Effects Chains

BENJAMIN THOMPSON

TU-2

Crowther Audio Hot Cake (knob)

SubDecay Noise Box

EHX POG

2x MXR Blue Box

Marshall GV-2

Devi Ever Truly Beautiful Disaster

>BOSS DD3 (in TBD loop)

BOSS DD-6

Ibanez Digital Delay

BOSS TU-2

BOSS CS-2

BOSS BD-2

Crowther Audio Hot Cake (switch)

SubDecay Noise Box

EHX Holy Grail

EHX Memory Man

BOSS TU-2

Death By Audio Interstellar Overdriver

Artec ADL2

Barge Concepts BP1

MXR Micro Amp

EHX Holy Grail

BOSS OC-2

Rational Academy Geared Special – the full interview transcript.

TODD

G: Your DBA Interstellar Overdriver is pretty much always on. What do you like about that overdrive in particular?

TD: I like that it isn’t an “end of the world” kind of sound. To me it sounds like a nice tube amp turned up really loud, but more manageable. Often I’d like to turn my amp up to ten but I have to fit into an arrangement where there is three guitars, so I cant be blowing the rest of the band away!

G: The Artec ADL2 has to be one of the best value analogue delays on the market. What sounds do you get out of it?

TD: Like the DBA overdrive this is almost always on as well. Primarily it is on a short time delay with medium feedback just to give what I’m doing more ambience. Then in the more “free for all” parts the oscillation can set off a whole bunch of crazy shit in the effects further down the chain. The reverb and octave can give off some really unpredictable modulation when pushed from a feeding back analogue delay.

G: You have an old BOSS OC-2, the ones with poor tracking. How do you incorporate its craziness?

TD: Again, it’s a two prong deal. In quieter, washy sections – without a lot of interference from other pedals – the OC-2 can sound like a broken organ; which is something we like to do in this band – make guitars not sound like guitars. Ben used to use one of these in the early days of the band – it’s a bit of a secret weapon for us. When you play a chord it actually can’t track properly and bubbles away trying to pick a note to settle on – when you hit it hard it freaks the fuck out and creates a really weird fuzz. I guess one of our favourite things is to find a pedal and mess with it until we find the sound it’s not supposed to make. We just recorded some e-bowed parts using it in a similar way – that was a really worthwhile experiment!

AMELIA

G: How do you find incorporating the Noise Box into songs, without simply blowing everyone else out of the mix?

AG: I do sometimes ... it’s pretty much amazing. Realistically though the Noise Box does not necessarily have to over-blow the mix. Yes, this envelope sensitive harmonic frequency generator throws a touch of chaotic presence into the sound. However, in other songs the pedal can simply be used to create a dirty synthy melody line. The overall volume of the effects is easily controllable and the pedal’s internal noise gate silences and cuts effects when not playing.

G: Sweet Deluxe Memory Man, Amelia. What settings do you use it for primarily?

AG: The Deluxe Memory Man is an amazingly versatile analogue delay. I love the warmth it brings to any sound and use it mainly as a volume boost or coupled with a Holy Grail Reverb to add a touch of lush to otherwise trebly Mustang tones. In noise sections I like to explore overdriving the volume and feedback settings, unlike other delays the Memory man when pushed this way takes on a life of it’s own, and I enjoy exploring these textures.

G: Why do Hot Cakes sell like hot cakes?

AG: It’s hard not to appreciate a pedal that’s simple, versatile, and transparent. Regardless of whether you prefer the original presence switch or tone dial Hot Cake there is not one setting that can’t be utilised when required. Plus it also has a super cute name. ^_^

BENJAMIN

G: How underrated is the Marshall Gov’nor?

BT: I’ve had my Marshall GV-2 Distortion now for what must be close to 9 years and it’s never had any need for service or repair – it’s built like a tank and weighs the same; they’re totally indestructible. The two EQ knobs have separate controls for bass, low, mid and high and I think this is where it really proves itself as an integral part of my sound. I tend to favour guitars like Mustangs that are often quite thin sounding but the EQ options and amount of gain it delivers really fills out into a massive wall of sound. I really need distortion that is flexible enough to deliver dirty low end drone without loosing any of the top end clarity and will feedback melodically.

G: Why two Blue Boxes?

BT: There was a point when every member of the band, including our bass player Matt, was using one of these guys – I’ll admit that was possible overkill but we’ve never never let that bother us before. Why do I use two? I set both of mine to their opposite extremes – one is gained all the way up with an emphasis on fuzz and the other dialled all the way back to the lowest octave it can deliver. I typically (but not always) use these as a means to build sections. For example in a typical “build up” section a logical progression would be Hot Cake and Marshall GV-2 then with the first Blue Box set to fuzz added to really fill out the sound and later still I would add the second Blue Box set to octave, therefore creating an impossibly loud and bottom-heavy sound that almost becomes a drone wash. Elements of drone are as important in our sound as jangly clean ones – as long as the snare and kick drum are constant, melody will still translate – it’s just that sometimes the melody needs to be delivered with a little more intensity.

G: The Truly Beautiful Disaster is all kinds of wild. What do you use it for?

