On this episode of DTB’s “Gear Masters”, Alex Gomez, guitarist/vocalist of the indie rock band, The Backfires, shows off the gear that he uses onstage, while on the "This Is Not An Exit Tour" with Foxtide and Mercury. The Backfires is currently supporting their newest album, This Is Not An Exit.
ABOUT DIGITAL TOUR BUS: Digital Tour Bus is your backstage pass to your favorite touring artists! With daily video releases, we cover all genres, and have had the pleasure of featuring the likes of Matchbox Twenty, Twenty One Pilots, Megadeth, Machine Gun Kelly, Papa Roach, and thousands of others, over the past 15 years. "Bus Invaders" takes you inside an artist's home on the road, "Cooking at 65mph" showcases the culinary skills of artists on tour, and "Gear Masters" unveils the equipment musicians use on stage.
Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links in this description are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you make a purchase. Your support helps me continue to create content like this. Thank you!
How's it going? I'm Alex. I sing and play guitar on The Backfires.
We just put out our debut album, This Is Not An Exit, and we're here with you
right now in Chicago at Subterranean. Gonna run you through
some of the gear that makes the awesome sounds
here when we see this live. So first, I'll just start with guitars
because, you know, I'm a guitar player.
I got this guitar. So both my guitars that I play generally live
are sort of like just second-hand guitars that I've gotten.
I'm a big fan of Catfish and The Bottlemen,
and Van McCann, the singer of that band, plays like a
Tele with humbuckers. And Teles, I mean, Fenders usually aren't
humbucker guitars. But I saw a black one for like sort of an
HH configuration, and I sort of got it off Reverb, and
I swapped out the pickup or the pickguard because I was kind of like,
I don't really like the black or the white look. I was like, I kind of like
having a little pop of color. And then I went to,
although I have guitar tech in the city, at 30th Street and back in New York,
and Matt sort of put in some better sounding
humbucker pickups than what comes with the standard-issue Mexican Fenders.
Yeah, so I didn't really know what pickups to put in there. I just sort of
talked to Matt. I was like, I don't know the finite details. I would just like
need it to sound good. And he did the trick, put something in there,
and they've got like a pretty good bright sound to them.
I don't really like it when guitars sound too muddy. Yeah, so I ride pretty
much just on the bridge. It's just got a pretty good bright
sound. You know, I never really play on the
neck at all or in the middle. This actually has a really cool
configuration though. It's like a push-pull. So if I pull it out,
it sort of splits this, makes this a single coil. I don't really know how that
works, but it sounds cool. I don't play with
that live, but sometimes I will write and stuff like that.
And then I play 10-gauge. I've been playing NYXLs for ages.
Don't cancel me, but I used to play Ernie Balls, and
they broke, I swear to God, every two days that I was playing them.
And I was like, never again. And then I heard there's something about the
climate that affects the strings that you use.
And D'Addario is based on the East Coast, and so
sort of being based out in New York and all that stuff, it's like you
want to be in that climate versus, I guess, the
Ernie Balls are like in dry California. So I'm not used to
those climates usually. But yeah, 10-gauge NYXLs.
I'll show you my other guitar. So I got this one.
It's like a Gretsch all-body. I have no idea
what it is beyond that. I genuinely don't. I just was playing it
at this second-hand shop in Maryland, the start of a tour we did just
over a year ago. And there's this shop called, I think
it's called Atomic Guitars or Atomic Music, and it's just
like this big warehouse of like thousands of guitars and amps.
And so I got this there. I was playing it, and it was pretty cool.
I swapped out the pickups. It was sort of a similar deal.
There were some shitty pickups in there before, and then I took it back.
I picked it up in such a dire state. I got it for a couple
hundred dollars, and it had the worst intonation in the
world. I tried to play it for a couple songs in that tour, and it was just like
anytime I ripped it out, it just sounded terrible.
So I took it. We were playing a show back in New York. We had a couple days off,
and so I took it back to 30th Street. I'm just plugging 30th Street hard
right now. And I was like, Matt, do your thing.
He calls me the day of the show, and he's like,
hey, I've got these gold foil pickups that I think would sound cool,
and it matches the look of it. And I was like,
just throw them in there. I sort of also ride this on the bridge.
Sometimes it's in the middle, but really it's on the bridge. I don't really have
like a... I should probably be more sort of set
on like for specific sets and songs, but I
honestly just play these pretty interchangeably.
It's kind of depending on like what I'm feeling on a given night.
They do sound a bit different, but I just kind of like the idea of going
back and forth sometimes, and sometimes it'll be like halfway through a set and
I'm gonna go play the other one. Everything's just all the way up.
And so I actually don't really know. I think this is the main volume knob,
and I don't really know how to make it work otherwise.
I just have it up, and I just hope it sounds good.
I just play in standard tuning. There's only one song on the set that's like in
just... I just tune down half a step, and that's
for our song Blindsided, but that's not on this record. Otherwise, I just sort of
keep it standard tuning. I use a capo sometimes, but otherwise it's pretty
straightforward. Yeah, so this pedal board is something I've
been working on for basically I feel like the entire time that I've been
playing guitar. I feel like I started getting into pedals when I was
like 16, 17, and I was just sort of like...
because I had like a guitar through an amp, and I was like, oh this sounds good,
and I was like, you know, you're playing through pedals, and you see so many of
your favorite artists playing through pedals.
