Garvey: Well, I have this guitar made by Dan Becker in Boston,
and it has humbuckers, but I use the coil-tap quite a bit. The
single-coil sound is pretty cool—I like it better than a lot of Strat
bridge pickups or even, like, a Telecaster’s sometimes. But I use that
with a treble booster into an EL84 amp, and I’ve used that for the
past couple of years. That’s really how I get my sound live. I have a
lot of control—I can do everything with the volume and the tone
on the guitar. But when I got into the studio, I felt like that was
a little bit thin and lacked some of this woody midrange I wanted
to get. So I blew out all of the pedals and just started plugging
into the amp, and it was just a totally different way to go about
things. If I’d had a couple more weeks, I probably would’ve gotten
it under control [laughs]. I should’ve just done what I’m used to,
but I ended up convincing myself to do something different. I don’t
know if it ended up being good or not, but …
It sounds great! The guitar parts really pop out of the mix, and
a lot of that seems to be because the effects—such as the rotary-speaker parts—are really strategically applied. Do you guys hear
those effects in your head as you write the parts, or do you come
up with parts and then figure out stealthy ways to make them
pop when you’re recording?
Schnier: It’s a little bit of both. I think most guitar players have
probably had the same experience: Sometimes you sit down with
a certain effects pedal—or even just the tremolo on your amp or a
ton of reverb or delay—and you come up with a cool part because
of that soundscape you’ve created. And other times the band will
be playing something and you hear a part in your head, and you’re,
like, “Okay, I’ve got to have something that goes [mimics robot-like
sound],” and it’s, like, “How do I make that happen.” And then
you spend a couple of minutes working on trying to come up with
these psychedelic, weird things that bounce around the room.
Chuck and I have always had a great time doing stuff like that,
but we start with that stuff when we’re composing the songs and
kind of go from there. The funny thing is, a lot of times when
we’re doing these writing sessions, he and I won’t have much more
than maybe a delay pedal or an overdrive pedal. And a lot of times
it’s just a cable into an amp, just so we can get the structure of the
songs together.
Garvey: A lot of that we figured out beforehand. We were doing
preproduction basically in the studio. We would talk about a song
and how we wanted to change the arrangement and feel, and then
after we had a new arrangement, we’d shake out all the details really
quickly and try to get three or five good takes, and then go back
and listen to them. I think this works best for us as a band—if we
don’t fuss over it too much, it sounds better. Everything really was
kind of either just trying to solve the problem of what tone to use
or what effect to use on the fly as a complementary or interesting addition to your basic guitar tone. On most of the tracks, we
did live takes of the whole band, but for logistical reasons, I over-dubbed the Leslie parts.
Was it an actual Leslie cabinet?
Garvey: It’s actually a Fender Vibratone, and I had this road case
with these side-hatch doors built for it. You can open it up and use
it like an isolation cabinet with a pair of condenser mics.
Photo by James Paddock
CHUCK GARVEY FEELS THE VIBE ONSTAGE WITH HIS P-90-OUTFITTED DAN
BECKER RETRO-GRAD SOLIDBODY.
Which amps did you use to drive the Vibratone?
Garvey: I used two amps for the whole recording, and I
might’ve borrowed a third from the studio. I have a Tony Bruno
Underground 30 and a 3x10 cabinet for my main sound, and I also
have a tweed [Fender] Twin clone that Tony made. I’ve had that
since about ’ 97, and it sounds really great with humbuckers. At
the time, I was playing a Strat, and it sounded amazing with that
and a couple of Tube Screamers. I use one or the other to power
the Vibratone—basically whichever one I’m not using for my main
guitar sound.
Is the tweed Twin clone one of Bruno’s standard Tweedy Pie models?
Garvey: No, it’s like a ’ 59, 80-watt, four-6L6 tweed Twin clone. The
faceplate says it’s a Pony 50, which I guess is his 50-watt Marshall-type design, but he used the chassis to build this tweed clone. It has
a floating baffle, just like the original, but it’s not wide—the speakers are staggered in the cab. I found it at 30th Street Guitars in New
York City. We got some money from Sony when we were doing our
first album, and I said, “I’m going to get myself something good
that’s not going to fall apart.” And when I played that, it seemed like
it was game over. I played that for a really long time. It sounds great,
