Debut Album - Death In The Evening

Stef talks guitars

I had been playing piano for a while when I was younger and I just picked the guitar up one day because it was standing there and I just never stopped playing it since then, that’s the story.

My first ever guitar was a really battered classical guitar. I don’t know what it was. But then I learned to play chords on that really quickly and then I moved on to an acoustic, a brand called Cort, I think, nothing fancy, but then I moved to electric and I got a Fender Strat and that’s where I really learned the basics of playing guitar.

It was just Jimi Hendrix at first, you know when you’re like 15 and you see Jimi Hendrix play at Monterey and you see him burn his guitar up and play those solos and that’s the ultimate guitar when you’re 15 I think. And then slowly, gradually, I got into Tele and I didn’t go back. I still love Strats but my guitar is Tele, my choice.

About the Tele, it’s just the diversity of the guitar, you can do any style you want, it’s just the feel of the guitar. Personally I don’t think there’s any guitar that sounds, and feels this good to play, especially this Tele, it’s quite dreamy, the sound you get out of the combo, it’s just Tele and Fender amp, it’s buttery and silky.

This is a Deluxe American reissue, it was made in the 90s, going back to the roots of Fender, maple neck, and I got it in America when I went over there, so it’s like an original and yeah it’s my favourite. I have played many Teles basically but I don’t know, maybe I just got lucky with this especially, it has a certain feel that I haven’t found with any other Teles I’ve tried

Fender Telecaster I don’t think there’s any guitar that sounds and feels this good to play Read More

Yeah it’s completely destroyed. I mean, I love my instruments but I also like to destroy them and not really care too much about them unfortunately. But… It’s suffered many blows and the tone control doesn’t work any more, in fact you can see it’s come out and it’s just stuck on the brightest setting and the volume is stuck as well. I’m going to have to replace this soon but I quite like the fact that it’s just on my favourite settings and they’re not moving, they’re not going anywhere.

The way to control the tone is just to switch between pickups and if I want a bright piercing tone I just go to the bridge pickup and it just comes through, it’s quite twangy so I tend to use it with moderation because it’s very country and it’s not exactly what I’m going for, but if you need the solo to come through that’s the pickup of choice. I mainly play on the neck, I like tender and soft sounds.

I wrote this blocky riff like 10 years ago and I never played it again and then one day I just picked a guitar up and I started doing it again. You know, like that. And I went to Leo’s one night and I just picked up an acoustic guitar and I tried to translate it into chords to the most direct translation I could get so that riff just went out of the window and I just… changed it to a more strummy style and it became the song. It’s interesting in a way how things can change and evolve to simpler and more direct I guess.

I was really into jazz a few years ago, after my Jimi Hendrix obsession, but I wasn’t really into any jazz guitarists in particular. I was more into pianists. Thelonious Monk was the game changer, he was the guy that inspired my love of jazz because he was absolutely crazy and he translated it into his playing, so I listened to his solo piano work and I tried to play it on guitar. I wasn’t trying to study jazz, I was just dabbling, and I still dabble in jazz. I like mad stuff, that’s why I like it, because it’s quite mad.

It’s tried to be a mix of all the influences but if you have to put a finger on the guy that influences me the most because obviously there’s so many, you can whittle it down to one guy. I’d say it’s Jimmy Page. I’m really big on folk stuff on guitar, I’m really into Nick Drake and all those guys in the 60s and 70s who were going back to blues roots and detuning guitars. They were experimenting and coming up with amazing uses of the guitar, just combining classical and blues to create new shapes and new ways of playing the electric guitar. Jimmy Page to me is the guy that brings all of that, all that folk influence, into rock so yeah, he can rock the guitar and he can also play its subtleties so that’s the guy for me and it influences the way I play.

Diamond Pedals J-Drive MK3 A really classic distortion Read More

To me my sound is about approaching the instrument so most of the variety of sounds that I get, it’s about dynamics, so pick and pickups. But when it comes to pedals at the moment I’m using one amp only so I have to rely on stomp boxes to get distortion. Ideally you’d want a switch pedal, AB and have a distortion on an amp with a great distortion.