BT: I was actually surprised by just how usable these things are? I had played around with one in 2005 when we were working on our first 7” but had been scared off them when friends of mine in noise bands described them as too unpredictable. So I kept away from them for years but everything I had ever read about them kept me intrigued and one day I bought one on an impulse. When you turn the gate off they become a really aggressive pedal and when you flick it back on you can kind of weird-up your sound a bit by blending them into an existing distortion sound. They’re not so scary … actually the looping function is scary – I run the loop on mine out into a delay and I have to admit that at times it’s even made me look in the mirror and ask myself why I would inflict such a noise on an audience? The trick to this one is moderation and a few trusted settings.

G: Can you explain the bass-splitting/switching you do when you’ve no bass player?

BT: Our Bass player Matt lives in Melbourne these days so he’s not always around when we’re recording or playing. To combat this we’ve developed a separate pedal board that runs a clean feed from our guitars into a bass amp. The board has a line selector that allows me to select which guitar should trigger the bass based on who is playing the root note at any given time – this is when it gets a little tricky and I often wonder if I’m playing songs or performing a weird dance in some kind of ritualistic sequence. The signal then passes through an original Tym Guitars Micro-Amp (made back before he even had a logo) that gives me the option of dirtying up the sound a bit. Following that is an awful old Boss DriveZone – the one good feature to this pedal is its incredible octave range. I ignore all of the presets on this pedal and simply turn the volume to 5 and the octave to 10 which lowers the guitar signals down to that of a bass. It’s a lot to think about – I find my foot instinctively reaching for those pedals even when Matt’s onstage with us.

BAND

G: You use multitudes of cheap guitars in the studio, why?

BT: It’s not so much a predisposition towards “cheap guitars” it’s more a group ethos that sounds and distinction between parts and sounds is an integral part of what we do. All of our instruments have very unique sounds – like different voices. Part of building a song for us is working out what voices it needs to grow. For example my $900 Mustang is great for beautiful open chords whereas my $3500 deluxe Stratocaster is great for unisons and lends itself well to driving pop hooks. Every guitar we own is in a different tuning – they’re like a sporting team with different strengths. When we go into the studio we could simply pick our best three guitars and restring them for each song but the parts would loose their identity. When you’re operating in a group where songs on record can end up with as many as 8 guitar overdubs it’s really important that all of those parts have a unique voice – this is the same mandate we apply to our use of amps and pedals. [Debut LP] A Heart Against Your Own had only seven tracks and we used 26 different guitars. Our new record, Swans, has 10 tracks yet only used 7 different guitars – it’s not a case of over-blowing things for the sake of it, a lot of thought goes into creating unique sounds and what the song needs.

G: What does Lawrence English bring to the recordings?

BT: From day one Lawrence has been onboard as our producer – I know that his involvement has really encouraged us to look past traditional ‘guitar band’ ways of doing things and approach our music both on record and live with ‘fresh ears’ so to speak. In the beginning we would flesh things out in the practice room and then deconstruct them in the studio – as time has gone on we’ve become much more aware of how things will change once we enter the studio and a lot of decisions about new instrumentation have already been made before we get there – for example we know that a guitar line Todd might play live is going to be replaced on record with organ or trombone or whatever. Despite his obvious tag as a sound artist Lawrence really has a great ear for pop as well so on one song he might be running a guitar line through a Kaos Pad and totally deconstructing it and in the next instance he’s coaxing four part harmonies out of us to lift the chorus.

G: How did The Author change from initial recording to the live setting?

BT: Meredith who used to play guitar with us bought that song in as a finger-picked acoustic song with kind of do-wop harmonies – we were playing around with the track listing of the album and thought we needed something more upbeat so I kind of worked out this Joy Division type bass line and increased the tempo drastically to which Lawrence pulled up some obtuse disco beat and we added a bunch of synths – most of the guitar played on that track was actually added by Australian ex-pat Ben Frost (most notable for his Bjork remixes) while he was visiting from Iceland. Im sure most people assume he’s responsible for some of the more far out noise on the record but the truth is he’s playing the ascending pop hook on the electro dance number!

G: Is it difficult (or even desirable) to reproduce the heavily processed sounds of your records live?

BT: We’ve never been interested in trying to reproduce what happens on a record. I could never understand why people would go to a show and want to hear things happen exactly the way the do on record – to me that would be boring. Playing live is such a spur of the moment thing – sometimes your feeling mellow and other times you just want to destroy the whole fucking stage - live shows should reflect that.

G: At what point does awesome ‘guitar freakout’ become uncomfortable ‘sensory overload’?

TD: Hopefully when we want it to. Occasionally you maybe feel uncomfortable, but that makes the ‘nice’ bits nicer right? For some people the uncomfortable bits might be the nice bits? Volume is defiantly an important aspect of our live show but that doesn’t work without some contrast. At our loudest you may miss some vocals live but we’re not trying to out-Sun0))) Sun 0))).

G: Is lugging all that gear around worthwhile? Do you ever dream of using a multi-effects unit?

TD: I look at the lugging of gear as pretty much the only exercise I get, so it’s ok. We’re all gear nerds anyway, so if we cut down our setups we’d probably just be grumpy. If you gave us three multi-fx that sounded exactly like our boards we’d most likely take them, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to do that anytime soon. That said, the new TC Electronic multi could be worth a look, but digital emulations won’t ever replace analogue, non-linear wackiness.

G: Are you a sound engineer’s worst nightmare?

TD: Well, not good engineers. There’s a lot going on onstage but we’re savvy enough and have all spent enough time in studios to explain what’s going to happen and how it should be handl