April 1, 2024 • 47 mins
Kia ora! Today we hear from Hugh Allan, guitarist for the Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland three-piece instrumental group Mothra. Hugh tells us about how Mothra formed, his favourite venues from across the motu, new music from the band coming, and the destruction of a Jackson guitar at the mercy of a vehicle backing over it. If you are listening to this before April 5-6th 2024, and are in Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington on the 5th, or Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland on the 6th you can catch Hugh with Mothra opening for Hötchiwitch featuring Peter Mengede (Handsome / Helmet) which has Hugh also playing second guitar for the headliner, pumping out the entire Handsome album and some Helmet tunes as well. Mothra: https://mothraband.com https://youtube.com/@mothrasound April 5th 2024 WLG tickets: https://www.valhallatavern.com/events-1/handsome April 6th 2024 AKL tickets: https://waxstartouring.flicket.co.nz/events/813e6d5b-a59b-4801-96b0-01cfb0eaec09/reservation Mentioned in the video: Wax Chattels - https://waxchattels.bandcamp.com Ginzu and the Steak Knives - https://ginzuandthesteakknives.bandcamp.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Music.
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Kia ora! Welcome back to the Aotearoa Guitar Show. Today I'll be speaking with
Hugh Allen of the band Mothra, an Auckland-based three-piece instrumental heavy group.
Mothra will be opening for Hochiwich, a tribute to Handsome on the 5th in Wellington
and the 6th in Auckland, where Hugh will also be playing second guitar for the
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headliner. More details on that in the video.
So let's get on with it and talk to Hugh. you. Hey, thanks for taking the time.
I really appreciate you taking time to be on the show.
This is a show that I'm basically creating to kind of catalog current players
as well as the past history of guitars and amplification and everything that
goes into all of those things in New Zealand.
And I had a wonderful time seeing you open for Quicksand. That was a fantastic
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show and was super impressed. That was great.
The first experience of Mothra and seeing you guys play, and that was just really a highlight for me.
So just wanted to pass that on.
Thanks, Wade. I appreciate that. Yeah. So how long have Mothra been together
and how long have you guys been pulling that one off?
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Mothra, I think we formed in 2008 or definitely late 2008.
So it's been quite a while now. What, 15 years? Yeah. That was my maths.
Something like that. Close. Yeah, it's been 16 years. Yeah Yeah, so it's been a while.
Yeah, very nice So you guys are a three-piece instrumental act,
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which is really kind of unique these days but it seems to also be a thing that I've seen a lot of,
Growth in to when I think about bands like animals as leaders and some of the
other three-piece instrumental groups out there How has that been as it harder
to get gigs or is it something that that's not so bad? I.
Yeah i mean yeah there's definitely a global community of
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of instrumental bands post-rock or
post-metal or avant-garde sort
of more virtuous i don't
know if virtuosic is a word more bands with who are
focused more on individual virtuosity like
like animals as leaders and bands like that but you
know that's a real genre and promoters who who want to
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bring bands you know in that genre to New Zealand
we always if we like the
band and want to have a go at opening and being a supporter
and we try and get on the bill so we've
had a lot of success I mean for a lot of internationals over the
years and you know I guess our music leans towards the heavier side of things
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as well as as quiet time ambient and clean not not so heavy side as well so
we've We've opened for bands who are more post-rock,
and we've also played with internationals who are really heavy,
like Dillinger and Skateplan,
and Helmets and Devin Townsend, and we were about to open for Deftones and Gojira
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and Mastodon, so it can swing both ways, you know, it's such a broad genre.
Yeah, and I feel like, based on what I've seen, it's
a nice pocket that you all sit in where where you
can kind of span a bit of that that genre which
is really cool i've been really impressed with that and yeah so did you have
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a vocalist in the band at one time or has it always been a three-piece instrumental
i'll give you a little bit of context on on how how the band formed if you want
yeah that'd be great yeah so late 2008 i used to have a band with james i went
school with James the drummer and we had
a band maybe a few years before like around
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2003 I think called Enzyme and we did
have a singer for that band a friend of mine called Matt he's actually singing
and then we've got a gig coming up with um it's it's the Handsome Tribute yeah
I don't know if you're familiar with that album and actually that that vocalist
who was in this band band previously that James and I played in early 2000s, 2003.
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He's singing this gig. So he got the gig, singing the Handsome album. Oh, that's great.
Anyway, that didn't work out. And I just started working on some demos after a few years later.
And James came around one day to my flat and he heard it and said,
that's my genre, I should be playing this.
And I was just programming drums at the time.
And then Ruben was just a friend. He actually was coming for some guitar lessons.
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I've been teaching guitar for
a long time, and I just sort of rubbed him into having a go on the bass.
And we kind of never looked back. He took it up well, and that was that.
We just started rehearsing, had a lot of fun, worked on the demos that I'd made,
quite a few on the first album that were initially demos that I'd made by myself.
And we did trial a lot of vocalists. There were But a lot of singers who tried
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were really keen and we'd do gigs early on and there was always someone who
would latch on and be really keen to come along to rehearsal and have a shot.
Most people, to be honest, we didn't feel that it made the band sound better.
We didn't feel that it made the music any better.
And it kind of just made a focus on the vocal rather than the music that we
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were writing and it didn't make it sound any better than it was.
So there were a couple of vocalists who really wrote some great parts to songs,
but they couldn't commit to the band.
It was Steve from the band Full Code.
He jammed with us for a while back in the early days, and he was really good.
We wanted to work with Steve, but he shot off to Melbourne.
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And there were a couple of others. So we just kept playing, and it just kind of worked, I think.
We found a way to to write music and tell
a story with our songwriting that that wasn't
too boring and didn't lack engagement with our
vocals and and people would tell us
that after you know we kept playing and i remember fans people
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at the show saying don't get a singer it's sweet we
love it like and i and i was interested in
triggering samples and atmospheres like
bands like neurosis and Isis who we were really influenced
by and at first I had someone just
triggering that these sounds on a what was
the the first the iPod or
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an iPod and I would just sort of cue them into I've not
Adam say like play that part now but then
this pedal came out it was a it's the jam
man digitech jam man and you're
able to just trigger samples load anything into it trigger
or whatever you wanted there's probably much better ones out there now but
i still use that that old one and yeah so
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just sort of painting some extra sound over what we were doing to make it more
interesting something to make up maybe for not having vocals but we certainly
tried and actually the door is always open for for singers we never adverse
people trying to sing and richard Richard Simpson,
our friend from, he was in that great band, New Way Home.
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I used to love that band. I'd go see them in the early 2000s as well.
They were mind-blowing and they disbanded
i don't know sometimes you hear a peep from
their page from from richard that they're doing something but pretty
much disbanded at this point i think he was he was in city of souls as well
but he actually recorded a vocal for myriad and we released that we released
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that on a seven inch nice she's the
only guy who's ever really fully Fully delivered a full song, the vocal.
And yeah, but other than that, you were instrumental.
Yeah, that's great. In the back of my mind, I always keep in mind or think about
the fact that it also must be really nice to be able to mix a bit better without
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vocals and guitars competing at the same time.
So that's, we'll call that a side benefit. Right. So, yeah.
Yeah, that's right. Easy to mix live. Yeah, Mark used to always say that on the King's Arms.
Yeah. Yeah, so I was going to ask you, what's your favorite venue that you've
played here in the country?
It'd be the King's Arms, but it's obviously gone now. But we played many shows there.
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That was really sad when the King's Arms was gone.
It was a real hub of culture and a lot of great bands coming through,
International X playing the King's Arms. It was perfect.
So that was probably the best memories of playing shows are at the King's Arms.
Where else we've played galatos in the studio and a whammy of course and the
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wine cellar i mean they're all good we're lucky to have these venues i don't
want to be too too picky but um the king's arms was was special and something
was really lost when my wine cellar was closed nice very nice,
so what was your your first guitar or amplifier rig
what did that look like my very first one
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yeah uh i would have been 14 i
think 14 or 15 and my
dad he told me to buy an electric guitar i
was pretty into like green day and green day dookie and nirvana and stuff at
that point and i got some crappy samick samick electric guitar bender i think
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was a fender copy it's kind of light blue turquoise kind of looked like the
green day guy's guitar, I think.
That was my first electric guitar. Yeah, I was inspired by there was an independent
music, independent guitar store called Mainly Guitars in the 90s,
and that was just in Takapuna there,
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and there was a real small community hub of music fans at the time.
And of course, the popular music at the time then was the grunge bands and alternative
metal and and and metal like metallica and slayer.
I got some lessons there from a guy called Stu. Nigel Murphy was teaching there.
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He played in the band Subtract, that metal band Subtract.
And Evan Short was teaching there from Concord Dawn, and he played in Cobra
Khan. I think he was in Subtract as well.
Andy Lynch was teaching there.
Andy from the Feelers, he's a great guitarist. He went to school with Andy.
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And Millen Williams, my friend, he was teaching there as well.
Nolan was in Cobra Khan, Lord of Tigers. He's a great musician.
And anyway, those just memories that tie into getting that first guitar.
And I think I had a Samick amp as well.