I use a really short selection of pedals, just a crunch and a fuzz at times.
Principally I rely on this Canadian pedal called J Drive MK 3, it’s by Diamond. It’s a little known company that actually makes brilliant pedals, it’s just a really classic distortion and you have a warmth knob and you have a drive knob and a volume and that’s really all I use to add to my sound.

Ibanez Tube Screamer TS9 It’s really bitey Read More

For overdrive I use a classic, this TS9 (Tube Screamer) by Ibanez. It just makes the sound shine even more when you need that extra top, that’s how I use it anyway. But it’s quite a bluesy pedal, quite Stevie Ray Vaughan, in that traditional Texas style. That’s not what I use it for but that’s the traditional use of this pedal. Yeah it’s really bitey.

I sometimes use the Big Muff it’s another staple fuzz, long sustain, and I’m really into it at times and at times I go off it. But the problem with it I find is that it’s tough to use the Muff and not lose your sound, it just becomes this blob of noise that gets lost in the mix but depending on the song… I can use the Muff but I’m more and more just limiting myself to these two, the distortion and the crunch and the overdrive.

Fender Blues Deluxe Amp Really kicks it when you crank it up Read More

It’s a Fender Blues Deluxe and it’s an amp I bought when I first came to England. I used to use a Blues Deville, which is the one that Alex uses at the moment and it’s a subtle difference between the Deville and the Deluxe, both hot rod tube amps but this one is quite… pungent. It’s got a sound that really kicks it when you crank it up.

Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi Staple fuzz, long sustain Read More

Electro-Harmonix POG2 Polyphonic Octave Generator with exciting new features Read More

Alex talks guitars

I’d been playing the piano before and I’d been put through the various torturous instruments they make you play at school, like the recorder, that was a nightmare that almost put me off music forever, but my dad had this old beat up classical guitar lying around that had six strings on it, I had that and was bashing it out. I remember I bought a book of music, I can’t remember which one it was, I thought it was going to be piano music. And I got it and it was a tab book for guitar instead, so instead of musical notes it was all these numbers and stuff. Guitar tablature and stuff and I thought, well I’ve spent £10 on this book and I haven’t got much money so I’ll get the most out of it. So I took this Spanish guitar and I started looking at the chord shapes and the numbers and it actually seemed quite straightforward and easy, easier than reading sheet music, so I just sort of went from there and a couple of weeks later I was basically playing chords and it snowballed, I’ve been doing well ever since really.

I don’t think I’ve ever thrown away a guitar so basically my musical history is lying around my house in the form of various guitars that I’ve had over the years. I started on a Spanish and I moved onto a kind of steel string American style acoustic, an old Yamaha I think. As I was building up my strength my fingers got more used to that. I saw – this is almost pre-Internet, I saw in Loot, the local paper’s classified or something, an ad for an electric guitar – ‘Electric Guitar, £20’. So I thought OK I’m going to just buy that. It seemed great, I was 16? So I got this really ugly Vox. Like an 80s Vox White Shadow and that was my first electric guitar. It’s kind of a take on the Van Halen Super Strat, it’s like, Strat configuration but it’s got two Humbuckers and a bunch of cool little switches and stuff. It’s hideous but bits of it are actually with me today in the sense that I took some of the guts and stuck it into another guitar I had.

I found that out later, but it was kind of a nice sign that this guitar was for me.

Fender Stratocaster I really like the feel Read More

It’s one of the new American Fender Strats. I really like the feel, the profile of a Strat neck, it’s fast, it’s slim. I don’t have the biggest fingers in the world so it’s not like the kind of hockey stick neck you get on some guitars, they’re really clunky. But I really didn’t like the quack, you know, the Strat quack, with the single coil pickups out of phase, you know, it was a bit thin, it didn’t really fit with the sound I wanted. So I kind of ripped out the guts of this guitar and rewired in a new couple of Humbuckers as you can see, and stripped down the controls to just like a Tele wiring kit.

I have to admit when I did it I was pretty freaked out because it was a brand new guitar, all my money, I’d been saving for years for this and I’ve just got it on my kitchen table and it’s all open and just bits of it everywhere and I’m trying to use a soldering iron to get it to work properly. But I knew that it was what I wanted and it came good.

