Lu Wan Rock

there were three great shows on this weekend at yuyintang and two of them prominently featured my favourite guitar – the fender telecaster. first up on friday night was strobolight, a four piece post-rock band from Oxford, UK. they describe themselves quite well on their website as rejecting “verse-chorus song structures in favour of a more classical approach, with often non-repeating phrases. Vocals are featured sparingly as the material focusses on catchy instrumental phrases and dynamics.” they used dynamics to great effect in their set, showing a love for the loud/soft approach which never fails to catch the audience’s attention. and they seemed to enjoy playing with different time signatures within a song – often switching between 4/4, 3/4 and others, as well as some great and abrupt tempo changes. i found it quirky but catchy. the often contrapuntal melodies are traded nicely between robin walton on the guitar and ken wang on the keyboards, creating a nice airy feeling as delayed and effected notes wash over and through each other.

robin is playing a sunburst telecaster deluxe which differs from a classic telecaster by featuring a gnarly scratchplate and two fat humbuckers. it also has cool 70s chunky knobs and an enlarged headstock not shown in this picture. originally manufactured from 1972 (or 3?) to 1981, fender reissued them amongst a whole series of mexican-made telecasters in 2004. i suspect this is one of the reissues due it’s shinyness and the stickers. if i owned an original from ‘the early 70s i wouldn’t be putting astroboy on it.

robin shows a strong preference for boss pedals, a subsiduary of roland. it looks like the first pedal in the chain is on the bottom right of the picture – the Barber Direct Drive. this is an american hand-made overdrive pedal that looks sturdy and sounds crunchy in a late 60s/early 70s  kinda way – think hendrix. the next one on its left is the Fulltone Obsessive Compulsive Drive (or OCD for short). this one is more for the mid 70s style overdrive – their website suggests that it’s more AC/DC or led zeppelin than hendrix. next up is Electroharmonix Little Big Muff Pi (china users click here) distortion pedal,  the littlest sibling of the big muff family, as used by shou wang of the carsick cars. apparently this one sounds practically identical to its larger brothers and sisters, but it is smaller and cheaper. sounds good to me. the next pedal is from Ibanez’s Tone-Loc series with depressable knobs so that your settings don’t get changed in transit. it looks like an LF7 lo-fi pedal. essentially this is an aggressive EQ pedal with only a high and low pass filter. when you use these to cut out significant frequencies in the lows and highs of the audio spectrum it makes the guitar sound washed-out, far away, down a telephone or on an old record. the last one on the bottom row and fifth pedal from a total of nine is the boss PS-5 intelligent pitch shifter, similar to the whammy pedal used in ratatat but with fewer options for manipulation whilst playing but still a very versatile pedal. it’s great if you want to harmonise with your self or drastically alter the picth of the guitar.

you can see a cable running from the left of the PS-5, back along to the top-right-hand corner of the pedal board and into the right hand side of the korg tuner. the signal then goes into the final phase of the pedal chain. first here is the boss RV-3 reverb/delay pedal. it is followed by the boss RV-5 reverb pedal and the boss DD-6 digital delay pedal. the RV-3 features several delay modes, four different types of reverb as well as the option to have the delay and reverb together. for the RV-5 boss dropped the delay but added two more reverb modes taking it to six. and while the DD-6 doesn’t have any reverb, it does feature reverse delay. natas ma i.