Throughout guitar-based-music-history, some of the tones have hailed from the mythic land of Seattle, Washington. From Mudhoney to Black Breath, these bands have stacked pedals on pedals on pedals and are able to get massive toan. Definitely the right music for gearheads like you and me.
So, Gear Gods is stoked to premiere an absolute slapper from Seattle heavy-grungers Sandrider, “Brambles”, from their upcoming record Armada.
It’s a thick track for sure, with the right balance of gain, fuzz, and overall volume. Guitarist Jon Weisnewski had this to say about channelling a little Dr. Frankenstein in his guitar setup:
I play a dark silver burst Fender Strat with a Seymour Duncan bridge humbucker for added bright-yet-dark tones, because my heart is bright yet I enjoy darkness. It runs through a pedal board with an MXR gain booster, Boss delay pedal for the spacey solo-y melodies, and a Boss EQ pedal set to “high and shitty” for that bass-less dry scratchy tone. The board line splits into two Verellen amps pushing Marshall 4x12s. The “always on” main amp is a 100 watt Verellen “Higher Watt” which was one of his early models that was inspired by a Hiwatt. It’s had a fair amount of custom work done over the years and is probably pretty MacGuiver-Frankenstein on the inside. The second “usually on” amp is a custom Verellen Meat Smoke bass amp called DYNAMO which he made for my old band Akimbo with a special distortion channel. It adds the thunderous thick slosh to compliment the Higher Watt. It is also abysmally heavy and I was genuinely saddened when I hooked it up to the guitar rig to see if it sounded good, because it did. It sounded great. And now I have to move it every time we play a show. Sucks.
And for bass? Jesse Roberts gives us the dealio:
I have played the same MIJ Geddy Lee jazz bass. I use both pickups depending on what I need at the moment. My pedal board setup is pretty simple with an emphasis mostly on dirtying things up. My signal runs through an Ernie Ball VPJ that is also connected to my tuner. From there my first layer of grit is provided by a Rusty Box preamp. That’s my core sound. After that is an Idiot Box blower box bass distortion for full melt down mode. I occasionally pepper in a Dunlop carbon copy delay or an T.C.Helicon nova delay for spacing thing out.
You can pre-order Armada now and catch Sandrider’s thick tunes on tour this summer and fall.
July 20th – Seattle, WA – Easy Street Records In-Store
July 27th – Seattle, WA – The Crocodile (Record Release)
September 8th – Calgary, CA – Palomino Smokehouse