That’s what I use now, it’s like a customized American Strat in the style of the 80s Super Strats, the Van Halen effect but not for that use. I’ve noticed a few people have done this, I think Dave Murray of Iron Maiden did, Kurt Cobain has done it as well, if you watch that Reading DVD they had you can see him playing a Strat. So I think you get more out of the instrument than just the standard pickup configuration.

Fender Hot Rod Deluxe Amp It’s got quite a kick Read More

The amp I’ve got here is a Fender Hot Rod, it’s a 40-watt amp. It’s kind of OK to carry around. It’s quite heavy but it’s not like a big huge stack. It’s got quite a kick, it’s more for shows. I’ve found a lot of the time for smaller shows it’s too loud, it goes up to 12. You won’t get it past two, three on the volume side which can be a bit frustrating cos tube amps sound nice when they’re cranked.

It’s quite a bright amp. Originally I tried that really tight class A sound that you get with a Vox AC30. I had a Marshall Haze for a while.

I want a warmer sound so it’s not like a classic Fender sound, so I kind of roll back the presence and the treble. Combined with the kind of Humbucking guitars you get quite a nice, warm almost like Jazzy sound when you’re clean. There’s a lot of top end and a nice round sound, that’s what I like.

I guess I’ve got a slightly schizophrenic approach to the guitar.

I suppose you could say my sound is a bit like a nun in a sex shop. It’s like on the one hand it’s really pure and clean and on the other hand it’s just pure filth. On the clean side of it I work really hard to get a pure clean tone through the pickups and amps and stuff and then a higher quality guitar with better resonance, all of it together, kind of harmonic feel, and on the other side of it I’m liking a dirty kind of abrasion, a harsh rock sound, where you’re really pushing, you’re compressing the sound with lots of distortion and you get all of the strange feedback and all of the kind of harmonic resonance that you get through strings that have been squeezed through distortion.

So people who inspired me in that sense, are guitarists like Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) or something, the way he plays the Strat and really just sort of beats it and spanks it and gets some great sounds out of it. Or people who use pedals to some effect, like Johnny Greenwood, or maybe like Graham Coxon who has that sort of approach to playing where he’s not really playing lead, he’s not really playing rhythm, its sort of like a mix of both and you’ve got like a rhythmic quality to it but he’s picking out kind of lead lines within it, so those are kind of all the landmarks, I guess, on my progression. I don’t follow any one school of how I play or how I get my sound, but I guess along the way they’re all qualities that kind of shape the player I am today.

Fender Jaguar Really percussive trebly sound Read More

I had a bunch of guitars and I was looking for something a little bit more exciting. I don’t really like the neck on a Telecaster, I don’t have the hugest hands in the world and I was drawn to the Jaguar cos it’s got a shorter scale length and the frets are a little bit closer together and you’re looking at the kind of people like Johnny Marr who made Jaguars quite famous. So I got the Jag, it was like an old Japanese one, 92, 3 or something. And it wasn’t in the best shape, it was full of dings and chips missing, and the neck’s not quite on straight and stuff.

And I had it for a bit and it had these single coils, pickups that came with it. And it’s designed for surfing so it had this really percussive, trebly sound that just wasn’t fitting with the kind of music I wanted to make, and as soon as you ran it through like a distortion pedal it would just squeal like a pig and the feedback was uncontrollable.

And I think the tone pots, you don’t lose any treble, I think they were 1000K tone pots so there was no real treble kind of loss so you couldn’t warm up the sound in a kind of reasonable way. So I had this old Vox guitar which was my first guitar and it had a double Humbucker pick up and a kind of, three knobs of master volume and two tones.

So I sort of took a leap of faith and took the Vox to bits and tool out all its innards and then put them into the Jaguar. But the problem is the Jaguar is only cut for a single coil pickup so the slots in the wood are only sort of half as wide as they needed to be, so I had to take a hammer and chisel to the guitar and I sort of hacked at it and it was all wood chips and it was quite a traumatic experience, a bit like doing open-heart surgery on your girlfriend, you’re not sure if she’s going to wake up at the end of it and every hit was more wood chips and you think, “Oh shit I’m just ruining this guitar”, but it came out OK.

