![Rig Rundown: The Smashing Pumpkins [2022]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/rig-rundown-the-smashing-pumpkins-billy-corgan-jeff-schroeder-2022.jpg?id=32176140&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
Thirty-one years after Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins are still exploring the architecture of sound in their often explosive and unpredictable songs. For their current Spirits on Fire Tour, Billy Corgan leads with his Reverend signatures and a few other carefully culled guitars, and Jeff Schroeder lends support with his fleet of Yamahas.
The Smashing PumpkinsSmashing Pumpkins' first two albums, Gish and Siamese Dream, were a huge part of the soundtrack for the early ’90s alternative rock revolution. Still sounding revolutionary all these years later, the band’s leader, Billy Corgan, recently brought the Smashing Pumpkins to Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena for the Spirits on Fire tour, on the heels of their 11th studio album, Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts.
The concept album is a sequel to the Smashing Pumpkins’ definitive three-LP masterwork Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, from 1995—which also brought them crushing into the mainstream. Acts two and three of Atum are scheduled for January and April 2023. But meanwhile, there are live shows … and all the gear it takes to recreate more than three decades years of the band’s signature sounds. PS: Special thanks to super-tech Trace Davis for his help with the fine points.
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Sticker Shocker
Billy Corgan’s main guitar, tuned in standard, is his Reverend signature Z-One in midnight black, loaded with Railhammer Billy Corgan Z-One neck and bridge pickups. This model is the third collaboration between Corgan and Reverend’s Joe Naylor, and Mr. C’s axe takes Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys, gauged .010–.046.
Purple Haze
For a back-up, Billy has his Reverend BC1 signature in satin purpleburst, loaded—again—with Z-One neck and bridge pickups, which blend the bite of P-90s with humbucker heaviness.
Those Pickup Covers!
Stare long enough at those pickup covers, and perhaps you’ll see the universe, putting a new spin on the old Zen koan. When Corgan wants things just a bit looser, in Eb standard tuning, he’ll reach for this Z-One sig in silver freeze. Oh! The strings? Ernie Ball Power Slinkys, .011–.048.
Truly Special
For a classic P-90 voice, Corgan lets the strings on this 1994 Gibson Les Paul Special sing. He keeps it tuned to C# standard and the switch has been modified (it's a secret), as has the sticker. Ernie Ball Not Even Slinkys (.012–.056) adorn this axe.
ES for Eb Standard
Another low-tuned Gibson, Corgan’s 1972 ES-335 with block inlays and a trapeze tailpiece, lives in Eb standard land and gets called out to play on the song “1979.”
The Silver Surfboard
For some mini-hum sting, Billy plays this Gibson Firebird with a Bigsby in silver finish. There are several switches in the headstock, which Corgan’s tech Davis says control the “secret sauce and voodoo magic.”
Star Baby
Corgan tours with two of his signature Yamaha LJ16BC acoustics—one in E and one in Eb standard. They’re medium-jumbos and all-stock, which means a spruce top, rosewood back and sides, a 5-ply mahogany and rosewood neck, and the company’s comfort traditional neck style.
Double Vision
Corgan tours with two identical amp rigs, with four different heads used separately for different tones, and all switched with an Ampete 444. This allows him to drive all four heads into one Laney Black Country Customs LA412 4x12 speaker cab loaded with Celestion G12H-75s. It lives in an iso box under the stage. The amps? There’s a Laney Supermod, an Orange Rockerverb 100 MKIII, a Carstens Grace, and an Ebo Customs Del Rio.
Billy Corgan’s Pedalboard
Here’s what underfoot: an RJM Mastermind GT/16 MIDI controller, an MXR CAE Power System, Analog Man Beano Boost treble booster with Mullard-style transistors, a Lehle III switching and looping tool, a Tone Bender-inspired Minotaur Sonic Terrors Evil Eye MkIII fuzz, a Strymon Brigadier delay, a Behringer Octave Divider, and a Dunlop Volume (X), used as an expression pedal for the Strymon.
Yamaha, Aha!
Jeff Schroeder plays Yamaha guitars. And he’s got four Revstars on tour. This one has an especially elegant finish. They came stocked with P-90s, but now one has Black Cat Vintage Repro Minis, another features Lollar Low Wind Imperial Humbuckers, and the one he keeps in drop D is totally stock. Schroeder goes with Ernie Ball Paradigm .009 sets for standard, .010s for Eb standard, .009s with a heavier .046 on the bottom for drop D, and .011s for C# standard.
Cutaway to the Pacifica
This Yamaha Pacifica has a scalloped fretboard and Seymour Duncan Hunter humbucking pickups in the bridge and neck, and an SSL-5 single-coil in the middle. It also features a Floyd Rose whammy upgraded with titanium parts.
Big Red
For a semi-hollow, Jeff goes with his Yamaha SA2200 guitars, with Lollar Low Wind Imperial Humbuckers.
Player’s Pick
As with all his axes, his plectrum choice is Dunlop Tortex 1.14 mms, including the the just-for-fun Dunlop YJMP03YL Yngwie Malmsteen picks (yellow), but the Dunlop YJMP02RD Yngwie Malmsteen picks (red) are beefier at 2 mm.
Double Generation
Schroeder tours with two Revv Generator 120 MKII tube heads—big, beefy, and versatile.
Don’t Call a Cab
No big boxes for Schroeder … at least onstage. He uses a pair of Two Notes Torpedo Captor X simulators, emulating a 4x12 mic’d with a Shure SM57 and Sennheiser MD421 on Celestion V30s. As a back-up, there is a Marshall 4x12 in an isolation cabinet—with a Shure SM57—under the stage. And Jeff’s “icing on the cake”—a suggested addition from tech Trace Davis (of Voodoo Amps)—is a Retrospec Juice Box. This inconspicuous box is a transformer-less, all-tube DI that has upped his live tones to a studio quality.
Double Helix
His effects array has two Line 6 Helix Rack units that live in his rolling rock case.
Central Command
At his feet he has a Line 6 Helix Control Foot Controller that works with an Analog Man Beano Boost, like Billy’s. These are fired up for solos. Also, Schroeder has a pair of Dunlop DVP3 Volume (X) pedals (one for volume and another for pitch-shifting effect from the Helix) and a Dunlop JB95 Joe Bonamassa Signature Cry Baby wah.
But Wait, There’s More
He also uses an Origin Effects RevivalDrive, a Vox Satchurator, and Fender’s Yngwie Malmsteen signature OD.
- Billy Corgan on Smashing Pumpkins’ New Mellon Collie Sequel: “Now’s the Time.” ›
- Rig Rundown: A Perfect Circle ›
- Reverend Launches the Billy Corgan Z-One ›
- Reverend Billy Corgan Drop Z Signature Electric Guitar - Premier Guitar ›
- From Songwriter to Guitar Designer, Billy Corgan's Evolution - Premier Guitar ›
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.”
