As this Rundown unravels, your inner armchair expert (especially once we get to the pedals) may scream "gluttony." And you're not wrong, but Whores creator Christian Lembach doesn't care to be right.
"Honestly, when people say 'You don't need all that stuff,' my response is, 'No shit! I want all this stuff,'" he proudly states. "Necessity is the dumbest argument in rock 'n' roll. For me, it has nothing to do with utility—playing guitar and using all of this [gear] gives me pleasure [laughs]."
And with that spirited passion, he's been Whores' ringleader since 2010 when he formed the swaggering, strutting power trio with bassist Jack Schultz and drummer Travis Owen. The band has released a pair of blistering EPs (2011's Ruiner and 2013's Clean) that were followed by a refined, groovier, raucous sound for the full-length debut (2016's Gold) that featured the current lineup of bassist Casey Maxwell and drummer Douglas Barrett.Carrying on the brash, boisterous tradition from '90s underground slobberknockers like the Melvins, Shellac, Swans, and Jesus Lizard, Whores churns out the loudest, most obnoxious (yet infectious) rock 'n' roll you won't hear on your dad's airwaves. "When rock music gets too fancy, it gets ruined. I know I'm not the world's greatest guitar player. I don't want to be," admits Lembach. "I just wanna play guitar, in a band—I just love fuzz pedals and big, loud music so much—nothing else on earth makes me feel like that."
Recently, Whores entered producer/engineer and longtime collaborator Ryan Boesch's Candor Recording to track their second album. During the process, Lembach virtually welcomed PG's Chris Kies to go over his simplistic-but-intense guitarsenal. Plus, we admire his plentiful pedal paradise (rivaling your favorite guitar store's inventory) that delivers both "flavor crystals" and "fire-breathing craziness," and he shares the two-pedal combination that "is the reason this band exists."
[Brought to you by D'Addario Auto-Lock Straps: https://ddar.io/AutoLockRR]Mid-2000s Fender Classic Series ’50s Esquire
You might not believe it (especially if you take a gander down at his feet and the three pedalboards), but Whores' ringmaster Christian Lembach likes to keep it simple … at least with guitars. His longtime No. 1 is this mid-2000s Fender Classic Series '50s Esquire (MIM). However, that wasn't always the case. He originally pulled the trigger on this reissue to serve as a backup for his then go-to axe (a Fender American Standard Telecaster). Before he trusted the Classic Series for the road, he had to replace the anemic stock single-coil. A friend offered a solution by way of a spare Schecter F520T. Christian wired it into the T and, wham-o, the Esquire instantly became his Excalibur. (Because of the F520Ts being out of production (it's connected with Mark Knopfler in the "Walk of Life" video), Christian has since opted for obtainable F520T recreations—wound and wired by German pickup maker Harry Häussel, and aptly called Walk of Life—in his stage guitars.)
In the Rundown, Christian breaks down the pickup's special DNA: "It's basically an overwound single-coil that has half of the winds in one direction and the other half of the winds in the opposite direction, so you could coil-tap if you want. I don't have it tapped. I have it on full blast, all the time."
He also revels in the Esquire's often misunderstood switching setup. (Why in the hell is there a 3-way switch for a one pickup guitar?!) In the back position, it's just the standard Tele bridge sound that bypasses the tone circuit. The middle slot is your standard Tele bridge setting that brings back in the tone control. And the "neck" or third position removes the tone circuit again and activates a bass boost. He loves how dark and loud that last setting is because, when smeared with fuzz, it balances out for a lively, laser-like tone. Other repairs, upgrades, and switches include an Amazon-purchased, 6-saddle brass bridge, a Mighty Mite maple T-style neck, Hipshot locking tuners, and a bone nut.
The band usually lives in drop-C tuning (CGCFAD), and he plays with light picks (.60 mm) paired with heavy strings (.013–.056). That sort of imbalance allows Christian to hammer on the strings without walloping them out of tune.MJT Musikraft VTM Telemaster
This Fullerton knockoff features all of the same ingredients as the T (Amazon bridge, Mighty Mite neck, Hipshot locking tuners, bone nut, Esquire circuitry, Häussel Walk of Life pickup), but with a MJT Musikraft VTM body. He admits that this one is closing in on the No. 1 slot, because the beveled body is easier on his picking-hand forearm, which gets shredded by the slab-bodied Esquire.