That's my first rig. I think the first pedal I got was a DS-1,
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a Boss DS-1 from Mainley Guitars.
Dave McGrath was the guy who ran Mainley Guitars.
So he certainly set me on my way at that place, Mainley Guitars.
Yeah it sounds like quite the hotbed at the time so yeah until the rock shop rolled in and,
consumed all yeah yeah i have
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noticed that i have noticed that pattern i guess is
a good way to put it from the rock shop
so is your rig mostly
i mean other than the i know you have a lot of the the
digital effects that you're using for the ambience bits that
you use how much of how it's the split between like a
digital and analog rig that you that you
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run okay so fast forward to my actual rig
yeah yeah yeah not my rig when i
was a teenager i actually not actually
not too many years after that i got a jackson guitar i love that guitar but
we we ran over it in a van we backed over that in a van sadly one night and
severed the whole neck because of a soft case But I got hold of an ADA MP1 preamp
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and a power amp that went with it, the ADA power amp.
I was washing dishes at cafes to earn some money. I saved $1,000 and I bought a stack.
I bought a Marshall cab, not JMP1, the ADA MP1.
My parents said, are you sure you want to spend your money on this? And I said, yeah.
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Absolutely and so i had this big stat sitting right by
my bed and i love that rig i
love the sound of that that ada mp1 fans like
i think metallica used that you can
see it in the nothing else matters video but it
was really noisy it had a great course a beautiful chorus on
that ada in ada mp mp1 and
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and but it was it was noisy at least the one
i had was noisy so i eventually changed it out
for a jmp1 i bought it like 600 bucks on
trade me i've got a jmp1 chris monk from
the guitarist from new way home he had
a jmp1 and it sounded great and you know
that was a really popular preamp smashing pumpkins used
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that deaf tones used that i think
deaf leopard used it and that just sounded as
good as the ada mp1 or better and and
no noise or you know very little noise and i
got the power amp i got it's a 120 i've
still got that's the same rig i've still got it's a it's a
120 120 valve state
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marshall power amp it was just a hell of a lot lighter than the actual valve
one and as i've got older it's got heavier and heavier so i'm pleased i chose
that but it does have some resonance and sort of tone shaping features on that
power amp but you know I'm not one to change things that aren't broken,
so I've always been a fan of that sound. I've kept it ever since.
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And even the guitars, I cobbled together some money because we realized that
when I was in this band with Janice before Mothra, it was called Enzyme,
we would sound horribly out of tune on stage.
And so the bassist said, you need to get a better guitar, something that stays in tune.
So the little money I had and could afford,
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forward and from the trade and exchange so this is pre-trade pre-trade
me trading exchange you had to go through the actual the
newspaper i found a gibson it wasn't a
you know a flash one but it was called the ball a really light
version of the les ball and it
was and i've had it ever since i've played that ever since as
well and i have never changed the pickups out i like
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those pickups they're hot they're pretty dark and you know i i use a lot of
feedback i love using feedback for ambience and you know pickups can can definitely
change for feedback response and things like that i've never changed pickups
out i did look them up once and i can't remember what they call.
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Yeah but that's that's the rig this the jmp1 the
valve state martial power amp i've got
two martial cabs 19 1960 cabs
and i only really use one and
and the and the gibson the paul i've got
two of those but one of them i yeah one of them i use in
the band and the other one for guitar teaching and i've
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got a lot of pedals huge amount of pedals yeah i
i was remarking to some friends that were at the show at
the uh catalog of pedals
there that were there in front of you so it was
yeah yeah that was that was pretty epic definitely uh
definitely good though but i mean sounds sound is great
i really enjoyed your tone and and the way it
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everything kind of combined together sounded spot on
and yeah i've been a fan of the jmp ones for a
long time always been one of of those things where keep
my eye open for one from time to time but
yeah yeah i'll be looking out to find it
looks like they've gone up in value actually they're worth
they're over a grand now yeah yeah you
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want to find them i got an xfx just for recording the xfx2 so i've got one of
those but you know it's it's honestly it's it's way above my head it's it's
far too many parameters and I actually haven't even tried to use it a lot,
but it's pretty handy for recording.
Yeah, that was actually going to be a question I had, was where do you sit within
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that modeling and plugins and physical amplifiers and which do you prefer and why?
But it sounds like you've kind of halfway answered that already.
Yeah i'm i'm into anything that
sounds good so for recording the xfx but
for someone like me who i don't have access um where
i look am i where i'm living to you know to just mic up amps and record loudly
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with with mics so you know the xfx is great you can you can pretty much use
any virtual mic and position and but not just the xfx is all there's piles of
stuff now Now, when I bought it,
those neural DSP plugins hadn't come out yet, I don't think,
and now there's a lot of those.
There's a lot of like, what are they, sponsored artist plugins,
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like there's the Nolly plugin.
There's a lot of those now. They sound, I think apparently they're great.
There's the positive grid stuff and there's Kemper and Helix and all sorts of modelers now.
It's great. It makes it so much easier to record.
Probably actually, I might try and use something like that live, perhaps.
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We'll give it a shot anyway for much easier than lugging heavy equipment around all the time.
Just worried about using the ambience feedback and things like that.
But I saw Sheehard using only DI at the town hall in the last year.
They were getting feedback. back i saw them going close phil knight going very
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close to the monitor stage monitors to definitely try and get that feedback
so then the look is easy as going up to your big care but yeah,
much more economical to tour and travel yeah yeah for sure yeah and i see and
like you're talking about the artist packs i've seen a lot of folks that are
creating their own irs for speaker cabinets as well and so you can buy a custom
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one from them for a few dollars kind of thing and And they're just pulling some extra in on the side,
which is really good. Yeah, it's very cool.
That so you kind of gave me the full rundown there
on the guitars but i always ask if there's a guitar or an amplifier that
you feel like got away one that you you shouldn't have
let go of or i mean i guess it could have been the jackson
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that got tread marks over the the neck of it so but yeah just curious if there's
one of those floating around an amp that got away and guitar or guitar yeah
yeah i mean i did love that jackson but i don't know if i how much i'd like
it now now. I think it had a floating bridge.
It was cool when I was a teenager.
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I replaced it with another Jackson and it was nowhere near as good.
I don't really know much about guitars.
I still don't know that much about guitars really, technically,
but I actually still have the body of that guitar that I ran over.
So I could maybe try and repair pair it but i don't think
it's it's destroyed pretty much amps the
80 you know the ada mp1 was was great but
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jmp1 was better yeah i'm
not that much of a nerd on gear to be honest i tried
some um big other martial amps like i
remember the jcm jcm 800
what the one with the reverb but i always gravitated
towards that the more digital preamp sound
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that the ada and the jmp1 had really precise
defined by definition especially on low
tunings so much nice definition which
i kind of lost on just well for
me anyway it sounded um muddy and
undefined on the jcm 800 is probably
not wasn't the right kind of amp yeah so that
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digital more digital preamp sound has always been
what i've what i've liked yeah thanks sort
of the diphthones handsome helmet sort of tone i always i'm always like the
sound of that yeah yeah so what are some of your favorite outdoor artists that
you listen to i saw wax chattels play the other night do you know them I don't know, but...
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They were brilliant. They blew my mind. Amazing band.
I saw them at Whammy Background a few weeks ago.
Just insane. I'd seen them a few years ago at the Others Way Festival,
and I just remember being just blown away then as well.
I didn't remember too much, and I actually didn't venture into their music and
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listen to it much over the years.
But when I saw they were playing again, I remembered how good they were when
I saw them, and so I went to it.
I got the last ticket, actually, and I don't really know how to describe them.
Sort of post-punk guitar music without guitars, which is what I thought of,
and that's actually what they wrote on their bio as well. Oh, that's funny.
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It's a bass player, drummer. There's the drummer from, he's in Miss June as well. Mm-hmm.
Sort of like dillinger escape plan with meets
battles maybe battles that that band
so the guy's got a the the guy who sings peter i
think his name is he's got this big sample synth set
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up making crazy sounds really interesting samples
and sounds and doing crazy stuff with his vocals a lot of heavy delay but he's
controlling it really well and the drum is just he's just out of control that
guy he's hitting so hard hitting so hard and very minimal drum kit it's a tiny drum kit,
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probably just a floor tom maybe in a snare and then the bass player bass players
you know some pretty heavy bass distorted bass at times but that blew me away
actually a few weeks ago i was really stoked on that other kiwi acts well there's
new way home there who aren't together anymore they They were amazing.
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My friend Mikey plays in the band Outside In.
They're really good. They're like progressive rock. I'm actually doing a bit
of work with him at the moment, trying to write some parts to his new album. Oh, great.
We've played with a lot of bands over the years. Most of them have disbanded now.
The shelf life of bands is generally a couple of years, I think, or a few years.
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We used to play with Lord of Tigers. They were great. They're obviously gone.
Cobra Khan, they were awesome.
I'm sure there's some other bands that I should be thinking of.
There's a lot of good bands. Yeah, Althea Dyer.
Yeah, yeah. I'm fairly new to the country, but I was immediately struck with
basically the diversity and the amount of community that there is within the
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band and live music community here.
So I'm on my own learning journey and cataloging. This is part of that. So.
