Lu Wan Rock

the second big gig at yuyintang last weekend was the handsome furs, a two-piece from canada. unfortunately i didn’t make it – i opted for a night in with anvil instead. but i did send john, my intrepid correspondent, to get gear photos regardless. sadly we missed openers and local favourites, boys climbing ropes. but i heard it was a great night.

dan from the handsome furs has something in common with robin from strobolight – they both play telecasters from the mexican reissue range. but whereas robin has a ’72 deluxe tele, dan is sporting a natural finish ’72 thinline tele. the differences in these two guitars are few. the thinline was introduced in 1969 with two regular single coil telecaster pickups. in an attempt to make the telecaster lighter they made it semi-hollow and gave it a lovely f-hole. then in ’72, in conjunction with the release of the telecaster deluxe, they decided to go large and fit it with two humbuckers and redesign the scratchplate again. the thinline series also differs from the deluxe by having the regular smaller sized telecaster headstock than the larger one seen on 70s strats and deluxe telecasters. and notice there are only two metal knobs instead four larger plastic ones.

at the bottom of the photo we can see the ubiquitous boss TU-2 tuner pedal followed by the classic boss DS-1 distortion pedal. next up is the truly awesome “Hachihachi shiki kebadate hizumaseki SUPER OSCILLO FUZZ” (88) from lastgasp laboratories. this is a distortion pedal loaded with different oscillators and six switches to control them. these oscillators fuck your sound up real good. you can hear samples of it on their website. next up is the incredibly cool, hand-painted z.vex fuzz factory. their pedals all look so cool. after that is the boss DD-20 giga delay – a delay pedal with up to 23 seconds of delay and some loop sampling functions too. lastly at the top of the photo is the electro-harmonix micro pog – a polyphonic octave generator. it is an octave pedal that outputs an octave above what you are playing as well as an octave below like most octave pedals. though a lot of octave pedals also give you two octaves below as well – this one forgoes that for a higher, richer sound. i think i want one.

meanwhile on the other side of the stage, alexei was playing all korg gear this evening. at the top of the photo we can see what looks like a microkorg. basically the good folks at korg have taken all of their best sounds and put them into a little box. they removed all but the most useful tweaks and left us with a lightweight, inexpensive synth that sounds excellent. below that is the ‘tube-powered’ korg electribe MX. i don’t know what to call it. a production tool? a work station? it’s essentially a portable dance music production desk. it’s got synths, sequencing, filters, effects, pads and two vacuum tubes. not to mention lots of knobs, buttons and flashing lights. awesome.

*in the interests of full disclosure, it should be known that i also play a thinline telecaster (’69 model) and am heavily biased towards these objects of beauty.