Acrylic B.C. Rich Mockingbird
During one of Whores' Canadian tours, Christian blew out his knee. (In true rock 'n' roll fashion, he continued the tour and performed sitting down.) While at home recovering from surgery, he was browsing online and came across this acrylic B.C. Rich Mockingbird. He screenshot the bodacious instrument and shared it on his social media because it was that cool. Well, friend and fan John Cooper bought the guitar and contacted Lembach, who appreciated the sentiment but said he had no spare cash for the instrument because of the surgery. Christian didn't realize that Cooper bought it for him as a gift. The below guitar might not see a lot of stage time (our necks hurt just looking at it), but it will always have a special spot in Lembach's boat.
1960s Marshall 100W Super Lead
For his auditory assault, Christian packs a one-two Marshall punch. Below is a late 1960s (or possibly early '70s) 100W Super Lead. He runs that through a Marshall JCM800 1960A Slant 4x12 cabinet filled with Celestion G12T-75s.
2000s Marshall 1959SLP 100W Plexi Reissue
The second part of the amp equation is this 2000s Marshall 1959SLP 100W plexi reissue. This one hits a Marshall JCM800 1960B straight 4x12 cabinet that's also loaded with Celestion G12T-75s. Both of the heads have lower gain than stock plexis, because Lembach put in 12AU7 preamp tubes. To give himself even more headroom, he plugs into the low inputs and both heads have been upgraded with Mullard or Tung-Sol EL34s. (He plugs into channel 1 of the original Super Lead, which is internally jumpered, while he plugs into the low-input channel 2 of the reissue.)
1960s Silvertone 1484
His latest gear acquisition before entering the studio was this 1960s Silvertone 1484 head and cab.
Christian Lembach's Pedalboard #1
We were lucky enough to swoop in to producer/engineer Ryan Boesch's Candor Recording while Whores tracked their new album. (Lembach does admit to traveling with a lot of pedals, but this amount is insane and for studio shenanigans.)
To try to make sense of this plethora of pedals, let's start at the end. Christian divides his pedalboards into two paths. The A loop is everything except what's in loop B. The B loop is the always-on, menacing combination of the ZVEX Super Hard On ("SHO" as Lembach calls it) and the green, tall "bubble font" Russian Big Muff. "That combination is literally on every song we've ever recorded and is used on every song we perform. It's the reason this band exists," he says.
Lembach has it set up this way so he can go from any sound conjured in the A loop to the aforementioned destructive duo on a dime. (In the next photo, you'll see a small, non-descript gray box in the lower-right corner that switches between A and B loops.) Everything else on this board (lower right) includes a pair of Devi Ever FX stompbox (a Soda Meiser and a Bit: Legend of Fuzz), a ZVEX Box of Metal, signature IdiotBox Effects Whores Fuzz/Filter, and an original Electro-Harmonix POG. A Morley ABY box switcher commands the Marshalls.
Enter to win Christian's signature IdiotBox Effects Whores Fuzz/Filter!
Christian Lembach's Pedalboard #2
Moving left, the pedal parade continues (bottom right) with a ZVEX Fuzz Factory, Jext Telez White Pedal (fuzz/overdrive), Spaceman Effects Sputnik III, and Chase Bliss Audio Automatone MKII Preamp. (Those last two pedals were both presents from his better half.) The middle row consists of a Caroline Guitar Company Somersault, EHX Micro POG, Boss NF-1 Noise Gate (because of Steve Albini), Keeley Nova Wah, and an Xotic AC Booster. And the top row starts with a Cusack More Louder clean boost, TC Electronic Ditto Looper, EarthQuaker Devices Hummingbird, Hungry Robot Pedals Stargazer (V1), Catalinbread Echorec, Dr. Scientist BitQuest, Alexander Pedals Radical Delay II Plus, JHS Stutter (small black box), an EHX Freeze, and an AMT Electronics Japanese Girl Wah. A Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner keeps his guitars in check. While he doesn't claim to have Eric Johnson's hear-the-difference-in-9V ears, Lembach does claim to distinguish differences between all his fuzzes and filters.