A band I really like is Ginzu and the State Knives.
Ginzu and the State Knives. That one. Awesome band. That one is crossing my
desk. I have not heard yet though. So, but yeah.
They are awesome. And they keep releasing these songs with these videos.
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I don't know where they get the videos from, but they must pull them from somewhere.
The kind of cartoon kind of humorous,
visuals to there it's yeah it's that's
great no that's great i'll definitely definitely definitely check that one out
so yeah i was gonna ask who who you believe the most unsung player or musician
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that the rest of the world should
be hearing about from from here from new zealand yeah from new zealand.
Unsung. Yeah. Should be mainstream or should be popular. Should be popular, yeah.
I don't know, really. Like those bands I just referenced, just bands that sprung
to mind from the sort of underground scene that I know around here.
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So I don't, all those bands are great, in my opinion.
I think New Way Home, they should have been, they should have had huge success.
Especially in the early days as a four-piece.
They had Tristan on drums. I think he drummed for Blacklist after that.
And yeah, they were amazing. It was a shame they disbanded.
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They replaced Tristan with Scott. After a while, he was also great.
And they got a second guitarist. I personally felt the first lineup was something
that had a bit more magic to it.
Yeah your way home awesome i've still got there yeah
seat first cd somewhere nice anomaly yeah
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very nice that's fantastic is
there new material coming new recording from mothra yes
there is a lot actually we take forever we
have a whole new album finished just needs
to be mastered and also an ep so ep
of five songs i think and the album's got 12 songs
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on it so we've been been working for years just chipping
away at that you know life gets busy ruben and james have
got families and we're all self-employed as
well so you know it's um lucky to just fortunate to still be going and have
found a way to sustain the band we take big breaks and then we quite selective
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on gigs and just found a way to sort of keep the band alive without burning it out and we just Just,
you know, we get on really well.
We share a lot of humor. There's just a lot of humor that goes on,
a lot of jokes when we rehearse.
But we take it seriously as well. And what was the question?
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It was just about the new material. Oh, new material. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.
I wandered off a bit there. Yeah, so album in the can and an EP.
And, yeah, we'll get it out. We'll get it out soon. I'd like to get a music video for it.
We've got a good friend, my friend Sean Layden. he's in the netherlands he made
the two videos that we released for the beginning in splinters,
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but he's pretty busy with his he's a professional videographer
he might make something for us it would
also be nice to get some kind of distribution don't know
if it'll be possible but we'll probably try and do that there might be a label
somewhere that's that likes the album enough to want to release it but if not
we'll just we'll release it ourselves again and it would be good to get something
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else soon at least even a teaser just one track but really happy with it happy with the ep.
Just me to push it over the line. Yeah, that's great.
I'm looking forward to it for sure. So yeah, I'll be probably bothering you about the date.
Maybe I'll just be that little conscience on you.
(27:14):
Ask him when it's coming. So yeah, that's fantastic.
I made it out of the quicksand show before I had a chance to,
because I realized the other day that all my t-shirts are falling apart.
And I'm like, I need some more t-shirts. and I really wish I'd picked up a Mothra
t-shirt. So are you guys going to have some merch available at the Handsome Show? Yeah.
(27:35):
Yep. Yep, we do have merch. We're pretty much sold out of vinyl,
I think, of Decision Process.
I don't think there's many left. But we've got some 7-inch CDs and,
yeah, we've got t-shirts. Nice. We've got t-shirts.
Yeah, if you've got some vinyl, I'll probably be finding out how to grab some of that, too.
Yeah uh so when when you guys actually land
(27:58):
your gigs with i don't play out by the way i'm more
of a sit at home and and and noodle and record
some stuff and see where that takes me but when
you guys do line up those gigs do you get contacted usually by the promoters
because they know it's a good fit sometimes yep so quick work sand we were nice
yeah it just depends yep or mastodon Gojira which was the support acts were
(28:23):
cancelled we were contacted for that.
Usually we submit. I just submit to the promoter or I might know the promoter.
I might even know the band.
Yeah, so it just depends, but it could be either or. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, so Ben from Valhalla, and he's amazing.
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He's bringing so many bands. It's great. It just seems like a full-time job
for him and running Valhalla.
And Jason from Waxstar, he did Quicksand. Andy's got Sparta coming.
And of course, they had the handsome tribute with Peter Mangetti.
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So it's good to have these guys bringing gigs in. Yeah.
There's a few Australian ones sometimes. There's a guy from your mate,
Bookings, and there's been a few over the years who have come and gone,
actually. Of course, yeah.
They keep the scene alive, these guys bringing in bands of this genre.
Genre, so hats off to them.
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Yeah. I was going to ask like how COVID impacted everything that you do actually.
And do you, is there some meaningful change that came out of that,
the pandemic for, for you?
Yeah, well, we had the Deftones gig, so yeah, we were two days out from opening
for Deftones and that was canceled because they were playing the Download Festival in Australia.
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Australia, I think My Chemical Romance was headlining and they pulled out,
as soon as they pulled out, that download collapsed and that meant Deftones
weren't coming and none of those bands were coming.
I think there was Baroness were also coming, but I'd be faith no more.
So that was a real bummer, that would have been our biggest gig for sure.
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And we had been rehearsing pretty hard up until then and so we just...
Didn't rehearse for quite a while over the pandemic, but I kept working on the
album on the studio stuff and actually had a bit more time to do that and more
time to finish recording.
So that was, that was a plus. Yeah.
And it was, you know, I actually didn't, didn't mind the, I quite enjoyed the quiet around here.
(30:39):
Yeah. We, yep. We totally comment on that every once in a while when,
you know, either the planes are going over, you know, a whole crew of motorcycles
goes by on the road it's like i miss sometimes i miss lockdown.
But you know it certainly it was devastating for the music the live music industry
(31:01):
yeah it was it took a long time to come right because it kind of kept opening
up and then people were just,
scared to go out no one wanted to go out certainly not enough and i think yeah
i saw tool played just Just before the pandemic, just before lockdown happened here,
it must have been sort of March 2020 and the Pixies.
(31:24):
And then I think there was the WOMAD Festival this time, this time of year in
2020. And then it was, that was it.
Yeah. Yeah. It was madness. But it's all, it's all good now, finally. Yeah. Yeah.
One band coming in. Yep.
Yep. Yeah. I was, I was all masked up for the show.
I think I was one of two people there but I've got immunocompromised folks in
(31:47):
the house so I can't take a whole lot of chances I actually got COVID straight
after the quicksand for the first time I hadn't had it,
and quite a few of my friends did as well so must have been a must have been
a rife mothership that night.
Glad I was masked up that's very very
(32:10):
glad yeah yeah and so
so you you said you teach lessons um is that is that
the day job yep i've been a guitar teacher
for 20 years i think round about
so i've been teaching guitar privately and and a couple of schools around here
for for many years i also run a little band program and two two primary schools
(32:33):
here in devonport oh nice just getting kids playing playing in bands at lunchtime
We rehearse and then do performances,
do end-of-term shows.
We actually played it at a school fair yesterday.
Yeah, and we play a lot of songs. There's White Stripes and Do I Have the Tiger,
Taylor Swift, Post Malone, Nirvana sometimes, whatever.
(32:57):
I try and accommodate the requests of the children. Right, right.
That's fantastic. Yeah. Yep. So yeah, a lot of music-related stuff.
Yeah, that's great. And I do all the mixing, a lot of recording as well for the band.
Do you guys record in a studio or do you record more at home kind of thing?
(33:21):
We do the drums in the studio, of course.
Pretty fine art, recording drums well. So we did the drums with Dave Rhodes down at the depot here.
There's a studio here in Devonport. Dave Rhodes took care of that.
But I did all the guitars myself because I've got the Axe FX,
so if you know how to use it and dial in a good tone, it's a great tool. That's fantastic.
(33:43):
And the bass, we recorded the bass ourselves as well.
I actually just used an SM57 and it sounded great. The bass sounds really good.
So I just did that in my teaching space where I teach, got a studio in Devonport.
Just set up Ruben's rig and put the position at SM57 and a DI actually.
But it sounds really good. Yeah, that's great.
(34:07):
That's really great. Yeah, I have one of the two notes attenuators,
and then I load up, I got some of the Celestian IRs. So it's nice.
I can run my 50 water into that and then run that directly into the audio interface.
And then it's not, you know, rattling the neighbors around. So yeah, exactly.
(34:28):
Yeah, that works out pretty well. But I also have the Tonex application from
IK Multimedia that I mess around with as well.
Um yeah which is kind of fun so yeah yeah
yeah it's great we're we're so lucky to
have all this technology at our fingertips yeah it's
pretty great yeah i i did an experiment about creating my
(34:50):
own ir for actually a cabinet i built from scratch as well and that was quite
the experience i i'm not still not happy with it i don't think it get actually
captured it the way i want it to so well it's fine it's basically keeps me keeps
me going on this kind of thing so So, yeah. Wow. You made your own IR?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Using logic, I could just create an impulse response for the cabinet itself.
(35:15):
And I mic'd it up two different, because the cabinet has mismatches speakers.
So, it's got a V30 and G1265.
