The hard-rocking Aussie butt-kicker goes minimalist for his band’s current tour: a Line 6 HX Stomp, three guitars, and a modest pedalboard. And yes, he’s slowly working toward a new album, too.
When we walked into Nashville’s Eastside Bowl for this Rig Rundown with Wolfmother’s alpha canine, Andrew Stockdale, it sounded like he was playing his SG through a Marshall stack at head-ripping volume. Nope! Stockdale was blasting skulls apart with a Line 6 HX stomp doing the heavy tonal lifting. Surprise!
It's part of his strategy for traveling lite in support of Rock Out, the Australian outfit’s 2021 album, on a make-up tour of the States that was preempted by the Covid shutdown. For Stockdale, the rest of his formula for playing his blood-and-guys rock 'n' roll live includes an SG, a White Falcon, and a vintage Supro, and … no traditional amps.
“I used to have, like, three Voxes–cabs and everything up there. And we had a trailer behind the bus and two guys to carry it, who'd have a beer and high-five each other after they loaded out,” Stockdale recounts. “Now they‘re gone, all the amps, and them gone.”
Here’s a close-up look at what’s onstage with Stockdale right now, as he uses minimalist gear to create maximum sound!
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The Red Dog
This ’61 Gibson SG reissue with 61T humbuckers is a loaner. Stockdale flew from Australia without guitars—part of his smart-travel initiative. He strings his electrics with .010 to .042 sets from Ernie Ball. He also uses EB’s .88 mm picks. His SG’s control dials? They’re all the way up, my friends! At home, or in Europe on tour, he plays an ’80s black SG and an Epiphone Explorer
Supro, Man
This vintage mother-of-toilet-seat Supro was a gift from Seasick Steve—who Stockdale went surfing with … in England. (Right?) Even more odd is Stockdale’s testimony that Steve is an excellent surfer. This 1-pickup model appears to be a late-’50s Belmont, replete with the original pickup. If you haven’t played a guitar with one of the big-footprint Supro pickups, you're missing a truly special experience. Just ask Ry Cooder.
Big Bird
Stockdale uses this Gretsch White Falcon on the song “Apple Tree.” It had a neck break near the body joint on a flight in Australia, and Stockdale glued it up himself, letting it set in a clamp. This model was introduced in 1954, but it sure as hell does more than twang.
Board to Be Wild
Stockdale moved from traditional amps to Line 6 a few years ago, and blends in with his own pedals, to “give it more character.” His board’s layout is a Snark floor tuner, an EHX Micro Synth (a Wolfmother staple), an Xotic AC Booster, an EHX Micro POG, a Dunlop Cry Baby 535Q Multi-Wah, a Boss TR-2 tremolo, a CIOKS DC5 power supply, and Shure GLXDC+ wireless. Unfortunately, he left the wireless transmitter in a guitar case at home for this tour. Whoops!
Meet Siccardi Number 28: a 5-ply, double-cut solidbody tribute to Paul Bigsby’s “Hezzy Hall” guitar.
Reader: Mark Huss
Hometown: Coatesville, PA
Guitar: Siccardi Number 28
May we all have friends like Ed Siccardi—along with a rare stash of tonewoods and inspiration to pay tribute to a legendary luthier.
I have too many guitars (like at least some of you I’m sure), but my current No. 1 is a custom guitar made for me by my friend Ed Siccardi. Ed is an interesting and talented fellow, a retired mechanical engineer who has amazing wood and metal shops in his basement. He also has an impressive collection of tonewoods, including rarities like African mahogany and some beautiful book-matched sets. He likes to build acoustic guitars (and has built 26 of them so far), but decided he wanted to make me an electric. The fruit of this collaboration was his Number 27, a Paul Bigsby tribute with a single-cut body—looking very much like what Bigsby made for Merle Travis. Note that Bigsby created this single-cut body and “Fender-style” headstock way before Gibson or Fender had adopted these shapes. This was a really nice guitar, but had some minor playing issues, so he made me another: Number 28.
