![Rig Rundown: Exodus' Gary Holt [2022]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/rig-rundown-exodus-gary-holt-2022.jpg?id=31834194&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
Pioneering thrasher brings hell to the stage with signature ESPs, Silver Jubilees, and a few key tone titillators.
If you’re a devoted follower of the Rig Rundown series, you’ve probably noticed our recent rash of thrash. We’ve featured nearly every corner of the genre—heavyweights Megadeth, torchbearers Anthrax, revivalists Municipal Waste, and, now, pioneers Exodus get their (re)visit. Their four-decade reign and 11 gnashing albums are brimming with sinister, trouncing, wood-splitting riffs and vividly vicious narratives. And the blade of this chainsaw collective is its longest-tenured member, fretboard flyer Gary Holt, whose last Rig Rundown appearance was in 2015.
During the afternoon of Exodus’ middle slot for the ongoing The Bay Strikes Back tour—featuring neighbors Testament and Death Angel—at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, Holt’s tech Steve Brogden invited PG’s Perry Bean onstage to catalog the thrasher’s setup. In this RR, Brogdon details the murderous axes, custom cabs, and more that Holt is packing into the trailer and onto the stage.
Brought to you by D’Addario Nexxus 360 Tuner.
Goldilocks
This custom-shop goldtop edition of Gary Holt’s ESP GH-600 signature might look familiar because it spent a lot of time out with him when he filled in for Jeff Hannemann during Slayer’s last tours. His signature model is based on the company’s Eclipse single-cut body shape. In typical fashion for Holt, it’s loaded with EMG 81R/89R active pickups and a Floyd Rose 1000 Series tremolo. The axe has been upgraded with FU-Tone performance hardware components. Holt calls this one “Goldy.”
The model comes stock with a mahogany body, 3-piece mahogany neck, and a Macassar ebony fretboard with 22 extra-jumbo frets. Holt alternates between two sets of signature strings from Von Frankenstein Monster Gear—Toxic Rocks (.009–.052w) and Collateral Damage (.009–.060w)—that are a collaboration with Rig Rundown alumnus Doyle of the Misfits.
Purple Reign
Here’s another custom-shop ESP GH-600 signature that has the same specs as Goldy, but is a remarkable single-cut salute to Prince.
Officer Holt, Reporting to Rock
This custom-shop creation from ESP gives Gary Holt the authority to shred your face off. Same specs as before, but this one features a real badge from the police force of Holtville, California. Shotgun shell casings make up the volume and tone knobs.
Bullets on the Board
An impressive build already, the craftsmanship was elevated when the Japanese custom-shop luthiers took the ends of spent shell casings from Gary’s collection and put them into the fretboard, starting at .50 caliber and ranging down .22. Gary mentioned off camera that it was a struggle to get the bullets into Japan—which has strict gun control laws—for the ESP crew to build into his custom order.
Camaraderie with Kirk
To honor his longtime friendship with former Exodus bandmate and fellow ESP endorsee Kirk Hammett, Holt purchased this ESP LTD Kirk Hammett EKH-3 Spider 30th Anniversary single-cut.
Awesome Arrow
This ESP custom-shop endeavor centers around their Arrow model and has all the same specs as the previous guitars. It also has the FU-Tone hardware upgrades, like the others, but features the first FU-Tone add-ons finished in white.
Auctioning an Eclipse
At every show, Gary rips on one of his ESP LTD Gary Holt GH-600 for a few songs and sells it to a lucky fan who gets an all-access reception, including a backstage hang, a peek at soundcheck, and plenty of photo ops with the thrash legend. If you were at the Nashville show and bought a GH-600 from Gary, this is probably your guitar.
Jubilee Jamboree
Back in 2015, Holt was using a Kemper Profiler that revolved around a replication of his beloved 1980s JCM800 that featured a Langer mod. He’s back plugging into tubes and has landed on the famed Marshall 2555X Silver Jubilee. One is his main and the other a backup.
Creepy Crawly Cabs
Gary’s duo of Silver Jubilee 2555X heads hit a fearsome foursome of signature light-up 4x12s specially built by Arachnid Cabinets out of Sacramento, California. These cabs all rock Celestion Vintage 30s, are constructed with dovetail joints, and use marine-grade Baltic birch. They are illuminated with LEDs and each has a Holt-designed sigil on its center. The cabs are color coordinated with the axes Gary plays on each song.
