#its IT'S all about the bass about the bass no TREBBLE

[fandomlife-confessions]

[sidechainzine-blog]

Crows - Steve Goddard

Photo: Steve’s guitar - Credit: M.P.

A few months ago, when they played at Green Door Store, I met with Steve from the band Crows. We talked about guitar pedals and European dB limiters.

Hi Steve, can you introduce yourself briefly please?

My name is Steve Goddard and I play guitar in Crows.

You chose to talk about your guitar, can you tell me more about it?

I have a lot of problems with it. I still use it because the sound of it is really different from what I’ve ever played. It’s a Vox Ultrasonic, they made it in the 60s. I can’t remember exactly from when, but they stopped making them in the early 70s so they’re kinda rare. They have built in effects. I don’t really use them on the guitar because of the way they’re made, when they start to break you can’t fix them cause they’re built in to the actual circuits underneath the wood. So you can’t really get to it. Basically, you have a hand-operated Wah-Wah pedal, a distortion - which is a really nice Vox fuzz sound -, and a repeater, kind of like Spaceman 3. It also got a Bass or Trebble booster. You have the usual pick-up selection, but you also have ‘bassier’ or ‘trebblier’. Because you always have to have it on one or the other - otherwise it doens’t make any noise -, you have to chose between the two. I always have it on the Bass booster, so it makes it really different to any other guitar that I’ve ever played. There’s something a little bit more behind it. Most of the time when we play, there’s a least somebody who will come up to me and ask what tuning we play in. I tell them « standard E to e » and they’re like « oh really ». In a band like this, which is effectively the same as having a three-piece band (drums bass and guitar), it helps to push it a bit more, it fills up the space. I keep snapping strings on it though, which is a real nightmare and I can’t get around it. Friends of mine who are luthiers have tried and looked at it tons of times, and they can’t see why it does that.

Does it happen at the bridge ?

Yeah it’s at the bridge, but they’ve never found anything there, so they can’t really tell me why it does it. If it was any other guitar I’d probably just be like « oh fuck it», sell it, and get rid of it. I think it adds a lot to our sound. Which is why I  tolerate it. If I snap a string, I snap a string, it’s not a big problem.

About the effects in the guitar, I’d love to use them straight from the guitar, but they run at weird levels. If you flick the switch from one to another, it dips. I have a pedal that is built by a company in Texas called Acid Fuzz and they’ve pretty much built the same effects, except the Wah-Wah, but the others are in this one pedal which is quite cool. I have a couple of songs where I use that instead of using the effects through the guitar. This Acid Fuzz pedal is called the Sonic Boom.

What else is on your pedalboard, and what do you mainly use?

I think I’ve got eight pedals. I’ve got a really cheap DanElectro Fuzz, I just quite like the sound of it, it’s a pretty nasty sound. My main overdrive sound is a Menatone Dirty Blonde, like an old 50s fender cranked up. It’s really nice, I really like that pedal. That’s the main one use for this stuff. As you’re progressing as a band obviously you just collect more and more of them, but when we first started I had a fuzz, that Menatone, and another reverb. I use the reverb on the amp but I like to double up in places. And before that, I used to use the clean tone of the amp but as we’ve started playing bigger shows and in bigger venues I’ve noticed that it doesn’t really cut that great for some reason, my amp is pretty old so it���s…

[There was a slight interruption in the interview due to members of Virgin Kids having their foot ball stuck over the marquees outside the venue. After Steve’s fantastic foot ball rescue we got back to the amp conversation]

Alright, so I’ve got another little pedal that’s a really subtle drive that’s made by Fairfield Circuitry in Canada, and I’ve got that on all the time now. So when it’s clean, I still use it to add a little bit of grit to it. Other than that, I’ve got the Sonic Boom, a reverse delay, which is a cheap DanElectro thing. I don’t really use it that often really. I’ve also got a freeze pedal just for a little bit of drone sound in some places.

Sweet. So, can you tell me a bit more about your amp, what do you use?

So, i’ve had it for a real long time. I got it in 2011.

I’ve seen on stage that it’s a Fender, isn’t it?

Yeah it’s a Fender Twin Reverb, but it’s an original 69. It used to have one of the original speakers in it but that just died, and I don’t think there’s any way to bring it back. It actually happened where we were on tour earlier this year, in Holland. We were gonna record over there at some friend’s of us. We took it out, plugged it in and only one of the speakers was working. They rang around a few people and managed to get me a different speaker, which I think is some weird 70s speaker, with a diamond shape to it at the back instead of a circle. It actually sounds kind of nice, the mix of speakers. I know a lot of people would chose to always match up the speakers to the same brand and things like that but I like the sound of it. And yeah, I’ve always used it wherever there’s been the option, even when we first started, if there was the option to use the house backline or my amp, I’d always bring mine because I just prefer the sound of it.

Is there any other ideal amp configuration you’d like to go for?

We did some shows before this year and there were pretty big venues, so in the end I ended up borrowing another twin from a friend of mine. What I’d kinda like to do at some point would be - if it gets to the point we need a bigger rig for bigger shows - to have another twin and then something in the middle kinda bit different. Like an old Marshall to have a more driven sound in the middle, and have the two reverby ones on the side of it. Gives it a bit more control from my end rather than from the front of house. I find that sometimes front of house - unless it’s your own guy, we have a friend of us who does it sometimes - don’t get what we’re after. If I had a setup like that I think it would take it away from them being able to fuck with it too much. Which would be cool. But at the moment we just dont have the need for it really. Cause we mainly do small venues like this at the moment, except on bigger support slots where I end up borrowing something. Other than that I don’t think I’ve ever thought I need some kind of amp than what we’ve been using, so I’m happy with it as it is.