The pickups are slightly, you can see, they’re a little bit wonky, I wasn’t that disciplined in putting it together. I need to get a metal control plate custom-cut for the new three-way pickup, the pick up selector switch, it’s more like a Gibson, this one. Put a kill-switch in, in the style of Johnny Greenwood mid solo kind of thing. What I like about it now is that you get this warm sound, it’s got this kind of beefy, meaty sound.

But what you also get, which is kind of special about the Jaguar, because of the low break angle between the bridge and the back, the strings resonate a lot more and you get a lot of harmonic overtones. So you can strum it behind the bridge and you get this Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth thing going on. It was like the combination of the resonance of the strings and all the harmonics you get on it, and the tremolo’s quite nice, kind of like a gentle one, not that huge kind of whammy that you can get on other guitars.

So this was like my first foray into the world of customization and it’s all a bit,,, you can see things aren’t quite as they should be cos I was squeezing a lot into it. But it was an attempt, and since then I’ve not really looked back and I think it gave me the confidence to make the changes I did to my Strat. I mean this isn’t really worth much as a guitar, whereas the Strat was new. So there are things I’d like to change about this, I’m having some grounding issues with it as you can hear. It’s not a perfect instrument but I think it’s got character.

I’m quite a pedal aficionado, it’s partly out of necessity cos we’re at a stage, we do a lot of travelling around and two-amp setups you know, this A B amp thing, isn’t really available to me, but at the same time I think even if it was, I quite like the control that you get with a clean amp with a clean sound and then a chain of stomp-boxes, cos you can shape your sound, particularly if you’re doing things that involve feedback and high amounts of distortion. I think amps on their own can be a bit of an untamed beast. So when you really want to get specific feedback, particularly like the lower frequency ranges and stuff, you need to kind of shape it with your pedals and that’s what I’m doing here

Boss Turbo Distortion DS-2 The first pedal I got Read More

Loosely, the pedals are kind of in two halves, there’s boost effects, that include overdrive, distortion and fuzz, kind of an EQ boost thing and then like modulation effects so I’ve got like a chorus, digital reverb and a delay pedal, so those are the two halves. But I like being able to step up my sound as the song progresses, so rather than just having clean and dirty, I’ll start with the clean and then go to an overdrive crunchy, then maybe onto a fuzz or onto a distortion, do a clean boost on the overdrive. So you end up with like different tiers of sound that you can control as you go. You can see quite a lot of Boss pedals but that’s mostly just because that’s where I started. I think the first pedal I got was this Turbo Distortion. And I like the format, I like the style of pedal, it’s quite reliable and I just sort of stuck with it. Not to say that these are the most perfect pedals for my sound, just thinking that people tend to, especially when you’re younger and you don’t have huge amounts of cash, you sort of stick with what you know.

Pro Co Turbo Rat A really nice sound, it’s more of a fuzz than a distortion Read More

But I’ve kind of moved out into other sorts of things, I’ve got this Turbo Rat here made by Proco, that’s a really nice sound, it’s more of a fuzz than a distortion, but you get this kind of long sustain on it.

Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe The Memory Man’s really nice… you’ve got a lot of control with that you can get some really nice sort of feedback, almost loops going on Read More

It’s a mix of Boss and other brands. The Memory Man’s really nice, Electro-Harmonix, you’ve got a lot of control with that you can get some really nice sort of feedback, almost loops going on, and it’s a mix of echo and chorus so you can really mess with your sound, lots of knobs to kind of tweak to just right.

Again with the Turbo Distorion it’s a kind of DS2 as opposed to DS1 it’s only got three knobs on it. With this one you get a lot more control. It’s got an extra thing that makes it more turbo, you can have an extra mid-range boost which is good for cutting through on solos and stuff. You actually get like a breakout pedal that’s like a latching switch that you can then use to get more sounds out of the pedal, and again more sounds and more control, that’s what I like

Danelectro Fish and Chips Mini EQ Pedal Read More

I use a sort of simple 7-band EQ and I use it like a solo boost but it’s also a treble up. So when you do a solo if there’s feedback it’s nice resonant feedback on notes rather than just top end squeal so I like that.