But I sort of changed. The one that's been on this board the longest
is this white huge delay. It's just a pretty straightforward
analog delay pedal. I actually know about pedals, which is the funny thing. I don't
know a single thing about my guitars, but I know how the pedals work. I feel
like this is where a lot of my time comes from,
to be honest. And then some of these are pretty new. Like I've had this on the
board a very long time. I've had the Strymon on the board since
I was like 18, and I actually had to get a new one at one point.
And then the rest of these are kind of newer. Like I had the tuner for a bit,
because you need a tuner. And then I got a compressor, because I was just sort of
like... I think it's just good to sort of like
moderate what's coming in, especially with rhythm. It's like you don't
really want to have too much discrepancies in volume.
And then this is a brand new addition. I actually got this a few days ago.
The Microamp, the MXR. And because I was watching a gear rundown
of Carlos O'Connell from Fontaine CC, and he was talking about this, and he's
saying that like they all use it, and the Arctic Monkeys all use it, and that just
has like a really good like saturation boost to your tone,
to the amp, and like helps it break up pretty nicely. And I was like,
that's good enough for me. Fucking two of the best bands in the world right now
use this pedal. It's like, it doesn't break the bank. I was like, all right,
check it out. And then similarly, he was talking about
his gear rundown, and he runs, sometimes for some of their songs, he runs like a
spring reverb before the distortion chain. And I'm just
like, in the overdrive chain, and I just found it so interesting because that
feels like it goes against all the rules of
pedals that I've ever known. And so I added this spring, I had this
reverb for a bit. I got this a few years ago in Nashville.
And I added this to the beginning of the chain recently, just because I was like
trying to experiment with some of the lead tones at times.
I only have a few lead tone moments in the set, but I was just like, oh, how do
you like make it really pop? And then I've got this Angry Troll,
which is kind of a funny one. It doesn't, it's kind of like, it just
sort of like, I use it as like a bass tone sound a bit. I don't really have it
off ever. I kind of like the name of it. I think
it's kind of funny, and it's got like this volume knob, and then an anger knob
with like a fist, which I thought was hilarious.
The Rat is like a big one. Matt recommended it to me, and it sort of
has like a pretty cool distortion tone. And then if I'm ever doing any
solo moments or any sort of lead tone moments, I just throw the Red Lime on.
I'm kind of a, I'm kind of a slut for Way Huge, I guess.
And I have like another Way Huge pedal that is no longer living on my board.
But yeah, I mean it just sort of goes down this way, comes around,
come out the blue sky. And this is on usually most of the time. It's got just a
pretty good reverb sound. Alright, so this is
like, I feel like, the best part of my whole setup.
And this is like a Vox AC30. I've been playing AC30
for as long as I can remember. It's like, I had a Fender,
I had a Fender like Hot Rod that I was like playing, or I had, the first amp I
ever had was like this like Blackstar. It's actually not true, the first amp I
ever had was like a Peavey little digital amp,
practice amp. And I sold that, got like Blackstar amp. And then I had that, and I
was like, I didn't really love it. And then at that point, I was playing like a
Strat through a Fender, and I was like, it's just such a different thing. And
then I was over in England, and so many of my favorite bands were
playing Voxes. And so I was like, alright, I'll try the Vox. And I was playing a Vox
over there. And I really liked the sound, and so we
came back to the U.S. when I was like playing a Vox.
And then we were playing some headline shows over on the West Coast,
like just over a year or two ago. And we had to rent some amps, and I asked
for an AC-30, and like SIR gave me an AC-30. That's the most
unbelievable AC-30 I've ever played in my life.
And I guess it was like one of the last of like the British-made ones
between 94 and 2004. And it's got like the blue
Celestron speakers, and it's basically modeled after the
models from the 60s. And it just sounds incredible. It just
sounds so, so good. And it's just like, just like amazing
top-end clarity that like, it just sounds better than any amp I've
ever played. And so, but yeah, I have it pretty straightforward.
I've got it right now on the low channel of the Brilliant.
And then I kind of use, I like to have a bit more treble in there. I just think it
sort of cuts through a bit better. A bit of bass, and then I've got some
sort of tone cut. Don't really know what that is. I do
sometimes will use some of the Vibe Trem with the
Brilliant, and this is such like a beautiful channel.
But then you're sort of running out the top of the Brilliant channel and it just
gets a little too hot for some of the rooms we're playing right
now. And so hopefully I'm going to be using that
a little bit more in the future. So yeah, pick's pretty straightforward. I mean,
I just feel like, yellow Dunlop Tortex. I feel like I had
like started like on blues and greens years ago,
and then I just like, just kept getting thinner and thinner. I just wanted to
sort of, more shape for stuff. This is like a
Sennheiser E935. I was playing, I was singing
through 58 for so long, and I just felt like I had no headroom.
And this just like, you just cut through. You just like can sit right on top of
everything. It sounds great. So yeah, been Alex with the Backfires.
Brand new album. This is not an exit. Just came out January 24th, 2025.
You can learn more about us at backfires.com,
at the Backfires on socials, at the Backfires official on TikTok.
And yeah, on tour right now. Come check out our show.
