James Iha and Matt McJunkins cover their 21st-century setups while lead guitarist Billy Howerdel shows off the range of sounds he needs to pull off the band’s expressive discography.
Before APC's gig at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena, bassist Matt McJunkins (above right) and guitarists James Iha and Billy Howerdel spend some time with PG's Chris Kies cataloging the guitars, basses, amps, and digital gear they require to pull off material from all three of their studio albums and beyond.
As part of the Smashing Pumpkins from the start, James Iha originally was a Fender guy in the Gish-era of the band, but slowly made his way to humbuckers and Gibsons. Here is a 1984 Gibson Les Paul Custom he’s had since the mid-’90s. The only thing he’s done to the guitar was swap in Tom Anderson H3 (bridge) and H1 (neck) humbuckers to match the sound Billy achieved on APC’s recordings. Following suit even further, Iha tunes this LP to C# and uses a custom set of Ernie Ball Slinkys (.056–.044–.032–.020P–.017–.012) that Billy came up with. He prefers to play with Jim Dunlop Tortex .73 mm picks.
This ’80s silverburst Gibson Les Paul has a capo on the first fret and gets put to work for the song “Passive” off of Emotive.
Here is a Yamaha Revstar that uses a capo on the second fret for the cover of Nick Lowe’s “(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.”
Eschewing any sort of tube amp, Iha relies on the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II for all his amp simulations and various effects. He goes with in-ear monitors and has monitors or speaker cabs onstage. For his main rhythm setting, he selects a Friedman-style preset.
Back for his second Rig Rundown is bassist Matt McJunkins (check out our Eagles of Death Metal episode where Matt shows off some different gear.) who is still favoring Fender P basses. During his time in EODM, he rolled with a 2010 Fender American Deluxe Precision bass, but he recent upgraded to a new go-to—a 2017 Fender American Elite P. He rocks Ernie Ball Power Slinkys .055–.110 and Jim Dunlop Tortex .88 mm picks.
The core of McJunkins’ APC tone starts with the Mesa/Boogie 400+ that goes into the “Fridge”—an Ampeg 8x10 cab.
For additional tube-tone tweaking, McJunkins incorporates a Demeter Tube Bass Pre-Amplifier and all of his effects patches are coming from the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II. Onstage, he controls everything with a Voodoo Lab Ground Control.
This is Billy Howerdel’s main squeeze—a 1960 Gibson Les Paul Classic Reissue that is actually two guitars he put together from his days as Trent Reznor’s tech for Nine Inch Nails. The guitar has been upgraded with Tom Anderson H3 (bridge) and H1 (neck) humbuckers, is tuned to C#, and has a custom set of Ernie Ball Slinkys (.056–.044–.032–.020P–.017–.012). All of his guitars, including this beast, has an added cap so when he rolls off the volume he doesn’t lose any of the guitar’s tone. In 2013, Billy spoke with PG about this special guitar, so we’ll let him take it away: “I was the guitar tech on a Nine Inch Nails tour and one of the guitars that lasted the longest—a cinnaburst 1960 reissue Les Paul—is my main guitar now. It got broken all of the time—all the guitars did. They had headstocks off, necks off, just shattered. I fixed this one so many times, and then one day it got thrown into the crowd and somebody in the audience ripped the headstock off. It was sitting headless for a while. I had trunks and trunks of guitars, probably 50 or 60 of them that I traveled with and tried to fix to get ready for a show today, tomorrow, two weeks from now. A similar cinnaburst guitar got broken, and I kept that headstock and tried to marry the two. It got put back on, but at sort of the wrong angle—because, of course, the wood type didn’t match. It’s a little less angled than normal, but it’s the best-sounding and best-playing guitar I’ve ever used. It was a happy accident. I talked with Gibson several years ago about doing a signature model with the same specs. Even if it’s not for mass production, I just want some duplicates in case something ever happens to it.”
Here you can see the break of the original headstock and how the repaired headstock has a minimal break angle.
His second favorite guitar from the NIN days is this Les Paul Studio he prefers for slide work on “Blue” and half of “Outsider.” It also has been outfitted with Tom Anderson H3 (bridge) and H1 (neck) humbuckers and uses a custom tuning: B#-F#-B-B-B-B. He uses the Jim Dunlop 234 glass slide and always jams with Tortex 1.0 mm picks.
Look at the Studio’s gruesome neck joint!
Billy’s fundamental sound starts with this Dave Friedman-modded 1978 100-watt Marshall Super Lead. Friedman reworked the preamp section to sound and react similarly to a 60-watt Naylor head that Billy loved. To help reduce unwanted noises and annoying buzzing, Billy started using Custom Audio Electronics isolation transformers.