Boss Digital Reverb RV-5 Six reverbs in one stereo pedal Read More

I don’t really use the chorus much, it’s a very sparing effect, the same for the reverb. Digital reverb can be a bit funny when you put distortion through it, but again it’s about control and I don’t like having too much reverb. I don’t like having the amp too wet. So it’s just giving me the flexibility to kind of change between sounds and not have to live with them the whole time, being on at the source of the amp.

Boss Super Chorus CH-1 Clear clean chorus with stereo effect Read More

Frederick talks bass

As far as I know it’s the best budget bass on the market. It’s got a through neck and has Gibson pickups. It’s very warm sounding and is a proper rock style bass so great for now for Whales stuff. Eventually I’d like a good Fender P Bass for other styles.

Epiphone Thunderbird Classic-IV Pro Bass Warm-sounding, proper rock style bass Read More

The Selmer amp is in my opinion one of the world’s best amps. British made. It’s from the early 70s and is one of their most powerful amps they ever made. Really clean and really loud. I use it for both bass and guitar, sometimes through a Marshall 1960 cab.

Both the bass inputs on the amp sound too low and it actually outputs the volume too loud for the bass cabs I own, so I actually just use the guitar inputs (treble inputs) on the amp for playing bass in Whales.

Selmer Treble ‘N’ Bass 100 SV amp One of the world’s best amps, really clean and really loud Read More

The NM2 is a new bass pedal - Nate Mendel Foo Fighters signature - and has worked really well. It doesn’t lose any low end, and the distortion sits really well with both Stef and Alex’s guitars.

It’s a stereo overdrive that splits the signal into two amps. So I use a slight overdrive through the Selmer Amp and the 15’’ cab. Then a more fuzz type overdrive through the Ashdown combo amp. I use them in parallel to get a big sound, and mostly just turn the more fuzz type one off in quieter parts in songs.

Ashdown NM2 Pedal Has worked really well, doesn’t lose any low end Read More

I’ve also been using the Electro-Harmonix Freeze pedal for transitions between songs and loud crescendos.

Electro-Harmonix Freeze For transitions and loud crescendos Read More

Sometimes I use my Fuzzrocious ‘Rat Tail’ pedal. It’s a modification of a Rat pedal and is way more versatile than a standard ProCo Rat pedal. I have it in a custom etched box/enclosure, it’s David Lo Pan from the film Big Trouble in Little China.

It’s made by a small company in the USA and is primarily made for bass. Caleb Scofield, my favourite bassist from Cave In uses one, and I know that Neurosis, Young Widows, Thrice, and Coliseum all use them.

Their pedals are amazing. They even do a Heliotropic pedal, it’s the bass sound from a song of the same name by the band Failure. I’m looking to get one of those soon.

Fuzzrocious Rat Tail Versatile, their pedals are amazing Read More

Ashdown ABM C210H-500 EVO III A versatile and powerful combo bass amplifier. Read More

Ashdown Mag 115 Deep Cabinet A 250w cab with 15” speaker Read More

Matt talks drums

The shells are a bit off a one off beast. It’s a custom built that I purchased from Drumshack (the best drum shop in London!) It’s an MJD Custom and it was built by a guy who lives in Bournemouth.

The sizes are 24x18 kick, 13x11 Rack tom, 18x16 Floor Tom which are Keller maple shells. The snare is a Pork Pie 6.5x14 Big Black Brass.

I use Ludwig hardware, Tama Iron Cobra Pedal and a mixed bag of cymbals….15” Bosphorus traditional hi hats, 21” Zildjian K Crash/Ride & 20” Paiste 2002 Crash.

Pork Pie Percussion Big Black Brass Snare Cut of brass with fat low end Read More

Tama Iron Cobra Drum Pedal Rugged classic drum pedal Read More

Paiste 20” Crash 2002 Series A medium volume crash with a washy stick sound and a medium sustain. Read More

Kit List

Boss

Fender

Electro-Harmonix

Ashdown

Pro Co

Epiphone

Diamond Pedals

Ibanez

Selmer

Danelectro

Fuzzrocious

Pork Pie Percussion

Tama

Paiste