Huntsmen's Chris Kang - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 234

you hi i'm chris from huntsman and i am gonna show you the stuff i played today this is a Gibson SG 61 reissue from I want to say like 2006 which my understanding is that was a good time to get one of these just quality control inconsistencies and such I do love it it's awesome it's really light it sounds great it plays well with my other stuff which I'll talk about in a second it feels nice and fast it's I mean it's kind of you know typical right like it's I honestly probably can't even really tell you exactly though the specs are but just like the normal SG stuff which i think is like mahogany body you know glued on neck neck a rosewood yeah rosewood fretboard I've got via Daario 11s on it I don't think there are any real special you know I don't know starting and ending gauge they're just heavy enough to support this tuning which on this guy we tuned like half of our songs to e-flat standard or drop c-sharp that's what this guy's forces guys Elevens I guess interesting thing about it I got it from Chicago music exchange used and it had this like aftermarket the berola tailpiece on it with uh with a real cool like had a like a whammy thing with like one of those you know tusk handles I ended up taking it off because just for rehearsal and stuff it was kind of like more of the nuisance than it was really like benefiting but you know that's there it looks kind of gnarly when it's on there I'll probably put it on for shows just look cool or something and then for the occasional dive-bomb right just completely up my tanning one day I might get something graved here I thought that might be a fun idea you know just like a I don't know like a bald eagle holding a rifle or something like that and or yeah anyway so that's this guy cool guitar yeah setting wise I keep pretty much everything dimed except for the tunnel and I just have it rolled off a couple of notches just because it's a pretty bright guitar I actually usually play on the bridge but it really depends on the song and the passage if we're trying to just get like a blast ear muffle your sound then I'll go neck you know or like kind of like a creamy fuzz doubt sort of thing but frankly I'm usually usually on the bridge mainly because it plays well really well with my amp we'll talk about in a second but yeah okay this is the other one it's an 87 Les Paul Studio used to be white white and now it's old white aged white if you will a little faded actually I'll really love the color didn't suspect that I would but I do this one is for our even lower tuned songs which are c-sharp standard and then we drop to be sometimes sometimes it's got da Dario twelves on it again just sort of the standard gauge standard like nickel Wow like to be honest I I actually do care about my ear but I tried to like agonize over a lot of the details so you know I switched between strings over the years I just landed on these they sound very nice and good enough and I'm like alright same story I usually will be on the treble pickup here again a lot mostly just because of a reacts really well with the animal I've started venturing more towards neck for certain things which also reacts well with the amp and I just didn't know because I was always easy the treble pickup so you know there will be more of that down the road but yep nothing special on this again just like dimes as far as like law I am in town I'll volume I managed via like my volume pedal which I'll talk about but I try really high like saying and I play and I'm not like the world's greatest player so I definitely try to minimize things to worry about so that's why I just sort of keep everything cranked you know like I'm lost I really like clumsy like I was like oh no like something's different and not know why and I feel like why's my time terrible and it's because my guitar isn't plugged in you know so yeah so I'd go for just simple this thing is awesome it's really heavy the only I think really interesting thing to point out about it if it's got in Ebony fretboard I believe this is which is really like a liquid fast when I got it as like just I know this feels really good when it's bent really well and you can like move really fast like up and down the fretboard and it just feels great it was cheap for a Les Paul and but it sounds awesome so yeah stock pickups they come this is a high town I'm not sure exactly what the model is I think they just call it yeah a 100 it's just a straight i watt dr 103 clone like to the to the t and that's what i got it his I love hi watts it is made by the company hi tone which is Dave Rees son I don't know I'm terrible at this but it's this son of the guy who founded hiwatt is actually the chief consultant there's like a million company I know there's maybe three companies out there that sell hiwatt clone types of amps and I just settled on this one I think the other one is like reeves or something like that but I love it because it's really loud it's the loudest most beautiful yet punishing amps that I've really ever played like it's not as gnarly sounding in terms of like breakup and overdrive isn't like an orange or something like that but it's very bold sounding like it just sounds like a really brave and am that's the best way I can describe it like the sound is really present it's really impact Olatunji it's got like a really powerful just like kind of mid-range like mid mid range I would say and I got it because really the first like guitar 10 that I fall in love with a long time on a record was elder on their record lower in which in which the guitarist and I'm on the spots on forgetting his name Jesus he actually also plays an SG through a high watt clone his is a Sound City 120 but you know they're all clones of Lincoln the era 103 and it's just like it was the most it had like the most beautiful chime and growl at the same time and like that's basically describes what I all I ever really want is like chime + growl and power and Headroom okay I guess I'm alone so but yeah I love it it's been really hard to want to play other amps after getting it I actually got another read they're like Kirill uses which is kind of like a really basic jcm800 clone and it's a really cool sounding amp but there's just something really powerful and really like true sounding about this one you just yeah but I can't really seem to replace with other amps I run it's pretty just I don't know like middle-of-the-road loud and slight breakup if I had my way I'd probably have it cranked all the time because that's really when they sound amazing and then if you crank them and you add you know it fuzz their distortion overtop of it it's just there's like no better sound how we recorded our last record it was actually cranked basically the whole time and yeah I do some jumping here we'll call this damager our jumping because I'm not sure all of the possible jumping options but I do believe this links the normal and brilliance channel with my empirical data being that if I turn one either one of these volume putts down or up it sounds differently and so you can actually kind of use this to dial in like the amount of normal which is a little more muted a little little more lower mids and brilliance which is just a top and sparkle and I'll kind of like fine-tune the mix of them so I do like it for that reason and it actually just makes everything louder and it seems to break up Center this is an emperor four by twelve they're vintage 30s it's at 4 ohms because my amp when I got it was like a Fender bandmaster which you know was old and only had a 4 ohm output sound forever change