So, kind of a slightly different flavor out of each of those.
And I mic'd it up with two different mics as well, and then blended them together
and created a stereo IR actually out of it. So it sounds okay,
(35:36):
but I think it was the first one I've ever even tried to do.
So I think there's more experimentation needed there. But yeah, it's fine.
Yeah, cool. Yeah, I don't really, I'm not very technical with that stuff.
Zoran, you know, Zoran, he's a really good engineer, producer guy in Auckland. I think he's out west.
(35:57):
He told me to get, what are they?
I can't remember the company that made these IRs. I can't think of it,
but Zoran's my guy if I need advice on a plug-in.
What's some gear, what IRs to use. Yeah. Yeah, man.
Yeah. Zoran was in New Way Home for a while when they got two guitarists.
(36:22):
Okay. But he plays a huge role in the scene as well.
He's always recording bands. He's always taking care of bands' recording needs.
Do you use... Shout out. Yeah, no doubt.
Do you use a lot of alternate tunings when you play? What does that usually look like?
(36:42):
Yeah, a lot, actually. Almost every song is in a different tuning that night.
And they're all just mostly inspired by other bands.
So Isis on Oceanic, I think the first song is the beginning.
In the beginning and the end.
Because they just use six-string guitars. I'm a big fan of what can be done
(37:04):
on a six-string guitar without using seven strings and eight strings.
You've got enough threads already on a six-string.
Adam Jones did it on Parabola as well on Tool.
He knocks the heavy E string down to an F sharp anyway for Isis.
And on Parabola, I think it's B and E. B and E and so we have a few songs similar
(37:30):
to that, not quite the same but along those lines,
and I'll drop A, Neurosis did a lot of that some of them are even different
I'll tweak the heavy E down to a C sharp and maybe another string as well just
to sort of open the instrument up and get some,
(37:50):
sounds and chords that you can't achieve even as a standard tuning but that's
the beauty of the guitar and you can manipulate it into different tunings and
really expand the potential of the chords and melodies that you can create.
Yeah. You're always exploring with different tunings and I've been working on
(38:13):
a song recently that is just in standard.
Occasionally stumble across an idea that I find interesting enough in standard
tuning. There's a lot you can do in standard tuning.
Actually, funnily enough, I don't have any songs in drop D.
For years, I would play in drop D back in the day, but yeah,
a lot of drop B, drop A, drop F sharp, drop C sharp variations and tweaking
(38:38):
the higher strings as well sometimes.
I only use one guitar live and have to be careful the order of the tunings because
your guitars will get upset if you tend to need to start with the lower tunings first.
It will be more stable as you tune up through the set rather than the other way around.
(38:59):
You'll come to a point where your guitar would go quite out of tune when you're
abusing it that way with tuning down too fast and things like that.
Yeah yeah and i noticed you at the tuner
quite a bit during the show and i thought to myself like it's
either got to be alternative tunings or like he's got to
get some new gear because it's just not staying in
(39:21):
tune but yeah i kind of assumed that it was it was definitely alternative alternative
tunings so yeah yeah yeah it's a lot of old tunings yeah but what was there
that night it would have been the double f sharp and then and then b b and b
and f sharp and then c sharp and And then double A for the last two.
And the last ones also double drop A and a D down to a C. So every song was a different tuning.
(39:50):
But funnily enough, I've never got it wrong, I don't think, ever.
I've never started playing a song and it hadn't tuned correctly, ever.
That's great. 16 years. Yeah. But I try to trigger an interesting soundscape
and atmosphere while I'm tuning.
Not just have dead silence. I saw Isis do that. Actually Isis did that in 2007,
(40:12):
Late Flight of the King's Arms with Jacob.
And I noticed them just having this amazing sound when they were tuning out
in between songs and I thought, I want to do that.
Yeah, so we do that. But a friend of mine actually said he didn't like it.
Said can you just stop stop the sound just for
us for a moment i thought it was nice i thought
(40:35):
it all sounded good and made everything feel a bit more cohesive
i think so yeah yeah keep the flow going
yeah especially without vocals we don't
have to there's not much banter going on you know over the mic so
something something's good yeah yeah yeah
yeah that is good yeah and the other thing i like about it too is
that uh i see a lot of folks talking about like
(40:57):
you really need a completely different set of
guitar if you're going to be you know doing playing most.
Of your songs in a lower tuning and and it's it's
it's also nice seeing seeing folks not do
that and it working because yeah it's more
of i think i think there's sometimes a
bit too much purity and that that concept of
(41:19):
needing it to you know this is my drop d guitar and
that is the only guitar that shall do that because nothing
else can sound like that but i like the versatility comment
that you made there has pretty spot on yeah yeah
i've got enough gear to carry as i was thinking about a
guitar yeah but um there's
a i put a quite a lot of relief in the neck of that
(41:40):
gibson guitar years ago and you know
it's crazily enough it handles low
tuning and and standard so i
don't know i don't quite know how but you would think it wouldn't be
able to do both the luthier who got the relief and he said you can't have it
both ways you know you want it to be able to handle these strange low tunings
(42:00):
it's not going to stay in tune and standard but it actually does yeah so i'll
leave it i'll leave it as is which i have i've just left it yeah.
Actually let me do another question about i was going to ask you oh string gauge like
what's what gauge of strings do you typically use i'm using
54s 10 to 54s i think the the yellow pack ernie balls beefy they're beefy slinkies
(42:23):
but i actually changed the a out from a 42 to a 48 so i buy a single packs of
48s and put them into the a string because when i was tuning the a down years
ago to to maybe a D on the A,
it was too loose, couldn't handle it.
So the 48 just gives it a bit more stability because I am tuning that A string down quite a lot as well.
(42:47):
What about tuning it down to E and F sharp? Okay.
Sometimes D. So yeah, that's it. So 10 to 54 and 48 instead of 42 on the A string. Nice.
Yeah, I saw Paul Gilbert talking about what gauge strings he uses and he was
talking about how light of a gauge that he actually uses because then he can
(43:08):
leave the action really high so that he can play slide better at the same time
as with the light string, he can still mash it down really easily.
So I was like, oh, that's an interesting thought process there.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's always hard to use a slide guitar unless you raise the action. Yeah.
(43:29):
One thing I have noticed is that playing with a lot heavier gauge strings,
things this having stainless steel frets tends to
make it feel like a lighter gauge because things are just slippery
across the fretboard so that's another
thing where i'm constantly on the lookout for another guitar
with stainless frets because i yeah i actually really really enjoyed the guitar
(43:52):
that i got to play that had stainless frets on it so that was super it just
again it felt it felt It felt like a lighter gauge because everything was so
good to do a bend or some vibrato and,
and it, it just, they just slide right over it. Like it's butter.
So, so that was kind of neat. Yeah.
I don't know much about frets other than the different sizes,
(44:14):
but the ones on my guitar are pretty, they're quite low and flat, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. And be pretty worn, pretty worn down now. Yeah. Yeah.
Plays, plays good. Yeah. That's what matters. So that's what matters.
Awesome. Hey, we're coming out to the top of the hour there.
(44:35):
I really, again, really appreciate your time on this and looking forward to
getting this one edited and out there as well this is my second second call
so thank you appreciate that it's it's a whole new thing for me but but it's
something that i'm invested in and and just.
Obsessed i guess it's a good way to put it yeah yeah yeah good
on your way that's great it's awesome to get something like this happening
(44:57):
yeah it's not there's not enough of them happening locally yeah
and it's it's definitely that that's exactly it right so
uh and i mean you've rattled off so many names now on my
i'm like inventorying them all and of course we'll be going back to
through the recording and writing everything down so more people
to contact and reach out to for sure so yeah
yeah yeah i talked to glenn evans
(45:18):
from mr glenn's pickups a couple weeks ago and that was the very
first one and glenn's amazing and he was
laughing pretty hard about the fact that you know when i mentioned the community
he's like yeah we all know each other every one of us
so he's not wrong yeah
yeah yeah yeah it is very very
tight man yeah it is new zealand after all so thanks
(45:39):
again can't thank you enough and i'm gonna try i'm
gonna try to get out to the the handsome show if i
can we'll see how everybody's doing here at the house so that's april is that
april 6th april the 6th at whammy bar yep it's swallowing the rats playing Mothra's
opening and then it's Handsome and I'm playing guitar It's Fonty Witch but playing
(46:01):
the Handsome album in its entirety Nice.
With Peter Mingetti so he's one of my all time Favourites, favourite players
From the early Helmet albums And the Handsome album so Try and make it to that,
that'll be great And then it's Wellington on the 5th Wellington at Balhalla
on Friday the 5th Of April.
Nice. Very nice. Awesome. Looking forward to it Cool.
(46:24):
Awesome Awesome. Hey, thanks a lot, Hugh. And like I said, I'll send you a follow-up
message and let you know when it's all live. Yeah.
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Wade. Nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you.
I hope to talk to you soon.
Yeah, talk soon. Yep. Bye-bye. Cheers, Wade. Bye.
Thanks again for stopping by the Alto Rojo Guitar Show. Tune in for episode
three, where I'll be talking to Simon Gottlieb, musician and amp technician
(46:47):
from Bogan Boutique Amplifiers.
