Chris - Mother Engine

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His Story :

When Tanguy from "More Fuzz" wrote me, I was already laughing about the message and the question he asked me... "What's your favorite distortion/ overdrive pedal?", he asked... Of course, I didn't want to disappoint him since he's one of our supporters from the first hour. But the fact is: I have none...

I just use the guitar volume poti's for the overdrive, as well as my different pickup sounds... So nothing special. But even though I have not the laboratory on my side, I really dig the sound of analog playing. It's like having the sound in your fingers, and creating something that's really warm and full of dynamic's... You don't have to search for a special combination between pedals and amp sound, because the amp and guitar will be a special sound, just in their combination... And I can tell you: I tried a whole lot of different guitars in type, shape, pickups and price class and it's always a big difference when you just use the natural overdrive of a powerful amplifier... I'm pretty sure that Stefan Koglek (Colour Haze), plays his guitar in a similar way, but with a volume pedal on the ground, and of course, a whole different setting of guitar and amplification...

His Amp :

I use a Blackstar Artisan 100 amplifier, which was build in 2007 (I guess). I bought this one very cheap, because it wasn't known that well before in Europe. The thing is it's a classic style build amp, like they used to have one in the late 60's/70's, with a 100W head , 4 x EL34 output valves, two channels, with four Hi and Lo inputs for channel blending, no master volume, no "gain" or "distortion" effect. The drive builds itself with the loudness of the guitar. I mean, there's this modern "4-way Voice switch", that can make you regulate the amp from a, as they say, "classic Fender reverb, to a twin reverb, to a Marshall Plexi pre and finally post the 1970's", which is just a kind of preamp distortion switch, if you ask me... But, it's a great feature as well... because you can switch the sound for recordings or live really fast into a whole other sound...

His Pedals :

In addition, I use a Boss DD-7 Delay with an extra tap for accuracy, that one has a great atmospheric and room filling sound, a 90s Boss Octave – I don't know if it is the 1st or 2nd... - and the classic Cry Baby from Dunlop. That's it! But even with this pedals you can have a lot of fun experimenting and combining them...

His Guitars :

My guitar is an Epiphone Les Paul Custom in heritage cherry sunburst. I guess it's the cheaper version of the model that Euroboy from Turbonegro uses. Actually, I really like this guitar because of its cheapness. I mean it's not like you go into the store, and buy the cheapest one you can find... This guitar is a good one !

The wood is beautiful and fine-meshed, the neck is glued, the fretboard had a great curve from the beginning ( even if I had to readjust it over the years... but that's normal I guess). But yeah what I'm trying to say is it's not a Rickenbacker or Gibson from the 70's or 80's (Luckily I didn't choose one from the 80's 😀 ).

You can hear it in the sound, that this one is no perfect blues or lead guitar at all... It's more like a sound between, which I really like! Warm, crunchy, dark and it fit's very good to the upper mids of Chrisitan's bass sound. So we always have this slide transition in our sounds.

One last thing I can tell you, is my newest one, which I'd like to use for further songs, and am already using it for "Wüstenwind", "Sonne" and "Weltraumwolf" live. It's an old " Defil" from 1972, handmade from Poland. Actually even if it's handmade , it was already a cheap guitar when it was produced 😉 so I only got it for 20 bucks...

So I split the body in the middle to get 2 halfs, and built a massive block out of ash , because it's really hard and closely-meshed wood, to reduce feedbacks from the amp. I finally fitted it into the middle of the older parts ! God knows that I'm no carpenter, so in the end my friend Torsten Preuß from "Preuss Guitars" finally built the neck, completed and perfected the guitar. All you guitar and bass players out there, believe me, this guy is one to definitely look out for! His guitars are always built very professionally, gorgeous looking and amazing sounding! And the best of it, since he learned, mastered and studied instrument building, he's really into any discussion about what you can create, transform or customize with your dream guitar...

Pickups are from Duesenberg, because I love those guitars. Now it's exactly what I wanted: A guitar that is perfectly sounding, between feeling really old, warm and soft, even some kind of jazzy, as well as it can be really cheap, crunchy and loud.

So let's summarize: Since we all know, that I'm not the greatest guitar player at all, I'm still a big fan of trying to produce a very human and analog sound. And I really dig when a guitar or bass player uses the sound of his instrument and don't cover it with a lot of pedals and stuff. That doesn't mean that I dislike the use of pedals in general... I just prefer the coloring of the sound by pedals before the complete change through heavy distortion or fuzz effects...