Daniel Duque-Perez (ex- The Griswolds) - GEAR MASTERS (Revisited) Ep. 103

How you doing? Dan here. This is my main axe, I guess. This is my Duesenberg. It's a Fullerton double cutaway, Carl Carlton. It's a German design, American built guitar. Man, it kind of does everything. Hey, this guitar is literally, you can do a whole set from start to end and just simple changes of tone, volume, and pickup positioning. Totally change the guitar tone. That's why I love it. It's got the humbucker in the back, P90 in the front, but then you can do a blend as well. And it actually makes a huge difference. If it was plugged in, I could actually show you. But yeah, if I'm in this position, I get a really lush, cutting sort of lead sound. It'll break my amp up. Even without distortion, it'll get my amp to break. If I stick it here, I get like a tele country kind of twang. And then if I stick it one more over, this is kind of my bread and butter sound. And this is like a nice, really warm, it really activates the springs in my Fender Twin. And it just gets like this really lush kind of almost surf rocky kind of really warm kind of tone, which I really enjoy. Yeah, but then I also trade this off with the Les Paul Custom as well, depending what song. This guitar was actually in the recording for Be Impressive pretty much the whole way through the record. This guy comes out for more of the rocky stuff because it's heavier. And you get that real full body kind of like, it's got a bit of a higher output than this, so you get a bit more volume as well. But it's also a darker tone. This one's a bit more lively, right? Ernie Ball and Ernie Ball Slinkys and 10-52. This guy is a Neurodigital. It's also in stock. I hate these goddamn fucking, every damn show, every time I need to pick it up, it gets tangled up. This guy was a gift from Gibson. And it's a custom shop too, as you can see. So it's a rare-ish, well not rare, but expensive. And Gibson were nice enough when we were in Seattle, first day of the show, the two of their cutters come in and you can see a bunch of Gibsons up here. Let us go through the office front and just pick out what we wanted for the tour, which is really cool. This guy's cool, solid, solid, heavy, meaty guitar with an ebony neck. The ebony neck's cool because it again makes the guitar sound quite dark, which is kind of the opposite of what you're doing, which is not dark. So yeah, I go to this guy for songs like Not Ready Anymore. I need more like a psychedelic rock, like very effects heavy kind of tone. And it's cool because it's pretty neutral sound, so it doesn't have too much character to it, which is good. And I use this sometimes on Outta My Head. I used pretty much the exact same guitar, the Tenacious, for Outta My Head when we played that performance. They're standard Les Paul humbuckers. I'm not sure exactly, specifically which ones they are, because I didn't custom order a guitar, it was just given. So I'm not 100% sure, but I mean Les Paul customs have their standard Les Paul custom humbuckers in them, and that's these guys. So you'll see here it says Rhythm. That activates these two tone pots, so you've got volume here, and you've got tone here. I actually use them quite a bit. So if you wind your tone down, you get a more jazzy kind of tone, more blues as you open her up, and then volume. This guitar is actually super sensitive to volume, so if I wind this back from 10 to say 7, it'll keep me in a clean territory, which is kind of cool. And I do tend to kind of ride between that and 10. And then the lead switch, I don't really use that much on this, because it's just too Led Zeppelin for my playing. I'm not good enough. But yeah, and then I use this last guy for any acoustic stuff, which is one song in the set already. Caged the night in the last song, and that's a really nice acoustic. I start my chain, it's my guitar lead here, in a Zed Vex Super Hard Up. And Super Hard Up is just like a boost, basically. And then I end my chain with a second Super Hard Up, an extra boost. So when I'm playing solos and stuff, this is the guy I activate. This remains on the whole time, just kind of compresses the tone as well. And then, obviously, I've got the TU-2 by Boss. But then these guys are where sort of the magic happens. So I've got a Verbzilla, and I've got this guy, like, decayed out almost all the way. So you get a really dreamy, sort of, super reverb-y sound for swells and effects and stuff during tracks. And then the Echo Park is cool, because I can sort of tap my timing into it that I want, or I can rapid-fire it with my hand. This guy's really cool. It adds some sort of, like, I don't know. Because it's analogue, it's not actually digital, it warps my sound like a tape player does. So as I'm doing effects, it does one echo and delay, but it also modulates the sound. So it's kind of got a very unique voice. And we've got the Jekyll and Hyde, which, I don't know, I don't use it too much. But yeah, it's basically just an overdrive and a distortion. And when you put the two on, it's pretty crazy. I use it for, like, big solo parts and washes and stuff. But generally, I let the guitar do most of the work. I'm playing with tone and pickup positioning in terms of how dirty or clean I'm going to be playing. And then this is just added if I need, like, a little bit more cut to a track. So if I'm doing, you know, like, a super lead part of something, then you'll activate this guy and this guy as well at the same time. And that's it. I keep it pretty simple, man. It's mostly in the right hand. Everything's going on in the guitar in the right hand. Then we got the Fender Twin Reverb Amp. It's really cool. I got this a while ago. I use that or I got a Fender Vibro-King, but the Vibro-King is just too heavy and it's too powerful. Vibro-King is like 90 watts and it's hand-to-hand sold, and it's all A-class. Whereas this one's, I think, about 60, 50 watt. Perfect for live, man. I only run it at two and a half. And it's fucking loud at two and a half, but it's not dirty yet. So yeah, not much else to say about that. It's pretty standard. It's got the Jensen's in it. Yeah, 2x12. It's good. It's a workhorse, man. We've had this amp out for three tours. I've never had to service it. No valves are going. It's just great. Love it. Very well-built amp. Good tone. Really nice. Complements the guitars really well. This is my favorite thing in the whole rig. My Akai MPK249 is the best keyboard. I love it. I do a lot of filtering, sampling. Everything's run off the digital things. I'm using VST. Everything's running out of main stage. But the thing I love the most about this keyboard is the keys are weighted, but also I've got all my sample pads here as well. So while I'm actually playing synthesizers, I can be triggering samples at the same time in between the lines as well. So I can do a lot with that. It's also got a tap tempo and an arpeggiator, which I use so I can actually tap out my timing of the track in time to lock and then activate an arpeggiator and I can match it so I can just be hitting one note at a time and just keep carrying those notes around. It's got a modulator as well and a bender. I don't know man, it's just kind of the most reliable, unbreakable. It doesn't do anything other than just be reliable and let me play comfortably on what I'm doing, which is freaking awesome and it does it really well.