Until next time, that's us.
Music.
Music.
(00:11):
Kia ora! Welcome back to the Aotearoa Guitar Show. Today I'll be speaking with
Hugh Allen of the band Mothra, an Auckland-based three-piece instrumental heavy group.
Mothra will be opening for Hochiwich, a tribute to Handsome on the 5th in Wellington
and the 6th in Auckland, where Hugh will also be playing second guitar for the
(00:32):
headliner. More details on that in the video.
So let's get on with it and talk to Hugh. you. Hey, thanks for taking the time.
I really appreciate you taking time to be on the show.
This is a show that I'm basically creating to kind of catalog current players
as well as the past history of guitars and amplification and everything that
goes into all of those things in New Zealand.
And I had a wonderful time seeing you open for Quicksand. That was a fantastic
(00:55):
show and was super impressed. That was great.
The first experience of Mothra and seeing you guys play, and that was just really a highlight for me.
So just wanted to pass that on.
Thanks, Wade. I appreciate that. Yeah. So how long have Mothra been together
and how long have you guys been pulling that one off?
(01:17):
Mothra, I think we formed in 2008 or definitely late 2008.
So it's been quite a while now. What, 15 years? Yeah. That was my maths.
Something like that. Close. Yeah, it's been 16 years. Yeah Yeah, so it's been a while.
Yeah, very nice So you guys are a three-piece instrumental act,
(01:39):
which is really kind of unique these days but it seems to also be a thing that I've seen a lot of,
Growth in to when I think about bands like animals as leaders and some of the
other three-piece instrumental groups out there How has that been as it harder
to get gigs or is it something that that's not so bad? I.
Yeah i mean yeah there's definitely a global community of
(02:02):
of instrumental bands post-rock or
post-metal or avant-garde sort
of more virtuous i don't
know if virtuosic is a word more bands with who are
focused more on individual virtuosity like
like animals as leaders and bands like that but you
know that's a real genre and promoters who who want to
(02:24):
bring bands you know in that genre to New Zealand
we always if we like the
band and want to have a go at opening and being a supporter
and we try and get on the bill so we've
had a lot of success I mean for a lot of internationals over the
years and you know I guess our music leans towards the heavier side of things
(02:47):
as well as as quiet time ambient and clean not not so heavy side as well so
we've We've opened for bands who are more post-rock,
and we've also played with internationals who are really heavy,
like Dillinger and Skateplan,
and Helmets and Devin Townsend, and we were about to open for Deftones and Gojira
(03:10):
and Mastodon, so it can swing both ways, you know, it's such a broad genre.
Yeah, and I feel like, based on what I've seen, it's
a nice pocket that you all sit in where where you
can kind of span a bit of that that genre which
is really cool i've been really impressed with that and yeah so did you have
(03:32):
a vocalist in the band at one time or has it always been a three-piece instrumental
i'll give you a little bit of context on on how how the band formed if you want
yeah that'd be great yeah so late 2008 i used to have a band with james i went
school with James the drummer and we had
a band maybe a few years before like around
(03:53):
2003 I think called Enzyme and we did
have a singer for that band a friend of mine called Matt he's actually singing
and then we've got a gig coming up with um it's it's the Handsome Tribute yeah
I don't know if you're familiar with that album and actually that that vocalist
who was in this band band previously that James and I played in early 2000s, 2003.
(04:15):
He's singing this gig. So he got the gig, singing the Handsome album. Oh, that's great.
Anyway, that didn't work out. And I just started working on some demos after a few years later.
And James came around one day to my flat and he heard it and said,
that's my genre, I should be playing this.
And I was just programming drums at the time.
And then Ruben was just a friend. He actually was coming for some guitar lessons.
(04:39):
I've been teaching guitar for
a long time, and I just sort of rubbed him into having a go on the bass.
And we kind of never looked back. He took it up well, and that was that.
We just started rehearsing, had a lot of fun, worked on the demos that I'd made,
quite a few on the first album that were initially demos that I'd made by myself.
And we did trial a lot of vocalists. There were But a lot of singers who tried
(05:03):
were really keen and we'd do gigs early on and there was always someone who
would latch on and be really keen to come along to rehearsal and have a shot.
Most people, to be honest, we didn't feel that it made the band sound better.
We didn't feel that it made the music any better.
And it kind of just made a focus on the vocal rather than the music that we
(05:26):
were writing and it didn't make it sound any better than it was.
So there were a couple of vocalists who really wrote some great parts to songs,
but they couldn't commit to the band.
It was Steve from the band Full Code.
He jammed with us for a while back in the early days, and he was really good.
We wanted to work with Steve, but he shot off to Melbourne.
(05:49):
And there were a couple of others. So we just kept playing, and it just kind of worked, I think.
We found a way to to write music and tell
a story with our songwriting that that wasn't
too boring and didn't lack engagement with our
vocals and and people would tell us
that after you know we kept playing and i remember fans people
(06:12):
at the show saying don't get a singer it's sweet we
love it like and i and i was interested in
triggering samples and atmospheres like
bands like neurosis and Isis who we were really influenced
by and at first I had someone just
triggering that these sounds on a what was
the the first the iPod or
(06:34):
an iPod and I would just sort of cue them into I've not
Adam say like play that part now but then
this pedal came out it was a it's the jam
man digitech jam man and you're
able to just trigger samples load anything into it trigger
or whatever you wanted there's probably much better ones out there now but
i still use that that old one and yeah so
(06:55):
just sort of painting some extra sound over what we were doing to make it more
interesting something to make up maybe for not having vocals but we certainly
tried and actually the door is always open for for singers we never adverse
people trying to sing and richard Richard Simpson,
our friend from, he was in that great band, New Way Home.
(07:18):
I used to love that band. I'd go see them in the early 2000s as well.
They were mind-blowing and they disbanded
i don't know sometimes you hear a peep from
their page from from richard that they're doing something but pretty
much disbanded at this point i think he was he was in city of souls as well
but he actually recorded a vocal for myriad and we released that we released
(07:41):
that on a seven inch nice she's the
only guy who's ever really fully Fully delivered a full song, the vocal.
And yeah, but other than that, you were instrumental.
Yeah, that's great. In the back of my mind, I always keep in mind or think about
the fact that it also must be really nice to be able to mix a bit better without
(08:03):
vocals and guitars competing at the same time.
So that's, we'll call that a side benefit. Right. So, yeah.
Yeah, that's right. Easy to mix live. Yeah, Mark used to always say that on the King's Arms.
Yeah. Yeah, so I was going to ask you, what's your favorite venue that you've
played here in the country?
It'd be the King's Arms, but it's obviously gone now. But we played many shows there.
(08:26):
That was really sad when the King's Arms was gone.
It was a real hub of culture and a lot of great bands coming through,
International X playing the King's Arms. It was perfect.
So that was probably the best memories of playing shows are at the King's Arms.
Where else we've played galatos in the studio and a whammy of course and the
(08:50):
wine cellar i mean they're all good we're lucky to have these venues i don't
want to be too too picky but um the king's arms was was special and something
was really lost when my wine cellar was closed nice very nice,
so what was your your first guitar or amplifier rig
what did that look like my very first one
(09:10):
yeah uh i would have been 14 i
think 14 or 15 and my
dad he told me to buy an electric guitar i
was pretty into like green day and green day dookie and nirvana and stuff at
that point and i got some crappy samick samick electric guitar bender i think
(09:32):
was a fender copy it's kind of light blue turquoise kind of looked like the
green day guy's guitar, I think.
That was my first electric guitar. Yeah, I was inspired by there was an independent
music, independent guitar store called Mainly Guitars in the 90s,
and that was just in Takapuna there,
(09:54):
and there was a real small community hub of music fans at the time.
And of course, the popular music at the time then was the grunge bands and alternative
metal and and and metal like metallica and slayer.
I got some lessons there from a guy called Stu. Nigel Murphy was teaching there.
(10:17):
He played in the band Subtract, that metal band Subtract.
And Evan Short was teaching there from Concord Dawn, and he played in Cobra
Khan. I think he was in Subtract as well.
Andy Lynch was teaching there.
Andy from the Feelers, he's a great guitarist. He went to school with Andy.
(10:37):
And Millen Williams, my friend, he was teaching there as well.
Nolan was in Cobra Khan, Lord of Tigers. He's a great musician.
And anyway, those just memories that tie into getting that first guitar.
And I think I had a Samick amp as well.
That's my first rig. I think the first pedal I got was a DS-1,
(10:57):
a Boss DS-1 from Mainley Guitars.
Dave McGrath was the guy who ran Mainley Guitars.
So he certainly set me on my way at that place, Mainley Guitars.
Yeah it sounds like quite the hotbed at the time so yeah until the rock shop rolled in and,
consumed all yeah yeah i have
(11:19):
noticed that i have noticed that pattern i guess is
a good way to put it from the rock shop
so is your rig mostly
i mean other than the i know you have a lot of the the
digital effects that you're using for the ambience bits that
you use how much of how it's the split between like a
digital and analog rig that you that you
(11:40):
run okay so fast forward to my actual rig
yeah yeah yeah not my rig when i
was a teenager i actually not actually
not too many years after that i got a jackson guitar i love that guitar but
we we ran over it in a van we backed over that in a van sadly one night and
severed the whole neck because of a soft case But I got hold of an ADA MP1 preamp
(12:04):
and a power amp that went with it, the ADA power amp.