Number 28 is another Paul Bigsby tribute, but is a double cutaway a la the Bigsby “Hezzy Hall” guitar. This guitar has a 5-ply solid body made of two layers of figured maple, cherry, swamp ash, and another layer of cherry. The wood is too pretty to cover up with a pickguard. The tailpiece is African ebony with abalone inlays and the rock-maple neck has a 2-way truss rod and extends into the body up to the bridge. It has a 14" radius and a zero fret. Therefore, there is no nut per se, just a brass string spacer. I really like zero frets since they seem to help with the lower-position intonation on the 3rd string. The fretboard is African ebony with abalone inlays and StewMac #148 frets. The peghead is overlaid front and back with African ebony and has Graph Tech RATIO tuners. The guitar has a 25" scale length and 1.47" nut spacing. There are two genuine ivory detail inlays: One each on the back of the peghead and at the base of the neck. The ivory was reclaimed from old piano keys.
This is Number 27, 28’s older sibling and a single-cut Bigsby homage. It’s playing issues led to the creation of its predecessor.
I installed the electronics using my old favorite Seymour Duncan pairing of a JB and Jazz humbuckers. The pickup selector is a standard 3-way, and all three 500k rotary controls have push-pull switches. There are two volume controls, and their switches select series or parallel wiring for their respective pickup coils. The switch on the shared tone control connects the bridge pickup directly to the output jack with no controls attached. This configuration allows for a surprisingly wide variety of sounds. As an experiment, I originally put the bridge volume control nearest the bridge for “pinky” adjustment, but in practice I don’t use it much, so I may just switch it back to a more traditional arrangement to match my other guitars.
Oni’s guitar duo cover 16 strings between them with a pair of Neural Quad Cortexes and some choice patches.
Jared Dines had been writing for Canadian metalcore outfit Oni—fronted by Jake Oni—for a few years before Jake invited Dines to join him onstage. Dines had just two days to learn the entire set before rehearsals began. But Eric Palmer can one-up him. He was teching for the band when Jake conscripted him—with just one day to pick up the set before a performance. Palmer rose to the occasion, and he and Dines have formed Oni’s two-guitar tornado for the past year.
Ahead of their gig at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl in December, Dines and Palmer walked PG’s Chris Kies through their spartan, one-guitar rigs—no backups, no mercy.
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Eric Palmer is used to playing 7-string axes, so this limited-run 8-string Jackson Concept Series MDK8 HT8 MS Modern Dinky didn’t take long to get used to. The Korea-made flamethrower has a basswood body, a 3-piece maple/wenge/mapleneck, and a compound radius ebony fretboard (12" to 16"). It also boasts a dual scale length—25.5" to 27.5"—and is loaded with Fishman Fluence Modern pickups, which feature two voicings selected by a push-pull switch. Palmer had this one upgraded to a 5-way switch to access split-coil sounds, and he got rid of the tone knob. “All gas, no brakes,” as PG’s Perry Bean would say.
Petrucci Power
Jared Dines also needed an 8-string for Oni, so Ernie Ball sent him this Music Man Majesty 8, a John Petrucci signature model. It’s got Fishman’s Powerbridge piezo system, which sees action on the song “Control.” Dines attached his own string clamp behind the nut to halt noise.
Double Quads
Dines and Palmer both rely on Neural DSP Quad Cortexes on this Oni tour. Their units are mounted on Temple Audio pedalboards, and both guitarists use the Architecture: Gojira X patch for their heavy sounds, and a Roland Jazz Chorus sound for cleans. Both Dines and Palmer employ a MIDI switching system that they pulled from Aaron Marshall’s Rig Rundown, and run their signals from direct to front of house.
The author found this one-of-a-kind tremolo/vibrato/sound-altering modulation box at Quattro Music Company in Thomas, West Virginia.
Producer and roots-guitar veteran Michael Dinallo pens his unabashed love letter to tremolo, with fond recollections of vintage Fender and Gibson amps, Dunlop’s TS-1, and a one-of-a-kind mystery modulator.
Tremolo is my favorite effect to modulate a guitar’s sound (and I love vibrato, too). I love it so much that it’s part of the moniker of the production team I had with the late Ducky Carlisle—the Tremolo Twins—as well as our Trem-Tone Records label. You might recognize Ducky from his many engineering credits, including Buddy Guy, or our work together on albums like Stax veteran Eddie Floyd’s heralded Eddie Loves You So, from 2008.