The backside of Billy’s coveted ’78.
Depending on what the song needs, how the rooms sounds, and what is working on any given day, Billy will kick on either one of these Gibson GA-15RV 1x12 Goldtone combos that he also uses for his other band, Ashes Divide. Currently, the one on the bottom is the favored combo, which was actually uses parts and was built in the U.K. whereas the top combo was constructed with American components and assembled in the U.S.
To accomplish all the soundscapes A Perfect Circle implements (and reduces headaches and anxiety), Howerdel leans on a Fractal Audio Axe-Fx II. Thankfully, tech Steven Alexander broke down the complicated signal path… keep up!
Guitar > Whirlwind Selector A/B box > Radial Engineering JDI (as a splitter to record a dry signal) > Axe-FX II rear input 1 (we found the rear to have a better signal for Billy’s rig than the front)
Axe-FX II output 1 > CAE splitter input 1
Axe-FX II output 2 > RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo input (non-buffered)
Axe-FX II input 2 < CAE splitter send 1
CAE output 2 > Palmer “The Junction” guitar DI box (for FOH and recording)
CAE Send 2 > DigiTech GSP2101 input
DigiTech GSP2101 output > CAE splitter input 2
Billy Howerdel custom amp send > RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo return 1
Billy Howerdel custom amp return < CAE splitter output 1
Billy Howerdel custom amp input < CAE ISO transformer < RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo send 1
RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo send 2 > CAE ISO transformer > Gibson combo input
Gibson combo (modded) output > RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo return 2
RJM Music Mini Effects Gizmo (click stop) output > CAE splitter input
Out front, Howerdel takes the sonic reins thanks to a pair of Mission Engineering SP1-RJM expression pedals and a RJM Music Mastermind GT controller.
And because he loves to have stage volume and feel the air, everything goes through this Marshall AV 4x12 cabinet loaded with G12 Vintage speakers.
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Fender’s American Vintage II Series
For these new recreations, Fender focuses on the little things that make original golden-era Fenders objects of obsession.
If there’s one thing players love more than new guitars, it’s old guitars—the unique feel, the design idiosyncrasies, the quirks in finish that all came from the pre-CNC era of instrument manufacturing. These characteristics become the stuff of legend, passed on through the years via rumors and anecdotes in shops, forums, and community networks.
It’s a little difficult to separate fact from fiction given these guitars aren’t easy to get your hands on. Fender Telecasters manufactured in the 1950s and 1960s sell for upwards of $20,000. But old is about to become new again. Fender’s American Vintage II series features 12 year-specific electric guitar and bass models from over two decades, spanning 1951 to 1977, that replicate most specs on their original counterparts, but are produced with modern technologies that ensure uniform build and feel.
Chronologically, the series begins and ends, fittingly, with the Telecaster—starting with the butterscotch blonde, blackguard 1951 Telecaster (built with an ash body, one-piece U-shaped maple neck, and 7.25" radius fretboard) and ending with the 1977 Telecaster Custom, which features a C-shaped neck, a CuNiFe magnet-based Wide Range humbucker in the neck position, and a single-coil at the bridge. The rest of the series spans the highlights of Fender’s repertoire: the 1954 Precision Bass, 1957 Stratocaster in ash or alder, 1960 Precision Bass, 1961 Stratocaster, 1963 Telecaster, 1966 Jazz Bass, 1966 Jazzmaster, 1972 Tele Thinline, 1973 Strat, and 1975 Telecaster Deluxe. The 1951 Telecaster, 1957 Strat, 1961 Strat, and 1966 Jazz Bass will also be offered as left-handed models. Street prices run from $2,099 to $2,399.
Fender '72 American Vintage II Telecaster Thinline Demo | First Look
Spec’d To Please
Every guitar in the series sports the era’s 7.25" radius fretboard, a mostly abandoned spec found on Custom Shop instruments—Mexico-made Vintera models, and Fender’s Artist Series guitars like the Jimmy Page, Jason Isbell, and Albert Hammond Jr. models. Most modern Fenders feature a 9.5" radius, while radii on Gibsons reach upwards of 12". Videos experimenting with the 7.25" radius’ playability pull in tens of thousands of viewers, suggesting both a modern fascination with and a lack of exposure to the radius among some younger and less experienced players.
T.J. Osborne of the Brothers Osborne picks an American Vintage II 1966 Jazzmaster in Dakota red.
Bringing back the polarizing 7.25" radius across the entire series is a gamble, and it’s been nearly five years since Fender released year-specific models. But Fender executive vice president Justin Norvell says that two years ago when the Fender brain trust was conceptualizing the American Vintage II line, they decided the time was right to “go back to the well.”