I was washing dishes at cafes to earn some money. I saved $1,000 and I bought a stack.
I bought a Marshall cab, not JMP1, the ADA MP1.
My parents said, are you sure you want to spend your money on this? And I said, yeah.
(12:25):
Absolutely and so i had this big stat sitting right by
my bed and i love that rig i
love the sound of that that ada mp1 fans like
i think metallica used that you can
see it in the nothing else matters video but it
was really noisy it had a great course a beautiful chorus on
that ada in ada mp mp1 and
(12:45):
and but it was it was noisy at least the one
i had was noisy so i eventually changed it out
for a jmp1 i bought it like 600 bucks on
trade me i've got a jmp1 chris monk from
the guitarist from new way home he had
a jmp1 and it sounded great and you know
that was a really popular preamp smashing pumpkins used
(13:05):
that deaf tones used that i think
deaf leopard used it and that just sounded as
good as the ada mp1 or better and and
no noise or you know very little noise and i
got the power amp i got it's a 120 i've
still got that's the same rig i've still got it's a it's a
120 120 valve state
(13:28):
marshall power amp it was just a hell of a lot lighter than the actual valve
one and as i've got older it's got heavier and heavier so i'm pleased i chose
that but it does have some resonance and sort of tone shaping features on that
power amp but you know I'm not one to change things that aren't broken,
so I've always been a fan of that sound. I've kept it ever since.
(13:52):
And even the guitars, I cobbled together some money because we realized that
when I was in this band with Janice before Mothra, it was called Enzyme,
we would sound horribly out of tune on stage.
And so the bassist said, you need to get a better guitar, something that stays in tune.
So the little money I had and could afford,
(14:12):
forward and from the trade and exchange so this is pre-trade pre-trade
me trading exchange you had to go through the actual the
newspaper i found a gibson it wasn't a
you know a flash one but it was called the ball a really light
version of the les ball and it
was and i've had it ever since i've played that ever since as
well and i have never changed the pickups out i like
(14:35):
those pickups they're hot they're pretty dark and you know i i use a lot of
feedback i love using feedback for ambience and you know pickups can can definitely
change for feedback response and things like that i've never changed pickups
out i did look them up once and i can't remember what they call.
(14:56):
Yeah but that's that's the rig this the jmp1 the
valve state martial power amp i've got
two martial cabs 19 1960 cabs
and i only really use one and
and the and the gibson the paul i've got
two of those but one of them i yeah one of them i use in
the band and the other one for guitar teaching and i've
(15:19):
got a lot of pedals huge amount of pedals yeah i
i was remarking to some friends that were at the show at
the uh catalog of pedals
there that were there in front of you so it was
yeah yeah that was that was pretty epic definitely uh
definitely good though but i mean sounds sound is great
i really enjoyed your tone and and the way it
(15:40):
everything kind of combined together sounded spot on
and yeah i've been a fan of the jmp ones for a
long time always been one of of those things where keep
my eye open for one from time to time but
yeah yeah i'll be looking out to find it
looks like they've gone up in value actually they're worth
they're over a grand now yeah yeah you
(16:02):
want to find them i got an xfx just for recording the xfx2 so i've got one of
those but you know it's it's honestly it's it's way above my head it's it's
far too many parameters and I actually haven't even tried to use it a lot,
but it's pretty handy for recording.
Yeah, that was actually going to be a question I had, was where do you sit within
(16:23):
that modeling and plugins and physical amplifiers and which do you prefer and why?
But it sounds like you've kind of halfway answered that already.
Yeah i'm i'm into anything that
sounds good so for recording the xfx but
for someone like me who i don't have access um where
i look am i where i'm living to you know to just mic up amps and record loudly
(16:47):
with with mics so you know the xfx is great you can you can pretty much use
any virtual mic and position and but not just the xfx is all there's piles of
stuff now Now, when I bought it,
those neural DSP plugins hadn't come out yet, I don't think,
and now there's a lot of those.
There's a lot of like, what are they, sponsored artist plugins,
(17:11):
like there's the Nolly plugin.
There's a lot of those now. They sound, I think apparently they're great.
There's the positive grid stuff and there's Kemper and Helix and all sorts of modelers now.
It's great. It makes it so much easier to record.
Probably actually, I might try and use something like that live, perhaps.
(17:34):
We'll give it a shot anyway for much easier than lugging heavy equipment around all the time.
Just worried about using the ambience feedback and things like that.
But I saw Sheehard using only DI at the town hall in the last year.
They were getting feedback. back i saw them going close phil knight going very
(17:55):
close to the monitor stage monitors to definitely try and get that feedback
so then the look is easy as going up to your big care but yeah,
much more economical to tour and travel yeah yeah for sure yeah and i see and
like you're talking about the artist packs i've seen a lot of folks that are
creating their own irs for speaker cabinets as well and so you can buy a custom
(18:19):
one from them for a few dollars kind of thing and And they're just pulling some extra in on the side,
which is really good. Yeah, it's very cool.
That so you kind of gave me the full rundown there
on the guitars but i always ask if there's a guitar or an amplifier that
you feel like got away one that you you shouldn't have
let go of or i mean i guess it could have been the jackson
(18:40):
that got tread marks over the the neck of it so but yeah just curious if there's
one of those floating around an amp that got away and guitar or guitar yeah
yeah i mean i did love that jackson but i don't know if i how much i'd like
it now now. I think it had a floating bridge.
It was cool when I was a teenager.
(19:02):
I replaced it with another Jackson and it was nowhere near as good.
I don't really know much about guitars.
I still don't know that much about guitars really, technically,
but I actually still have the body of that guitar that I ran over.
So I could maybe try and repair pair it but i don't think
it's it's destroyed pretty much amps the
80 you know the ada mp1 was was great but
(19:25):
jmp1 was better yeah i'm
not that much of a nerd on gear to be honest i tried
some um big other martial amps like i
remember the jcm jcm 800
what the one with the reverb but i always gravitated
towards that the more digital preamp sound
(19:45):
that the ada and the jmp1 had really precise
defined by definition especially on low
tunings so much nice definition which
i kind of lost on just well for
me anyway it sounded um muddy and
undefined on the jcm 800 is probably
not wasn't the right kind of amp yeah so that
(20:08):
digital more digital preamp sound has always been
what i've what i've liked yeah thanks sort
of the diphthones handsome helmet sort of tone i always i'm always like the
sound of that yeah yeah so what are some of your favorite outdoor artists that
you listen to i saw wax chattels play the other night do you know them I don't know, but...
(20:33):
They were brilliant. They blew my mind. Amazing band.
I saw them at Whammy Background a few weeks ago.
Just insane. I'd seen them a few years ago at the Others Way Festival,
and I just remember being just blown away then as well.
I didn't remember too much, and I actually didn't venture into their music and
(20:55):
listen to it much over the years.
But when I saw they were playing again, I remembered how good they were when
I saw them, and so I went to it.
I got the last ticket, actually, and I don't really know how to describe them.
Sort of post-punk guitar music without guitars, which is what I thought of,
and that's actually what they wrote on their bio as well. Oh, that's funny.
(21:15):
It's a bass player, drummer. There's the drummer from, he's in Miss June as well. Mm-hmm.
Sort of like dillinger escape plan with meets
battles maybe battles that that band
so the guy's got a the the guy who sings peter i
think his name is he's got this big sample synth set
(21:36):
up making crazy sounds really interesting samples
and sounds and doing crazy stuff with his vocals a lot of heavy delay but he's
controlling it really well and the drum is just he's just out of control that
guy he's hitting so hard hitting so hard and very minimal drum kit it's a tiny drum kit,
(21:58):
probably just a floor tom maybe in a snare and then the bass player bass players
you know some pretty heavy bass distorted bass at times but that blew me away
actually a few weeks ago i was really stoked on that other kiwi acts well there's
new way home there who aren't together anymore they They were amazing.
(22:18):
My friend Mikey plays in the band Outside In.
They're really good. They're like progressive rock. I'm actually doing a bit
of work with him at the moment, trying to write some parts to his new album. Oh, great.
We've played with a lot of bands over the years. Most of them have disbanded now.
The shelf life of bands is generally a couple of years, I think, or a few years.
(22:43):
We used to play with Lord of Tigers. They were great. They're obviously gone.
Cobra Khan, they were awesome.
I'm sure there's some other bands that I should be thinking of.
There's a lot of good bands. Yeah, Althea Dyer.
Yeah, yeah. I'm fairly new to the country, but I was immediately struck with
basically the diversity and the amount of community that there is within the
(23:09):
band and live music community here.
So I'm on my own learning journey and cataloging. This is part of that. So.
A band I really like is Ginzu and the State Knives.
Ginzu and the State Knives. That one. Awesome band. That one is crossing my
desk. I have not heard yet though. So, but yeah.
They are awesome. And they keep releasing these songs with these videos.