For me, the golden period of tremolo was the early 1960s. The brown-panel Fender amps of that period have astounding harmonic tremolo, as do the Gibson amps from that period. I have a 1963 Gibson GA-5T Skylark that has a tremendous tremolo circuit. I used that amp for all the guitar parts I cut on my new album, The Night’s Last Dance,as well as all the records I’ve worked on over the last four years, either as producer or player. My favorite, though, is the 1963 2x10 Fender Super—also a brown-panel amp. It can be so soupy that, if multi-tracked, it can almost induce seasickness.
But there are so many choices and classic sounds. The Magnatone and Lonnie Mack jump to mind, or the use of a Leslie cabinet for guitar, which is another sound I love as both player and producer. Two of the most distinct and famous uses of tremolo, to my ears, are Link Wray’s “Rumble” and Reggie Young’s arpeggiating opening chord on “The Dark End of the Street” by James Carr. There is a shimmery quality to big chords drenched in a slow tremolo, especially if the part is doubled. From a production standpoint, it adds depth to a track, even if it’s mixed way in the back.
Let’s talk about doubling a tremolo part. Once in a while you can get lucky and have the amp cycle the wave at just the right time as you hit the record button. But most often not. Usually this is not a big deal and adds to the depth of the bed part being recorded. Sometimes, though, it has to be a tight double. That’s when I’ve spent much time guessing at the cycling and trying to hit it just right. It’s a blast when you do.
One of my favorite experiments with tremolo was setting up two amps—a brown-panel Fender Vibroverb and a brown-panel Fender Concert—in a V-shape. The amps were set to the same volume and approximately the same tone settings. Using a stereo mic in the middle of the V, we recorded it to one track. We had to keep tweaking the individual tremolo settings in an effort to not have them cancel each other out. But what a huge, lush sound!
“There is a shimmery quality to big chords drenched in slow tremolo, especially if the part is doubled.”
There are many tremolo pedals and recording plugins these days, and they’re all good, but nothing quite captures the sound of an internal tremolo circuit. You can avoid chasing their cycles, too, if a pedal has a tap-tempo function. But what fun is that?
The one tremolo pedal, for me, that comes the closest to an in-amp circuit is the now-vintage Dunlop TS-1. Thirty years ago, I needed a tremolo pedal for my road amp—at the time, a 1994 Fender tweed Blues DeVille. I found Dunlop’s big, honking purple metal box with “tremolo” written across the front in wavy yellow letters. You can get wide, sweeping tremolo or set it to a hard, choppy setting where the volume completely disappears. I’ve used both applications effectively. The hard trem is great for the last chord of a song, especially live, hitting like a boxer sparring with a weighted, hanging bag—especially if you’re diving into a psychedelic ending. And, of course, mixing in other modulation effects, such as flanging or phasing, adds another twist.
I found the most unique tremolo/vibrato/sound-altering modulation box I have at Quattro Music Company in Thomas, West Virginia. It’s not a pedal per se; it’s circuitry housed in a cigar box with so many knobs and switches and variations that I still have not exhausted all the possibilities. It’s a one-off. I was told it was the only tremolo box the inventor made. Combining it with a front-end boost and diming an amp produces otherworldly sounds. I’ve used it on a couple of recordings: “Never, No More (A Reckoning)” by Keith Sykes and me, and “Time Machine” by the Dinallos (where we were joined by Nashville’s famed singing siblings, the McCrary Sisters). With the latter, it’s most obvious as a tremolo device, and on the former it’s as a sound-altering gizmo that enhances the guitar leads.
Of all the toys in the arsenal that guitarists have, I’ve gotta say, long live tremolo!
In our second installment with Santa Cruz Guitar Company founder Richard Hoover, the master luthier takes PG's John Bohlinger through the detailed (and scientific) process of analyzing, shifting and "tuning" the guitar's top before repeating the process when the back and sides are joined, and once again when introducing the neck to the instrument build while focusing on keeping everything harmoniously synergized and "tuned."