King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – the Australian everything-band that seems to put out between one and four albums veery single years without fail – just released their latest effort Flight b741. While we wait roughly half an hour for the next album, King Gizzard mastermind Stu Mackenzie took some time to talk gear with Total Guitar.
Mackenzie said it all started when he used to teach guitar and kids would come in with these tiny practice amps. Mackenzie found that if you cranked ’em up, they would get all crunchy and distorted, producing a tone that he eventually loved. So he headed down to Melbourne’s Cash Converters to test a theory.
“I bought about six or eight [of these small practice amps, maybe,” he said. “I didn’t spend more than 20 or 30 bucks on any of them. They were just tiny, tiny little speakers. Sometimes they would have a little gain channel that was absolutely nasty, but usually we would have them on the clean channel and just crank them.
“We had no pedals on the record, just guitars, straight into the amp, turned up loud enough so that it sounds nasty. In my mind it was like the first couple of Black-Sabbath records distortion.”
So there you go – head on down to your local pawn shop and get some disgusting tones.