to that for this guy but luckily as most people know most amps these days have a bunch of you know like all three resistance outputs well yeah this was from when Emperor was in it's I think like more or less original incarnation so it's just like a tank like it's really solid and it sounds awesome it just sounds tight and punchy and like contained but forceful and it's a perfect match for me my guitar in which is here so it's your ubiquitous Ernie Ball volume pedal which other than just the obvious reasons actually Carell and I do a lot of swell based stuff especially when we're building loops or trying to you know setups an atmosphere or I'll kind of like use it to just mimic like the track being you know like turned up at volume as it's mastered and you know like to be a mastering as it's coming in like on a recording or something like that volume pedal this is in exotic effects wah it's the only wow they have I think but I can't remember the exact name we'll just call it the exotic effects wah it works great it has four controls which are mostly at noon because when I've changed them it's been that it sounds that I just don't know it so uh yeah I I mostly keep it at noon works out I'll do a lot of I'll use this for a couple of solos just to add you know the thing that oh ah adds I have some passages of songs where I'll do this thing where I like really really like I'll turn it on and then I'll really slowly sleep back and forth from the trouble beyond full trouble cool bass as I'm playing the passage but stretched out over a long period of time so that's I like to do that I get out of this guy then it's actually going up here into my next similarly really expensive pedal that I probably don't take full advantage of to this because this guy isn't cheap it's a ready pedals little miss sunshine it's it's just a straight-up phaser it has one knob which is speed it's a nice rubber knob and you can actually like if your if your dainty you can move it with your toe mid playing but it does one thing and it sounds amazing doing it right now I actually only use it on one song so should probably use it more than that it is going into my I don't know basically my distortion pedals so fuzz is first this is a Faro supreme by black art stone works if I have any manufacturer I want to kind of give a shout to it's probably them they just I mean they make pedals for essentially heavy bands and they do a good job of it so the ferris supreme is just like it's like a version two of the old Pharaoh which was gold and really had one setting this one has some additional controls I don't remember the exact differences but uh it does have actually a bunch of different fuzz circuits that you can go to like there's like a like a Fed one and I don't know something else as well as the original Pharaoh as best I can tell I have it actually on the original Pharaoh setting I'm also not sure I'm getting the most out of this guy but I keep you know actually keep everything pretty high up fuzz and pre are really the two controls the kind of load additional gain onto the signal and I keep them both well passing in high just because the pedal is so fuzzy and rich I actually have high 100% dimes it's all the way up and tone which kind of serves almost is like a yeah I'd say it's a base cutoff because the further left I have it closer to zero the more base I get so I actually keep it close to zero it so it clearly is just blasting both ends of frequency spectrum great so that is going into my other black art stone works pedal which is a quantum mystic this is a straight-up distortion pedal it was designed by black arts in collaboration with Mike site from yob his guitar tone I loved especially when he's using this thing it's meant to be like a one of those Ross distortion pedals from the 70s but with more tongue basically tunnel control because there's a volume the drive and then any Q section bass mid treble it sounds really gnarly and very thick and very searing at the same time it's a really cool pedal that's going into my thing that's illegible because my Croatian friends made it and I don't speak much Croatian but it's an overdrive pedal they called it to 8:1 overdrive they are mostly just hobbyists but so spend a ton of time on it other than that it's fantastic and it's like a ts808 but with actually if you just took off that like super mid bump that it has and gave it some tone control specifically it has a high and a low cutoff which you can again you know like set to zero to basically have you know just much more frequency response to the lows and highs but it's awesome I usually will play it stacked with one of these other guys if I am already distorted and want to like pull out a lead or something or just rise above the mix it's a good one good one for that sort of thing it's going into TC Electronics flashback which like and I don't really use it extremely elaborately I mostly just keep it on the mod setting which is I think like a memory man deluxe just in that it's kind of an analog delay setting with that sort of chorus flutter over top of it I use it for all my delay and that's that coming around over here to my whammy which I use mostly when I want things to sound a little freaky in that it's really good for like setting it like a micro tone you know like not an exact pitch but like kind of like a little off a pitch and hitting it and you know just creating dissonance and you know some of the classic stuff you do with the way anywhere you can rock it as you have a note sustain to kinda bend it so it's basically used for weirdness that's my main like kind of weirdness pedal and I'll do it underneath stacks of other stuff like distortions and delays and then kind of bend it a little like as I'm doing I like subtle drawn-out I don't know things like that that are totally noticeable that's going into a Strymon Flint which kind of probably everybody watching this most likely has heard of it's just that it's a namely a reverb pedal with a really awesome tremolo as well and those are the two things that does tremolo on this side reverb on this side these are the reverb controls you actually have a few settings that you can use to sort of affect the the era of reverb 60s 70s and 80s 60s is kind of like a spring tanks or like from a Fender 70s I actually keep it on just because it lines up well with a lot of what we play and I'm not sure how else to describe it 80s is like really Spacey like Brian Eno the tremolo I am far less worse than what the different settings really correlate to but I think one is like a probably like a Fender tremolo another one I think it's like a Vox tremolo and then another more obscure one or something but I use the reverb a lot and I use the tremolo on like one song right now with the intensity basically docked okay last is my looper which I mainly have really just to fill the space between songs when we're playing shows we never really like to you know have the just the silence and the awkward shuffling so Kirill and I will usually take some feedback coming off at the end of the song make a loop out of it and then just have that running while we tune to get ready for the next song I've got a couple of things coming up on the album we're working on that are going to use its reverse feature which sounds a very and it's really fun to use and that should be that thanks for checking out my gear again i'm chris from huntsman feel free to come check us out we're on the internet in various places huntsman band now huntsman doom calm okay yes as well as huntsman band camp calm if you want to check some of it out but we play around chicago and the region and other places