Racked For Rock
Holt trusts most of his switching to his tech, Steve Brogdon, who triggers everything with a rack-mounted Voodoo Lab GCX Guitar Audio Switcher that coordinates with a Voodoo Lab Ground Control MIDI Switcher. The pedals in the travel case include a Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive, Pro Tone Pedals Gary Holt Mid Boost, Maxon OD-9, MXR Bass Octave Deluxe, Maxon FL-9 Flanger, TC Electronic Corona Chorus, Boss NS-2 Noise Suppressor, and a Darta Effects Bonded by Delay. A BBE Supa-Charger Power Supply gives juice to the stomps.
Gary’s Goodies
While Brogdon makes the changes for Holts’ rack-living pedals, Holt still stomps these boxes himself. His proper pedalboard is home to a Does It Doom Doomsaw, Mooer Tender Octaver, Mooer Green Mile, and a Dunlop JC95SE Jerry Cantrell Special Edition Crybaby Wah. A Shure GLXD16 Digital Wireless Guitar Pedal System lets him rock untethered.
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Effects Bakery MECHA-PAN BAKERY Series MECHA-BAGEL OVERDRIVE
Konnichiwa, guitar lovers! 🎸✨
Are you ready to add some sweetness to your pedalboard? Let’s dive into the adorable world of the Effects Bakery Mecha-Pan Overdrive, part of the super kawaii Mecha-Pan Bakery Series!
🍩 Sweet Treats for Your Ears! 🍩
The Mecha-Pan Overdrive is like a delicious bagel for your guitar tone, but it’s been upgraded to a new level of cuteness and functionality!
Effects Bakery has taken their popular Bagel OverDrive and given it a magical makeover. Imagine your favorite overdrive sound but with more elegance and warmth – it’s like hugging a fluffy cat while playing your guitar!
Or you can check out the Reverend Billy Corgan Drop Z. At a glance, the Drop Z may not look like much of a cure for the 6-string doldrums. But pick it up and you’ll feel the difference fast. The Drop Z is built around a 26 1/4" scale and a 24-fret neck that makes this Reverend feel like a very different instrument. Designed and optimized for use with drop tunings, it opens the doors to whole palace ballrooms full of new musical possibilities.
Beastly Blue and Easy To Use
If the feel of the Drop Z alone doesn’t dislodge you from a guitar rut, there’s a good chance that its pretty profile would compel you to pick it up and play. It’s a handsome instrument. The conservatively chambered alder body (it’s routed at the bass and treble horns) is clad in a very pretty twilight-blue-meets-ocean-turquoise glossy finish, which is complimented perfectly by the brushed-aluminum pickguard. The chambered body definitely helps with the weight; the Drop Z is a little less than eight pounds. It also helps the guitar feel very balanced. There’s not a hint of neck dive. And if it weren’t for the discernibly longer stretch you make to reach the first fret, it would feel as familiar and comfortable as a nice Stratocaster.
The medium-oval neck, which is satin-finished maple with a maple fretboard, is a pleasure. It feels substantial and fast, and getting around its expanse is facilitated by a perfect setup. The 12" fretboard radius and jumbo frets also add to the Drop Z’s easy-breezy feel. Big bends require little more effort than they would on a normal scale, and I never felt the urge to squeeze a note to compensate for the weird intonation issues big frets and long scales can cause. From first fret to 24th, playing the Drop Z is an easy glide.
The Drop-Z pickups are a modified version of the Railhammer Billy Corgan Z-One pickups in his other Billy Corgan signature Reverends. The pickups’ impedance is rated at 14.5 ohms, which suggests a pretty hot unit. In this incarnation, the Z-One pickups are tuned for even more output and smoother treble. That’s a good idea for a pickup designed with heavy musical settings in mind.
Fangs on Cue, but Mellon Collie, Too
Though the Drop Z is easy to play in a getting-around-the-fretboard sense, plugging and turning up may take adjustments in approach and attitude. As the pickups’ impedance rating suggests, the Railhammer Z-Ones have a lot of hop, and as the expansive lengths of string resonate impressively, you’ll hear a lot of very present treble overtones. I spent most of my time with the instrument in a C# modal tuning or C–G–D–G–B–B, and in each tuning the Drop Z rumbled impressively (particularly through a late-’60s Fender Bassman head, which is a beautiful, burly match for this instrument). But unless I wanted to linger among the peaky resonances of the highest two strings (and I often did), I needed to attenuate both tone controls.