Christian Lembach's Pedalboard #3
This last board is specific to studio experimentation. It has an IdiotBox Effects Power Drive, Spiral Effects Yellow LM741 Overdrive, Bondi Effects Sick As Overdrive, Beetronics Swarm, seahagFX Zonk (clone), Jext Telez Dizzy Tone (OC44 transistors, for pedal nerds), and a Montreal Assembly Your and You're (fuzzy synth).
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Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if you’re not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an “intelligent pitch-changer” that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ’80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. It’s essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is ±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and it’s also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the device’s guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days it’s not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000’s capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymon’s “shimmer” effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what you’ve won!)
“If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.”
But there’s another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. It’s easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which they’re mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isn’t always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offer—and I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, that’s a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions don’t quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) It’s all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists won’t be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations exist—Eventide’s own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhere—and you’ve got the time—fire it up, wait for the distinctive “click” of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
PRS Guitars today released the updated MT 15 and the new Archon Classic amplifiers, along with a larger Archon speaker cabinet. The 15-watt, two-channel Mark Tremonti signature amp MT 15 now features a lead channel overdrive control. An addition to the Archon series, not a replacement, the 50-watt Classic offers a fresh voice by producing retro rock “classic” tones reminiscent of sound permeating the radio four and five decades ago. Now twice the size of the first Archon cabinet, the Archon 4x12 boasts four Celestion V-Type speakers.
MT 15 Amplifier Head
Balancing aggression and articulation, this 15-watt amp supplies both heavy rhythms and clear lead tones. The MT 15 revision builds off the design of the MT 100, bringing the voice of the 100’s overdrive channel into its smaller-format sibling. Updating the model, the lead channel also features a push/pull overdrive control that removes two gain stages to produce vintage, crunchier “mid gain” tones. The clean channel still features a push/pull boost control that adds a touch of overdrive crunch. A half-power switch takes the MT to 7 watts.
“Seven years ago, we released my signature MT 15 amplifier, a compact powerhouse that quickly became a go-to for players seeking both pristine cleans and crushing high-gain tones. In 2023, we took things even further with the MT 100, delivering a full-scale amplifier that carried my signature sound to the next level. That inspired us to find a way to fit the 100's third channel into the 15's lunchbox size,” said Mark Tremonti.
“Today, I’m beyond excited to introduce the next evolution of the MT15, now featuring a push/pull overdrive control on the Lead channel and a half-power switch, giving players even more tonal flexibility to shape their sound with a compact amp. Can’t wait for you all to plug in and experience it!”
Archon Classic Amplifier Head
With a refined gain structure from the original Archon, the Archon Classic’s lead channel offers a wider range of tones colored with gain, especially in the midrange. The clean channel goes from pristine all the way to the edge of breakup. This additional Archon version was developed to be a go-to tool for playing classic rock or pushing the envelope into modern territory. The Archon Classic still features the original’s bright switch, presence and depth controls. PRS continues to stock the Archon in retailers worldwide.
“The Archon Classic is not a re-issue of the original Archon, but a newly voiced circuit with the lead channel excelling in '70s and '80s rock tones and a hotter clean channel able to go into breakup. This is the answer for those wanting an Archon with a hotrod vintage lead channel gain structure without changing preamp tube types, and a juiced- up clean channel without having to use a boost pedal, all wrapped up in a retro-inspired cabinet design,” said PRS Amp Designer Doug Sewell.
Archon 4x12 Cabinet
As in the Archon 1x12 and 2x12, the mega-sized PRS Archon 4x12 speaker cabinet features Celestion V-Type speakers and a closed-back design, delivering power, punch, and tight low end. Also like its smaller brethren, the 4x12 is wrapped in durable black vinyl and adorned with a British-style black knitted-weave grill cloth. The Archon 4x12 is only the second four-speaker cabinet in the PRS lineup, next to the HDRX 4x12.
PRS Guitars continues its schedule of launching new products each month in 2025. Stay tuned to see new gear and 40 th Anniversary limited-edition guitars throughout the year. For all of the latest news, click www.prsguitars.com/40 and follow @prsguitars on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, X, and YouTube.