“We’ve been doing the same [models], the same years, over and over again for 30 years,” says Norvell. “We really wanted to change the line and expand it into some new things that we hadn’t done before and pick some different years that we thought were cool.”
“It takes a lot of doing to go back in time and sort of uncover the secret-sauce recipes.”—Steve Thomas, Fender
To decide on which years to produce, Fender drew from what Norvell calls a “huge cauldron of information” from Custom Shop master builders to collectors with vintage models to former employees from the 1950s and 1960s. The hands-on manufacturing of Fender’s golden years meant guitars produced within the same year would have marked differences in design and finish. So, the team had to procure multiple versions of the same year’s guitar to decide which models to replicate. Norvell says some purists would advocate for the “cleanest, most down-the-middle kind of variant,” while others would push for more esoteric and rare versions. Norvell says that ultimately, the team picked the models that they felt best represented “the throughline of history on our platforms.”
Simple and agile, the Fender Precision Bass—here in its new American Vintage II ’54 incarnation—earned its reputation in the hands of Bill Black, James Jamerson, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and other foundational players.
Norvell says the American Vintage II series was developed, in part, in response to calls to reproduce vintage guitars. Just like with classic cars, he says, people are passionate about year-specific guitars. Plus, American Vintage II fits perfectly with the pandemic-stoked yearning for bygone times. “For some people, these specific years are representative of experiences they had when they were first playing guitar, or a favorite artist that played guitars from these eras,” says Norvell. “These are touchstones for those stories, and that makes them very desirable.”
Cracking Codes
Fender’s electric guitar research and design team, led by director Steve Thomas, dug through the company’s archive of original drawings and designs—dating all the way back to Leo Fender’s original shop in Fullerton, California. They found detailed notes, including some documenting body woods that changed mid-year on certain models. Halfway through 1956, for example, Stratocaster bodies switched from ash to alder. That meant the American Vintage II 1957 Stratocaster needed to be alder, too. That, in turn, meant ensuring enough alder was on hand to fulfill production needs.
Among the series’ Stratocaster recreations is this 1973-style instrument, with an ash body, maple C-profile neck, rosewood fretboard, and the company’s Pure Vintage single-coils.
Thomas and his team discovered another piece of the production puzzle when researching how pickups for that same 1957 Strat were made. “We realized that if we incorporated a little bit more pinch control on the winders, we could more effectively mimic the way pickups would have been hand-wound in the ’50s,” says Thomas. “It takes a lot of doing to go back in time and sort of uncover the secret-sauce recipes.”
Thomas proudly calls the guitars “some of the best instruments we’ve ever made here in the Fender plant,” pointing to the level of detail put into design features, including more delicate lacquer finishes which take longer to cure and dry, and vintage-correct tweed cases for some guitars. New pickups were incorporated in the series, like a reworking of Seth Lover’s famed CuNiFe Wide Range humbuckers, which were discontinued around 1981. Even more minute details, like the width of 12th fret dots and the material used for them, were labored over. Three different models in the line feature clay dot inlays at unique, year-specific spacings.
Ironically, modern CNC manufacturing now makes these design quirks consistent features in mass-produced instruments. While the hand-crafted guitars from the ’50s and ’60s varied a lot from instrument to instrument. “Everything needs to be located perfectly, and it wasn’t necessarily back in the day,” says Norvell. “Now, it can be.”
Don’t Look Back
With this new series so firmly planted in the rose-tinted past, Fender does run the risk of netting only vintage-obsessed players. But Norvell says the team, despite being sticklers for period-correct detail, sought to strike a balance between vintage specs, practicality, and playability. The 1957 Stratocaster, for example, has a 5-way switch rather than the original’s 3-way switch. Norvell also asserts that the “ergonomic” old-school radius feels great when chording. “It might not be [right for] a shred machine, but it feels great and effortless.”
The 1966 Jazz Bass is also represented, shown here in a left-handed version.
Norvell also pushes back on the notion that Fender is playing it safe by indulging nostalgia and leaning on their past successes. He says that while the vintage models are some of the most desirable on the market, the team “purposely did not stick to the safe bets,” citing unusual year models like the 1954 P Bass and the 1973 Stratocaster.
There’s a good reason why anything that hails back to “the good ol’ days” hits home with every generation. We’re constantly plagued by a belief that what came before is better than what we’ve got now. But with the American Vintage II series, Fender makes the case that guitars from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s can very easily be a relevant part of the 2020s.The Red Sea was born out of the vision to provide complex signal routing options available to the live/performing musician, that up until now, are only found in a studio mixing environment.
Introducing the Red Sea, an all-analog signal routing matrix, designed for countless stereo and mono signal path routing options. The Red Sea was born out of the vision to provide complex signal routing options available to the live/performing musician, that up until now, are only found in a studio mixing environment. The Red Sea has accomplished this in a compact, easy-to-use, and cost-effective solution.