(23:31):
I don't know where they get the videos from, but they must pull them from somewhere.
The kind of cartoon kind of humorous,
visuals to there it's yeah it's that's
great no that's great i'll definitely definitely definitely check that one out
so yeah i was gonna ask who who you believe the most unsung player or musician
(23:54):
that the rest of the world should
be hearing about from from here from new zealand yeah from new zealand.
Unsung. Yeah. Should be mainstream or should be popular. Should be popular, yeah.
I don't know, really. Like those bands I just referenced, just bands that sprung
to mind from the sort of underground scene that I know around here.
(24:20):
So I don't, all those bands are great, in my opinion.
I think New Way Home, they should have been, they should have had huge success.
Especially in the early days as a four-piece.
They had Tristan on drums. I think he drummed for Blacklist after that.
And yeah, they were amazing. It was a shame they disbanded.
(24:46):
They replaced Tristan with Scott. After a while, he was also great.
And they got a second guitarist. I personally felt the first lineup was something
that had a bit more magic to it.
Yeah your way home awesome i've still got there yeah
seat first cd somewhere nice anomaly yeah
(25:06):
very nice that's fantastic is
there new material coming new recording from mothra yes
there is a lot actually we take forever we
have a whole new album finished just needs
to be mastered and also an ep so ep
of five songs i think and the album's got 12 songs
(25:26):
on it so we've been been working for years just chipping
away at that you know life gets busy ruben and james have
got families and we're all self-employed as
well so you know it's um lucky to just fortunate to still be going and have
found a way to sustain the band we take big breaks and then we quite selective
(25:47):
on gigs and just found a way to sort of keep the band alive without burning it out and we just Just,
you know, we get on really well.
We share a lot of humor. There's just a lot of humor that goes on,
a lot of jokes when we rehearse.
But we take it seriously as well. And what was the question?
(26:07):
It was just about the new material. Oh, new material. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.
I wandered off a bit there. Yeah, so album in the can and an EP.
And, yeah, we'll get it out. We'll get it out soon. I'd like to get a music video for it.
We've got a good friend, my friend Sean Layden. he's in the netherlands he made
the two videos that we released for the beginning in splinters,
(26:29):
but he's pretty busy with his he's a professional videographer
he might make something for us it would
also be nice to get some kind of distribution don't know
if it'll be possible but we'll probably try and do that there might be a label
somewhere that's that likes the album enough to want to release it but if not
we'll just we'll release it ourselves again and it would be good to get something
(26:52):
else soon at least even a teaser just one track but really happy with it happy with the ep.
Just me to push it over the line. Yeah, that's great.
I'm looking forward to it for sure. So yeah, I'll be probably bothering you about the date.
Maybe I'll just be that little conscience on you.
(27:14):
Ask him when it's coming. So yeah, that's fantastic.
I made it out of the quicksand show before I had a chance to,
because I realized the other day that all my t-shirts are falling apart.
And I'm like, I need some more t-shirts. and I really wish I'd picked up a Mothra
t-shirt. So are you guys going to have some merch available at the Handsome Show? Yeah.
(27:35):
Yep. Yep, we do have merch. We're pretty much sold out of vinyl,
I think, of Decision Process.
I don't think there's many left. But we've got some 7-inch CDs and,
yeah, we've got t-shirts. Nice. We've got t-shirts.
Yeah, if you've got some vinyl, I'll probably be finding out how to grab some of that, too.
Yeah uh so when when you guys actually land
(27:58):
your gigs with i don't play out by the way i'm more
of a sit at home and and and noodle and record
some stuff and see where that takes me but when
you guys do line up those gigs do you get contacted usually by the promoters
because they know it's a good fit sometimes yep so quick work sand we were nice
yeah it just depends yep or mastodon Gojira which was the support acts were
(28:23):
cancelled we were contacted for that.
Usually we submit. I just submit to the promoter or I might know the promoter.
I might even know the band.
Yeah, so it just depends, but it could be either or. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, so Ben from Valhalla, and he's amazing.
(28:44):
He's bringing so many bands. It's great. It just seems like a full-time job
for him and running Valhalla.
And Jason from Waxstar, he did Quicksand. Andy's got Sparta coming.
And of course, they had the handsome tribute with Peter Mangetti.
(29:05):
So it's good to have these guys bringing gigs in. Yeah.
There's a few Australian ones sometimes. There's a guy from your mate,
Bookings, and there's been a few over the years who have come and gone,
actually. Of course, yeah.
They keep the scene alive, these guys bringing in bands of this genre.
Genre, so hats off to them.
(29:27):
Yeah. I was going to ask like how COVID impacted everything that you do actually.
And do you, is there some meaningful change that came out of that,
the pandemic for, for you?
Yeah, well, we had the Deftones gig, so yeah, we were two days out from opening
for Deftones and that was canceled because they were playing the Download Festival in Australia.
(29:50):
Australia, I think My Chemical Romance was headlining and they pulled out,
as soon as they pulled out, that download collapsed and that meant Deftones
weren't coming and none of those bands were coming.
I think there was Baroness were also coming, but I'd be faith no more.
So that was a real bummer, that would have been our biggest gig for sure.
(30:12):
And we had been rehearsing pretty hard up until then and so we just...
Didn't rehearse for quite a while over the pandemic, but I kept working on the
album on the studio stuff and actually had a bit more time to do that and more
time to finish recording.
So that was, that was a plus. Yeah.
And it was, you know, I actually didn't, didn't mind the, I quite enjoyed the quiet around here.
(30:39):
Yeah. We, yep. We totally comment on that every once in a while when,
you know, either the planes are going over, you know, a whole crew of motorcycles
goes by on the road it's like i miss sometimes i miss lockdown.
But you know it certainly it was devastating for the music the live music industry
(31:01):
yeah it was it took a long time to come right because it kind of kept opening
up and then people were just,
scared to go out no one wanted to go out certainly not enough and i think yeah
i saw tool played just Just before the pandemic, just before lockdown happened here,
it must have been sort of March 2020 and the Pixies.
(31:24):
And then I think there was the WOMAD Festival this time, this time of year in
2020. And then it was, that was it.
Yeah. Yeah. It was madness. But it's all, it's all good now, finally. Yeah. Yeah.
One band coming in. Yep.
Yep. Yeah. I was, I was all masked up for the show.
I think I was one of two people there but I've got immunocompromised folks in
(31:47):
the house so I can't take a whole lot of chances I actually got COVID straight
after the quicksand for the first time I hadn't had it,
and quite a few of my friends did as well so must have been a must have been
a rife mothership that night.
Glad I was masked up that's very very
(32:10):
glad yeah yeah and so
so you you said you teach lessons um is that is that
the day job yep i've been a guitar teacher
for 20 years i think round about
so i've been teaching guitar privately and and a couple of schools around here
for for many years i also run a little band program and two two primary schools
(32:33):
here in devonport oh nice just getting kids playing playing in bands at lunchtime
We rehearse and then do performances,
do end-of-term shows.
We actually played it at a school fair yesterday.
Yeah, and we play a lot of songs. There's White Stripes and Do I Have the Tiger,
Taylor Swift, Post Malone, Nirvana sometimes, whatever.
(32:57):
I try and accommodate the requests of the children. Right, right.
That's fantastic. Yeah. Yep. So yeah, a lot of music-related stuff.
Yeah, that's great. And I do all the mixing, a lot of recording as well for the band.
Do you guys record in a studio or do you record more at home kind of thing?
(33:21):
We do the drums in the studio, of course.
Pretty fine art, recording drums well. So we did the drums with Dave Rhodes down at the depot here.
There's a studio here in Devonport. Dave Rhodes took care of that.
But I did all the guitars myself because I've got the Axe FX,
so if you know how to use it and dial in a good tone, it's a great tool. That's fantastic.
(33:43):
And the bass, we recorded the bass ourselves as well.
I actually just used an SM57 and it sounded great. The bass sounds really good.
So I just did that in my teaching space where I teach, got a studio in Devonport.
Just set up Ruben's rig and put the position at SM57 and a DI actually.
But it sounds really good. Yeah, that's great.
(34:07):
That's really great. Yeah, I have one of the two notes attenuators,
and then I load up, I got some of the Celestian IRs. So it's nice.
I can run my 50 water into that and then run that directly into the audio interface.
And then it's not, you know, rattling the neighbors around. So yeah, exactly.
(34:28):
Yeah, that works out pretty well. But I also have the Tonex application from
IK Multimedia that I mess around with as well.
Um yeah which is kind of fun so yeah yeah
yeah it's great we're we're so lucky to
have all this technology at our fingertips yeah it's
pretty great yeah i i did an experiment about creating my
(34:50):
own ir for actually a cabinet i built from scratch as well and that was quite
the experience i i'm not still not happy with it i don't think it get actually
captured it the way i want it to so well it's fine it's basically keeps me keeps
me going on this kind of thing so So, yeah. Wow. You made your own IR?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Using logic, I could just create an impulse response for the cabinet itself.
(35:15):
And I mic'd it up two different, because the cabinet has mismatches speakers.
So, it's got a V30 and G1265.
So, kind of a slightly different flavor out of each of those.
