternating-color lamps), so I can observe the tape swirling within. The RE-201’s spring reverb, meanwhile, will be suspended in its own flip-up Lucite case which will sit on dampers to insulate it from floor vibration. Hopefully, it will sound like Lee “Scratch” Perry producing Love’s “7 and 7 Is”.
Obsession: The first sounds and green and gold flashes of early spring—and the wakeful energy, ideas, and inspiration it brings.
Giving some love to Love!
Art Director - Naomi Rose
A: The enclosure would be hex color #00b4c1—branded as NAOMI blue—checkerboarded with alternating boxes of NAOMI blue glitter flock and matte NAOMI blue. The footswitch would be a bulbous orange rubber material so it’d feel squishy when stepping on it whilst playing barefoot. It would have a kick-out stand in the back like a picture frame, so when it's not in use, it could stand angled on a shelf to be admired. It would be called Ruckus because that's my middle name. What would it DO? That's a secret I will not be sharing at this time.
Our graphic designer’s dream pedal brought to life.
Obsession: Silence. I hardly listen to music or podcasts these days. When I don’t have outside noise, I tend to self-narrate in my head, which leads to making ridiculous little made-up songs throughout the day. These will oftentimes spark cool ideas and manifest into actual songs that I end up recording and producing. Even in the mundane, inspiration is everywhere. Sometimes getting rid of distractions helps you notice it more.