You started leading on to the next question again… I wanted to ask if you usually have your own sound guy with you?

Yeah, we don’t tonight. Our friend Phil does front of house for a few bands and he tours with Yak. He would do it with us but at the moment Yak are on tour as well. We also can’t really afford to pay him [laughs] so… he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. Him and another guy Felix actually recorded the EP that we’re about to put out. So it’s quite nice that he’s been around for a bit, he’s done a couple of shows for us way back and as we’ve pushed on he’s been keen to work with us on a regular basis. It’s quite good to have somebody that knows what we’re about and how we want to sound. To work with him in the studio also helps with that because he knows exactly what we’re after. Unfortunately we can’t have him tonight but we’ve been playing together for a long time and we know what we need to do. We’ve been told a lot that we dont take long to soundcheck and I think sound guys are quite surprised by how quick we are with it. We know what we want, what we need, and what we need to do.

So you’re in good terms with sound engineers in general.

Yeah.

When I saw you first time, you were supporting Big Ups in London, which was a really sick show. I didn’t know you guys before so I didn’t know that James used to play guitar in the band. There was that interview online where you were saying that you chose to have him focus only on vocals and not guitar in order to give more room to the sound, which I think is really interesting because loads of bands forget about this and are just full on. Can you maybe tell me a bit more about it ?

Yeah of course ! So basically he broke his ankle skateboarding, at 23 or something, and we were gonna play a show for a friend of mine. I actually saw him earlier today because he’s moved to Brighton a couple of years ago. He was leaving and we worked together, and he said ‘would you play a show at my leaving party’. James broke his ankle the night before, he was on crutches, he’d have to sit down and he said ‘I can’t think I can have a guitar and sit down and sing with my leg the way it is’. We were kinda like ‘well, it’s only a leaving party its not a big show so let’s do it’. So he did it without the guitar, and we were like ‘shit it actually sounds kinda more interesting’. It sounds less like a generic kinda rock band now, there’s a bit more dynamic to it. Essentially when he played guitar it was just a beef up, on bits, and certain parts he wouldn’t even play on anyways. It was kind of a booster, but there were pedals and other things around making the dynamics difficult to hear. I used to work in one of the stores in Denmark Street in London, so everyone that was there was really into guitars and sound, and they all said to me that it sounded really cool like that, really different to how it normally sounds. Theres so much space, like we sounded bigger with less. We all kind of met at Uni and me and James played together in a different thing that kinda developped into this. When we were doing that, our tutor was saying ‘maybe you shouldn’t play guitar there and it will take it to a different place’, we were just like ‘naaah it’s fine’ but actually we probably should have listened. That was when we were still at uni so it was completely different kind of music and set up. When he broke his ankle two years ago it’s when we said we started to people who ask ‘how long we’ve been going for’. We put it back to around that time because it’s around that time that we realised that’s the sort of set up we should have, that’s the best kinda thing to do for us and our sound.

Bonus questions now: What would be your best or worst sound memory ?

For me, personally, the ones that are always interesting is when we play in places in Europe where they have dB limiters, and that’s always fun… the first time I experienced that was at a club in Paris called La Fleche D’Or. We played there last tour and we started soundchecking, I had my amp maybe on like just on the two, because my amp is really old and it’s really temperamental, there’s no sort of in between.

Yeah, often Fender amps are like that anyways…

On this one, if you go slightly too far it just cuts, it’s just off. So we were soundchecking and the sound guy was like ‘yeah the guitar is over the dB limit for the venue can you turn it down a bit ?’ And I just looked at it, I was like ‘wow not really actually’. So yeah, that was kinda annoying. So we ended up not running it through the PA and just from the stage. It’s not the smallest venue so it was a fun one…

And then recently we played at Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. We set up, started soundchecking and in our advance we were told if we went over the decibel limit and the sound police was there we’d get fined up to 10 000 USD, so that was exciting. And soundchecking, he was like ‘the guitar’s a little bit loud’, so I asked him if he wanted me to turn it down, because I could have turned it down a little bit, and he was like ‘naah we’ll just put it at the side so it’s not coming straight from the front’. We put it at the side of the stage and I was like… ‘ok… that doesn’t sound that great to me but at least if I can keep the same level and get the same level of drive to it then great’. So we did that, and obviously we had to get everything through the monitor really good, and when we actually came to play, either they managed to accidentally wipe the monitor board - cause it was a digital desk -. So we started, everything was at the same level but everything was different through the monitor. And then i was like ffs it sounds shit to me. So i went over to the amp, turned it up a little bit and i was like sweet that’s fine, it’s great i can hear everything now. And they started cutting stuff, turning it off and on in my monitor, to try and be like ‘turn it down’. Then someone had to come on stage and be like ‘can you turn it back down otherwise we’re gonna have to cut the show’. So I thought ok great. Those are always fun…

Another bonus stupid one: What song did you first ever learn to play ?

I started playing guitar when I was like 13, and I think the first song I learned was… actually I learned three songs during my first lessons… not really songs but kinda chord progressions. I learnt the intro to Smells Like Teen Spirits, something else, and the chords of Redemption Song by Bob Marley because my teacher was a big stoner and liked to do stuff like that…

[Edited for clarity - Interview October 2016]