Wet | Dry | Wet
The Red Sea gives you the ability to run a FULL Stereo wet dry wet rig using only 2 amps or just 2 signals to the FOH, while also giving you complete control over your Wet & Dry mix! Use the Blend knob to control the overall mix between stereo wet effects and mono dry/drive signals.
Stereo Dual Amps
Run dual amp modelers if full stereo w/ stereo effects. Gone are the traditional ways of one amp in the Left channel and another in the Right channel. Now use the Red Sea to seamlessly blend between two separate amps in true stereo. Think of this as a 2-channel amp where you can blend anywhere between both amps.
Stereo Parallel FX
Red Sea has two independent stereo FX loops. Use each FX loop to run stereo delay's and reverb's in parallel, where each effect does not interact with each other. Huge soundscapes can be achieved with washy reverbs and articulate delay repeats while being able to blend between each FX loops mix level.
The Red Sea can also do the following routing options:
- Wet | Dry utilizing a single amp
- Clean Wet | Dry | Wet (drives DO NOT run into wet effects)
- Wet | Dry | Wet with dual delays (one in the L channel & other in R channel)
- Parallel Dual Amps (run dual amp modelers in FULL stereo)
- Convert a tube amp's serial FX Loop to a parallel FX Loop
- Stereo and Mono analog dry through (avoid latency in digital pedals)
Features:
Stardust V3 was designed to capture the sound and response of 3 distinct amplifier models.
Stardust V3 was designed to capture the sound and response of 3 distinct maxed-out amplifier models. An all-analog signal path with discrete gain stages featuring MOSFET transistors provides juicy overdrive tones with great note separation that clean up to that sparkly sound that we all love and heard in recordings of the past. Set gain and tone and control everything from your guitar. Sparkly clean to crunchy mean are all there.
You can select the amplifier voicing via the onboard toggle switch.
BSM: Voiced after a blackface amp head that was primarily targeted for bass guitar players but got famous for electric guitar classic rock tones.
VLX: Voiced after a chimey 2x10” combo offering the perfect amount of controllable crunch
DLX: Voiced after one of the most popular low wattage 1×12″ combo amps that have found their way in countless recording studios and clubs around the world.
Stardust V3 now comes with top-mounted jacks and soft-click true bypass via a high-quality relay. The pedal has loads of output volume and enhanced headroom provided by 18V DC (boosted internally) so that it can also be used as a preamp going straight into your Power Amp or AudioInterface when combined with a separate speaker simulation device.
Street price: 199 Euro / 199 USD.
For more information, please visit crazytubecircuits.com.
The Sunn O))) Life Pedal circuit has been meticulously tweaked from the original and includes a third footswitch.
Sunn O))) present an enhanced version of the Sunn O))) Life Pedal Octave Distortion + Booster, in collaboration with their comrades at EarthQuaker Devices. The Sunn O))) Life Pedal circuit has been meticulously tweaked from the original to squeeze every last drop of heavy crushing tone available. The octave section has been fine tuned to make it more pronounced without losing the bottom end and we added a third footswitch, utilizing Flexi-Switch Technology, for the octave to allow an additional method of quick and radical tone shaping.
“Working on this new version has been a great continuity of this collaboration which feels so right, and sounds so right,” says Stephen O’Malley. “It’s a really beautiful pedal and it’s also a beautiful art collaboration. I think we made something really interesting that people can enjoy to use for their own music, but also, it makes a lot of sense to release a piece of distortion as a release for our band. We’re really happy that this is a trilogy now.”
The Sunn O))) Life Pedal is designed to represent the core front end chain used in those sessions, to drive the tubes of the band’s multiple vintage Sunn O))) Model T amplifiers (or take your fancy) into overload ecstasy. This is a 100w tube amp full stack’s holy dream, or its apostate nightmare.
Tech Specs:
Sunn O))) Life Pedal is a distortion with a blendable analog octave up and a booster- Features 3 different clipping options: Symmetrical Silicon, Asymmetrical Silicon & LED, and pure OpAmp Drive
- Distortion and booster can be used independently
- Expression and footswitch control over analog octave up
- Octave blend allows total control over how much Octave is mixed into the circuit
- True bypass with silent relay based soft touch switches
- Features EarthQuaker Devices’ proprietary Flexi-Switch® Technology
- Lifetime warranty
- Current Draw: 15 mA
- Octave Distortion: Input impedance: 1 MΩ / Output impedance: <1 kΩ
- Booster: Input Impedance: 500 kΩ / Output Impedance: <1 kΩ
- List Price: $299 USD