The good thing is that each of these controls has a very nice range. And while the guitar can start to feel stripped of its essence with too much tone or volume attenuation, there is wiggle room for softening transients and taming unwanted overtone blooms. These pronounced peaks are easy to hear in both the neck and bridge pickup, depending on your approach. I worked a lot more with open strings and drones than Billy Corgan might on songs like “Zero,” which the guitar was tailored for. But for those keen to explore the mellower side of the Drop Z’s personality, the combined pickup setting is a magic bullet. It’s airy, open, and makes it easy and rewarding to navigate slow-moving chord changes with strong bass foundations. It’s also fun to take advantage of the fretboard’s whole expanse in this setting—darting and dashing from toppy treble-note clusters to growling bass harmony notes—and enjoying the detail and string-to-string balance. By the way, the Drop Z, as you might guess, sounds positively massive with distortion, though you should be careful to choose your gain device carefully. The pickup’s midrange emphasis will make a similarly mid-heavy distortion sound harsh. A Sovtek-style Big Muff, with its scooped midrange and round low-end resonance, is an ideal fit if you want to get extra large.
The Verdict
The Korea-made Drop Z is a beautifully crafted instrument and a silky, easy, balanced player that will make you forget, in moments, about the expansive fretboard and extra scale length. It feels completely natural and effortless. How you relate to the tones here will depend on your musical mission. The hot pickups make it a perfect fit for outsized, aggressive tones. I, for one, would prefer to explore the wealth of overtones this well-constructed instrument generates via less aggressive pickups. But players like me will still find much to love in the combined pickup settings and the pickups’ impressive capacity for detail, which, depending on the tuning you use, can highlight harmonic interplay between notes and chords that would be much less prominent and less fun to explore in a more conventional guitar.
Reverend Billy Corgan Drop Z Signature Electric Guitar - Pearl White
Loopers can be complex enough to make beginners cry. They are fun if you have time to venture for whole weeks down a rabbit hole. But a looper that bridges the functionality and ease-of-use gap between the simplest and most maniacal ones can be a sweet spot for newbies and seasoned performers both. The JamMan Solo HD lives squarely in that zone. It also offers super-high sound quality and storage options, and capacity that would fit the needs of most pros—all in a stomp just millimeters larger than a Boss pedal.
Fast Out of the Blocks
Assuming you’ve used some kind of rudimentary looper before, there’s pretty decent odds you’ll sort out the basic functionality of this one with a couple of exploratory clicks of the footswitch. That’s unless you’ve failed to turn down the rhythm-level knob, in which case you’ll be scrambling for the quick start guide to figure out why there is a drum machine blaring from your amp. The Solo HD comes loaded with rhythm tracks that are actually really fun to use and invaluable for practice. In the course of casually exploring these, I found them engaging and vibey enough to be lured into crafting expansive dub reggae jams, thrashing punk riffs, and lo-fi cumbias. Removing these tracks from a given loop is just a matter of turning the rhythm volume to zero. You can also create your own guide rhythms with various percussion sounds.
Backing tracks aside, creating loops on the Solo HD involves a common single-click-to-record, double-click-to-stop footswitch sequence. Recording an overdub takes another single click, and you hold the footswitch down to erase a loop. Storing a loop requires a simple press-and-hold of the store switch. The sizable latching footswitch, which looks and feels quite like those on Boss pedals, is forgiving and accurate. This has always been a strength of JamMan loopers, and though I’m not completely certain why, it means I screw up the timing of my loops a lot less.
Many players will be satisfied with how easy this functionality is and explore little more of the Solo HD’s capabilities. And why not? The storage capacity—up to 35 minutes of loops and 10 minutes for individual loops—is enough that you can craft a minor prog-rock suite from these humble beginnings. Depending on how economical your loops are, you can use all or most of the 200 available memory locations built into the Solo HD. But you can also add another 200 with an SD/SDHC card.Deeper into Dubs
Loopers have always been more than performance and practice tools for me. I have old multitrack demos that still live in the memory banks of my oldest loopers. And just as with any demos, the sounds you create with the Solo HD may be tough to top or duplicate, which can mean a loop becomes the foundation of a whole recorded song. The Solo HD’s tempo and reverse features, which can completely mutate a loop, make this situation even more likely. The tempo function raises or lowers the BPM without changing the pitch of the loop. As a practice tool, this is invaluable for learning a solo at a slower clip. But drastically altered tempos can also help create entirely new moods for a musical passage without altering a favorite key to sing or play in. Some of these alterations reveal riffs and hooks within riffs and hooks, from which I would happily build a whole finished work. The reverse function is similarly inspiring and a source of unusual textures that can be the foundation for a more complex piece.
