Lu Wan Rock

culture clash, the first layabozi event at yuyintang went off successfully on friday night with at least 200 people through the door. they even updated the flyer. they also added another band at the last minute, rainbow danger club. these guys were great. a three piece with tight arrangements and some virtuosic performances both from frontman, jesse, and the bass player who’s name i didn’t catch. jesse did a mean job of playing guitar and keys simultaneously, as well as manipulating a effects on a table that i  was, sadly, unable to capture on film.

their bass player pulled out several extended techniques from his bag of tricks, including two handed tapping . . .

and another favourite, the violin bow. or is it a ‘cello bow?

next up was us, the dovetail joints. L-R: our new/temp bass player, jay; becca; knut; me.

after us came duck fight goose. these guys are just great. led by miniless records founder and all-round good guy, han han (a.k.a. goose), they take us on a very experimental (but not too experimental, mind you!) and twitchy journey through sound. han is another fan of the two handed tapping technique popularised by steve hackett from genesis and eddie van halen:

playing experimental rock doesn’t come cheap, look at all of goose’s pedals:

the first pedal that his guitar goes into is an electro harmonix double muff fuzz/overdrive, part of the muff family of pedals. this has an optional second layer of muff to “turn the milk into cream” i.e. go from a nice warm overdrive into chaotic fuzz. this goes into a vox cooltron buldog distortion. this is another dual distortion, but these channels are run parallel (one or the other) as opposed to previous pedal which has them in series. this means that you can set up two distinct tones and choose which one you want. this sounds very convenient, as i use two pedals to achive the same effect – one for warm overdrive and one for over-the-top distortion. the next pedal in line, the big red one, is a versatile beast. it’s the digitech whammy pedal as used by ratatat. it’s a pitch-shifter pedal with all the bells and whistles. it can intelligently harmonise with what you’re playing or it can make you sound like an 80s metal star going nuts on the whammy bar, hence its name. next up is the first of two boss DD-6 delay pedals. as well as offering several delay options, goose was also making use of it’s loop sampling functions. it has a little over 5 seconds of memory and duck fight goose used this feature several times to form the basis of songs. after this are two more electro harmonix pedals. one is the knockout attack equalizer. basically it provides a dramatic boost or cut to the lows and/or highs of your sound. you could really use this to sculpt a tasty tone with any guitar. after this is a great pedal, and used by my band-mate, dan. it’s the holy grail plus reverb pedal. self-explanatory? all of this runs into a little box i have never seen before. it’s another electro harmonix unit, bringing our total number of EH boxes so far to four. this black box with little triangles and many knobs on it is the electro harmonix MX-3M mini mixer. this enables goose to combine the input from all those guitar pedals with the microphone that you can see on the right of the photo, and send the combination to the second last pedal, another boss DD-5, for sampling or delay. all of this goes into the good ol’ boss TU-2 tuner pedal. i can’t imagine why this is at the end of the chain and not at the beginning.

as if that wasn’t enough for you, duck fight goose’s show was truly a gear orgy. to continue, we will now look at the setup of  the polyester-clad duck on bass.

duck is running two separate chains of one pedal each.  her bass guitar is running through the tonerider compressor, designed by shanghai’s own brad ferguson. i am a big fan of this pedal, i use it all the time to fatten my sound and beef it up. it can give you sustain for days or just even out your levels in the most transparent way. and the sexy blue box on the right is the electro harmonix voice box (that’s five!). simiar to the whammy pedal above, but for voice, it adds harmonies that are appropriate for the key you are playing in. it has an instrument input as well (not being used here) which enables you to use it as a classic vocoder (think beastie boys‘ intergalactic). i would love to play with one of these.

panda seems to be a bit of a gear geek too. here he can be seen using an e-bow on his black mexican ’72 telecaster custom, with a humbucker in the neck position and a single coil at the bridge. perfect. hte e-bow is a handheld device that is used by the guitarist in liew of a pick or fingers. instead of striking the strings to make them vibrate, the battery powered e-bow generates a small electric field that makes the string vibrate. it starts quietly and gets louder, kinda like a bow. the ‘e’ stands for ‘energy’ or ‘electric’ but i think it should stand for ‘excellent’ or ‘eawesome’.

his first pedal is the proco turbo rat. it’s fat n meaty. just ask all the other users… followed by another pedal also used in the carsick cars, the MXR blue box. it does octave and distortion, all in one. oh what’s that up next? it’s big, it has plenty of knobs and it’s built like a tank. it’s another electro harmonix product. this time it’s the graphic fuzz. a fuzz pedal with a built in graphic equallizer so you truly can be master of your tone, even at screaming high volumes and masses of fuzz. it also has a built-in adjustable compressor giving you heaps of sustain. and the green beast on top is another regular in my own setup, the line 6 DL-4 delay modeller. this emulates 16 different types of delay effects, from old tape delays to analogue delay with deterioration, delay with chorus, backwards delay, ping pong (stereo) delay, as well as having a 28 second loop sampling function. lot’s of fun, i can tell you.

there’s more to tell, but i gotta post already!