And I mic'd it up with two different mics as well, and then blended them together
and created a stereo IR actually out of it. So it sounds okay,
(35:36):
but I think it was the first one I've ever even tried to do.
So I think there's more experimentation needed there. But yeah, it's fine.
Yeah, cool. Yeah, I don't really, I'm not very technical with that stuff.
Zoran, you know, Zoran, he's a really good engineer, producer guy in Auckland. I think he's out west.
(35:57):
He told me to get, what are they?
I can't remember the company that made these IRs. I can't think of it,
but Zoran's my guy if I need advice on a plug-in.
What's some gear, what IRs to use. Yeah. Yeah, man.
Yeah. Zoran was in New Way Home for a while when they got two guitarists.
(36:22):
Okay. But he plays a huge role in the scene as well.
He's always recording bands. He's always taking care of bands' recording needs.
Do you use... Shout out. Yeah, no doubt.
Do you use a lot of alternate tunings when you play? What does that usually look like?
(36:42):
Yeah, a lot, actually. Almost every song is in a different tuning that night.
And they're all just mostly inspired by other bands.
So Isis on Oceanic, I think the first song is the beginning.
In the beginning and the end.
Because they just use six-string guitars. I'm a big fan of what can be done
(37:04):
on a six-string guitar without using seven strings and eight strings.
You've got enough threads already on a six-string.
Adam Jones did it on Parabola as well on Tool.
He knocks the heavy E string down to an F sharp anyway for Isis.
And on Parabola, I think it's B and E. B and E and so we have a few songs similar
(37:30):
to that, not quite the same but along those lines,
and I'll drop A, Neurosis did a lot of that some of them are even different
I'll tweak the heavy E down to a C sharp and maybe another string as well just
to sort of open the instrument up and get some,
(37:50):
sounds and chords that you can't achieve even as a standard tuning but that's
the beauty of the guitar and you can manipulate it into different tunings and
really expand the potential of the chords and melodies that you can create.
Yeah. You're always exploring with different tunings and I've been working on
(38:13):
a song recently that is just in standard.
Occasionally stumble across an idea that I find interesting enough in standard
tuning. There's a lot you can do in standard tuning.
Actually, funnily enough, I don't have any songs in drop D.
For years, I would play in drop D back in the day, but yeah,
a lot of drop B, drop A, drop F sharp, drop C sharp variations and tweaking
(38:38):
the higher strings as well sometimes.
I only use one guitar live and have to be careful the order of the tunings because
your guitars will get upset if you tend to need to start with the lower tunings first.
It will be more stable as you tune up through the set rather than the other way around.
(38:59):
You'll come to a point where your guitar would go quite out of tune when you're
abusing it that way with tuning down too fast and things like that.
Yeah yeah and i noticed you at the tuner
quite a bit during the show and i thought to myself like it's
either got to be alternative tunings or like he's got to
get some new gear because it's just not staying in
(39:21):
tune but yeah i kind of assumed that it was it was definitely alternative alternative
tunings so yeah yeah yeah it's a lot of old tunings yeah but what was there
that night it would have been the double f sharp and then and then b b and b
and f sharp and then c sharp and And then double A for the last two.
And the last ones also double drop A and a D down to a C. So every song was a different tuning.
(39:50):
But funnily enough, I've never got it wrong, I don't think, ever.
I've never started playing a song and it hadn't tuned correctly, ever.
That's great. 16 years. Yeah. But I try to trigger an interesting soundscape
and atmosphere while I'm tuning.
Not just have dead silence. I saw Isis do that. Actually Isis did that in 2007,
(40:12):
Late Flight of the King's Arms with Jacob.
And I noticed them just having this amazing sound when they were tuning out
in between songs and I thought, I want to do that.
Yeah, so we do that. But a friend of mine actually said he didn't like it.
Said can you just stop stop the sound just for
us for a moment i thought it was nice i thought
(40:35):
it all sounded good and made everything feel a bit more cohesive
i think so yeah yeah keep the flow going
yeah especially without vocals we don't
have to there's not much banter going on you know over the mic so
something something's good yeah yeah yeah
yeah that is good yeah and the other thing i like about it too is
that uh i see a lot of folks talking about like
(40:57):
you really need a completely different set of
guitar if you're going to be you know doing playing most.
Of your songs in a lower tuning and and it's it's
it's also nice seeing seeing folks not do
that and it working because yeah it's more
of i think i think there's sometimes a
bit too much purity and that that concept of
(41:19):
needing it to you know this is my drop d guitar and
that is the only guitar that shall do that because nothing
else can sound like that but i like the versatility comment
that you made there has pretty spot on yeah yeah
i've got enough gear to carry as i was thinking about a
guitar yeah but um there's
a i put a quite a lot of relief in the neck of that
(41:40):
gibson guitar years ago and you know
it's crazily enough it handles low
tuning and and standard so i
don't know i don't quite know how but you would think it wouldn't be
able to do both the luthier who got the relief and he said you can't have it
both ways you know you want it to be able to handle these strange low tunings
(42:00):
it's not going to stay in tune and standard but it actually does yeah so i'll
leave it i'll leave it as is which i have i've just left it yeah.
Actually let me do another question about i was going to ask you oh string gauge like
what's what gauge of strings do you typically use i'm using
54s 10 to 54s i think the the yellow pack ernie balls beefy they're beefy slinkies
(42:23):
but i actually changed the a out from a 42 to a 48 so i buy a single packs of
48s and put them into the a string because when i was tuning the a down years
ago to to maybe a D on the A,
it was too loose, couldn't handle it.
So the 48 just gives it a bit more stability because I am tuning that A string down quite a lot as well.
(42:47):
What about tuning it down to E and F sharp? Okay.
Sometimes D. So yeah, that's it. So 10 to 54 and 48 instead of 42 on the A string. Nice.
Yeah, I saw Paul Gilbert talking about what gauge strings he uses and he was
talking about how light of a gauge that he actually uses because then he can
(43:08):
leave the action really high so that he can play slide better at the same time
as with the light string, he can still mash it down really easily.
So I was like, oh, that's an interesting thought process there.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's always hard to use a slide guitar unless you raise the action. Yeah.
(43:29):
One thing I have noticed is that playing with a lot heavier gauge strings,
things this having stainless steel frets tends to
make it feel like a lighter gauge because things are just slippery
across the fretboard so that's another
thing where i'm constantly on the lookout for another guitar
with stainless frets because i yeah i actually really really enjoyed the guitar
(43:52):
that i got to play that had stainless frets on it so that was super it just
again it felt it felt It felt like a lighter gauge because everything was so
good to do a bend or some vibrato and,
and it, it just, they just slide right over it. Like it's butter.
So, so that was kind of neat. Yeah.
I don't know much about frets other than the different sizes,
(44:14):
but the ones on my guitar are pretty, they're quite low and flat, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. And be pretty worn, pretty worn down now. Yeah. Yeah.
Plays, plays good. Yeah. That's what matters. So that's what matters.
Awesome. Hey, we're coming out to the top of the hour there.
(44:35):
I really, again, really appreciate your time on this and looking forward to
getting this one edited and out there as well this is my second second call
so thank you appreciate that it's it's a whole new thing for me but but it's
something that i'm invested in and and just.
Obsessed i guess it's a good way to put it yeah yeah yeah good
on your way that's great it's awesome to get something like this happening
(44:57):
yeah it's not there's not enough of them happening locally yeah
and it's it's definitely that that's exactly it right so
uh and i mean you've rattled off so many names now on my
i'm like inventorying them all and of course we'll be going back to
through the recording and writing everything down so more people
to contact and reach out to for sure so yeah
yeah yeah i talked to glenn evans
(45:18):
from mr glenn's pickups a couple weeks ago and that was the very
first one and glenn's amazing and he was
laughing pretty hard about the fact that you know when i mentioned the community
he's like yeah we all know each other every one of us
so he's not wrong yeah
yeah yeah yeah it is very very
tight man yeah it is new zealand after all so thanks
(45:39):
again can't thank you enough and i'm gonna try i'm
gonna try to get out to the the handsome show if i
can we'll see how everybody's doing here at the house so that's april is that
april 6th april the 6th at whammy bar yep it's swallowing the rats playing Mothra's
opening and then it's Handsome and I'm playing guitar It's Fonty Witch but playing
(46:01):
the Handsome album in its entirety Nice.
With Peter Mingetti so he's one of my all time Favourites, favourite players
From the early Helmet albums And the Handsome album so Try and make it to that,
that'll be great And then it's Wellington on the 5th Wellington at Balhalla
on Friday the 5th Of April.
Nice. Very nice. Awesome. Looking forward to it Cool.
(46:24):
Awesome Awesome. Hey, thanks a lot, Hugh. And like I said, I'll send you a follow-up
message and let you know when it's all live. Yeah.
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Wade. Nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you.
I hope to talk to you soon.
Yeah, talk soon. Yep. Bye-bye. Cheers, Wade. Bye.
Thanks again for stopping by the Alto Rojo Guitar Show. Tune in for episode
three, where I'll be talking to Simon Gottlieb, musician and amp technician
(46:47):
from Bogan Boutique Amplifiers.
Until next time, that's us.
Music.
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