One of Australia’s finest purveyors of metalcore, Northlane, have been continually making waves both nationally and overseas with their bold brand of heavy-hitting tunes.
The five-piece absolutely smashed apart this year’s UNIFY festival and are now prepping for their forthcoming national tour on the ultimate lineup of Groovin The Moo festival that’s set to blow the minds of regional Australia.
In the build-up to the massive event, we spoke with guitarist Josh Smith who was only too happy to take us through the gear that he uses to deliver Northlane’s exploding sound, detailing his journey with the guitar as well as revealing many sonic secrets to note down for future reference.
Breaking It Down
“I think these days, the beauty of all these new digital technologies, like the Axe-FX and the Kemper, is that they can be an all-in-one solution to your gig if they need to be. If I had to, I could just take a Kemper and a MIDI switch into a show and they’d be everything that I need.
“So that would probably be the first thing, my Kemper Profiling Amplifier and my MIDI controller. That’s only the core of my rig. It’s built around a wet-dry setup with a whole bunch of different pedals and it’s pretty convoluted.”
Starting With The Smaller Details
“I started off when I was 11 years old, I started playing guitar, and when I was about 13, 14 I started playing close attention to the smaller details and did things like buying my first set of after-market pickups.
“I went through the normal experience of getting ripped off by music shops doing shoddy work and whatnot, so I taught myself how to solder, and things just sort of went from there. I learnt how to build my own pedal boards and whatnot, and do all my own customization and repairs.”
Early Beginnings
“The rig that I’ve got now, if you trace back to early Northlane, my first rig was a modified block letter 5150. You know, it’s a tried and tested amp, sounds great. I had five double 81s in mine and a bias mod, so it was running the tubes really hot and that really compressed out the highs and lows and made the high mids a lot
sweeter, which was really nice.
“And I used to run that with a TC Electronic G-Force delay unit. And then from there, the Axe-FX Ultra came out and I got my hands on one of those and I used to use it with a VHT Power Amp and a VHT Fat Bottom Cabinet, which I used to use with the 5150 actually, and that sounded sick, but it wasn’t very portable, because of how heavy the power amp was. It sounded amazing with the KT88s in there.”
Going Digital
“So it kind of brings me to the point I’m at now using a digital setup, still with a cabinet on stage for stage sound, and I’ve moved on to the Kemper instead of the Axe-FX, because our Axe-FXs kept breaking, they just weren’t very reliable.
“Even for a while we actually ran the Kemper with the Axe-FX in wet-dry-wet and used the Kemper for the amp tones and the Axe for the effects, but with the reliability problems we were having, we figured we’d just buy a bunch of pedals for the effects and take that route and put everything on pedal boards to save weight when we fly, and that sort of gets us to where we are now.”
Opening Possibilities
“But what I found is that by using all these pedals is it opens a lot more on-hand possibilities, like things that you can tweak on the fly that you just can’t… you can’t get into the depths of something digital in a gig, it’s just too much.
“But it’s really easy to just turn the knob on a pedal and right now we’ve got the Kemper taking care of our amp tones, but the pedals in front of the amp, like Seymour Duncan 805 overdrive, ISP Decimator, the Empress Fuzz, and this really interesting reverse delay, which is a vintage Danelectro piece, and we found that by using those pedals in front of the digital amp, we get a much more organic tone and it’s a quieter rig as well.”
Hitting The Studio
“We tend to use different tools when we are recording as opposed to playing live. With our live rigs based around the Kemper, a lot of variables (that are hard to control) stay fixed, and it allows us to access quite a few different tones with the one piece of gear.
“In the studio, variables can be controlled much more easily and it’s more practical to use lots of different amps than it would be on the road, so we go for the real thing. I can’t speak for this new record just yet, but it’s likely we will use a lot of the pedals that are on our live boards, we did something similar with Singularity.”
Functionality Rules
“I’ve learnt over time that what matters is functionality above all else and what is important to you as a player. Especially with my guitars, like, my rig’s more complicated now, but it’s for a specific reason. It’s built around our style and what Northlane requires.
“Like, using a wet-dry rig allows us to use a lot of really saturated delays and still have clarity and it opens up a lot of possibilities for front of house and it’s complicated but it suits what we’re doing, so I think what’s important is to think about what’s important to your playing and your application if you’re in a certain band and built around that.”
You Can’t Replace Talent With Gear
“Don’t try and add stuff in that’s not going to be a benefit. It’s great to experiment with pickups and effects pedals and all that but at the end of the day, tone is in your fingers and if you can’t play well, it’s not going to matter how much shit you have, because it’s still gonna sound terrible.
“But moving on from that, what’s even more important that a lot of people forget is things like the intonation on your guitar and how well it holds tune is so much more important than how good your tone is, for example.
“If people are going to spend time educating themselves on something it should be on the basics of setting a guitar up so they can maintain their own instruments and when they play they’re gonna get the most out of what they have. That’s what’s important is getting the most out of what you have and operating it to it’s limit.”
Getting Weird
“I was given this thing by a company called Music Nomad that’s pretty cool, it’s called a Nomad Tool. It has a flat pad on one end for cleaning under strings which is super handy, and it’s got a brush on the other end for whatever you need to brush I guess. It looks weird as hell, but it’s handy.
“I’ve got a Danelectro back talk that was super hard to find and cost me an arm and leg. It’s a very distinctive looking and sounding pedal, haven’t heard a reverse delay quite like it. The attack is super bright and it thins the tone out in a tasteful way for that kind of effect.”
Speak Softly and Carry A Soldering Iron
“There’s been a lot of times where things have gone wrong. Broken nuts, solder joints, pots, toggle switches, jacks, pedals, midi switchers, relay patchbays, more than a few AxeFx’s and the list goes on.
“Once I was restringing one of Jon’s [Deiley, guitarist] guitars right before a gig in Paris and the top of the tuner burst off when I was stretching the string. Luckily, Parkway Drive’s tech carried spare sperzels and helped me throw a new one on.
“Only problem was it wasn’t bored out for the string gauge (0.80) so we had to then swap it with another tuner. We managed to get it all together with enough time for a beer before I had to play.
“I’ve seen Fishy [techie, Parkway Drive] do some crazy stuff though, he’s been known to swap a guitar with a faulty jack halfway through a song and have it replaced and wrapped up for the end of the tune.”
GROOVIN THE MOO 2015
A$AP Ferg
Ball Park Music
Broods
Carmada
Charli XCX
The Delta Riggs
DMA’s
Flight Facilities
Hermitude
Hilltop Hoods
Hot Dub Time Machine
Meg Mac
Northlane
One Day
Peace
Peaches
The Preatures
RL Grime
San Cisco
Saskwatch
Sticky Fingers
Tkay Maidza
Wolfmother
You Me At Six
Saturday, 25th April 2015
Oakbank SA (ANZAC Day)
Tickets: Groovin The Moo
Sunday, 26th April 2015
Bunbury WA (ANZAC Long Weekend)
Tickets: Groovin The Moo
Saturday, 2nd May 2015
Bendigo VIC
Tickets: Groovin The Moo
Sunday, 3rd May 2015
Canberra ACT
Tickets: Groovin The Moo
Saturday, 9th May 2015
Maitland NSW
Tickets: Groovin The Moo
Sunday, 10th May 2015
Townsville QLD
Tickets: Groovin The Moo