HD, of course, stands for high definition. And the Solo HD’s capacity for accurate, dense, and detail-rich stacks of loops means you can build complex musical weaves highlighting the interaction between overtones or timbre differences among other effects in your chain. I can’t remember the last time I felt like a looper’s audio resolution was really lacking. But the improved quality here lends itself to using the Solo HD as a song-arranging tool—and, again, as a recording asset, if you want a looped idea to form the backbone of a recording.
The Verdict
With a looper, smooth workflow is everything. And though it takes practice and some concentration in the early going to extract the most from the Solo HD’s substantial feature set, it is, ultimately, a very intuitive instrument that will not just smooth the use of loops in performance, but extend and enhance its ability as a right-brain-oriented driver of composition and creation.
The Warm Bender dishes these sounds with ease and savage aplomb. Outwardly, it honors the original MkII—a good way to go given that the original Sola Sound unit is one the most stylish effects ever built. But the 3-transistor NOS 75 MkII is only one of the Warm Bender’s personalities. You can also switch to a 2-transistor NOS 76 circuit, aka the Tone Bender MkI. There’s also a silicon 3-transistor Tone Bender circuit, a twist explored by several modern boutique builders. Each of these three voices can be altered further by the crown-mounted sag switch, which starves the circuit of voltage, reducing power from 9 to 6 volts. From these three circuits, the Warm Bender conjures voices that are smooth, responsive, ragged, mean, mangled, clear, and positively fried.
The Compact Wedge Edge
Warm Audio, quite wisely, did not put the Warm Bender in an authentically, full-size Tone Bender enclosure, which would gobble a lot of floor space. But this smaller, approximately 2/3-scale version, complete with a Hammerite finish, looks nearly as hip. It’s sturdy, too. The footswitch and jacks are affixed directly to the substantial enclosure entirely apart from the independently mounted through-hole circuit board, which, for containing three circuits rather than one, is larger and more densely populated than the matchbox-sized circuit boards in a ’60s Tone Bender. Despite the more cramped quarters, there’s still room for a 9V battery if you choose to run it that way. Topside, there’s not much to the Warm Bender. There’s a chicken-head knob for output volume, another for gain, and a third that switches between the NOS 76, NOS 75, and silicon modes. Even the most boneheaded punk could figure this thing out.
A Fuzz Epic in Three Parts
Most Warm Bender customers will find their way to the pedal via MkII lust. If you arrive here by that route you won’t be disappointed. The Warm Bender’s NOS 75 setting delivers all the glam-y, proto-metal, heavy filth you could ask for. It sounded every bit as satisfying as my own favorite MkII clone save for a hint of extra compression that falls well within the bounds of normal vintage fuzz variation. My guess is that when you’re ripping through “Dazed and Confused” you won’t give a hoot.
“There’s more color and air in the NOS 76 mode.”
If the NOS 75 circuit suffers by comparison to anything, it’s the 2-transistor friend next door, the NOS 76. The lower-gain NOS 76 mode is, to my ears, the most appealing of the three. It’s the most dynamic in terms of touch response and guitar volume attenuation and delivers the clearest clean tones when you use either technique. There’s more color and air in the NOS 76 mode, too. Paired with a neck-position single-coil, it’s an excellent alternative for Hendrix and Eddie Hazel low-gain mellow fuzz that’s more like dirty overdrive. The silicon mode, meanwhile, lives on the modern borderlands of the ’60s-fuzz spectrum. It’s super-aggressive and focused, which can be really useful depending on the setting, but lo-fi, spitty, and weird when starved of voltage via the sag switch. It’s deviant-sounding stuff, but extends the Warm Bender’s performance envelope in useful ways, particularly if you hunt for unique fuzz tones in the studio.
There’s a widely accepted bit of wisdom that says most germanium fuzzes sound lousy unless you turn up everything all the way and use your guitar controls to tailor the tone. This is partly true, especially with a Fuzz Face. But in general, I respectfully disagree and present the Warm Bender as exhibit A in this defense. The gain and volume controls both have considerable range and fascinating shades of fuzz within that can still rise above the din of a raging band.
The Verdict
Some potential customers might balk at the notion of a $199 vintage-style fuzz made in China—no matter how cool it looks. But the Warm Bender looks and feels well made. The sound and tactile sensations in the three circuits are truly different enough to be three individual effects, and $199 for three fuzz pedals is a sweet deal—particularly when consolidated in a stompbox that looks this cool. There is a lot of variation in old Tone Benders, and how these takes on the circuits compare to your idea of true vintage Tone Bender sound will be subjective. But I heard the essence of both the MkI and MkII here very clearly and would have no qualms about using the Warm Bender in a session that called for an extra-authentic mid-’60s fuzz texture.
