INTERVIEW WITH CHILD BITE FROM TRANSLATE ZINE #10

 So back when I released TRANSLATE issue #10 I intentionally only interviewed bands associated with Hex Records.  I snuck in an interview with CHILD BITE as a hint that I'd be doing a record for them in the near future, but didn't say anything.  The intention was that people would say 'wait a minute, they haven't released anything through the label!' and then a couple months later I'd spring the freshly released MULTICULT/CHILD BITE split 12" on them as a surprise.  Of course, that was over a year ago.  Things kind of got delayed but I still kept the release a surprise, which came a few weeks ago.

That all being said, I always intended to put this interview up online because it's an awesome interview and it helps promote the record.  

There's still a few copies of TRANSLATE #10 (and for that matter #11) HERE if you like physical media, and, of course, you can get the split LP HERE.

The Detroit rock weirdos talk screenprinting, art, and relentless existence.  * 'SK' is vocalist Shawn Knight, while 'SC' is bassist Sean Clancy.

Do you both do screenprinting?

 

SK:  No, it’s just Sean.  Basically, I was doing screenprinting posters with a guy for a little while and the print shop he was at was looking to expand.  I knew Sean was looking for a job and I just played Molly Matchmaker, and he was into screenprinted posters and that sort of shit, and he lived like a mile away and at the time did not have a car.  So I said to the guy, ‘as long as you’re willing to train somebody, this could be the perfect person.’  This is a person who is into it and just wants to learn.  So then Sean dove into that and hasn’t come up for air since. 

It works  out well for logistics of being in a band- an artist and a printer.

The main thought that comes to mind is, ‘that saves some money!’

 

So, you, Shawn Knight, handle most of the artwork, while Sean Clancy, you handle the screenprinting?

 

SK:  Right.  And another thing that has developed is that since Sean is screenprinting all the time he’s trying out different things from projects he’s doing at work and will hit me up with an idea, or loose direction based on a printing process, or the ways some colors will work together.  So that will plant a seed with me and inform the art.  So in a way it’s kind of merging.

 

So I take it that right now printing posters is not really happening all that much? I assume it’s mostly shirts?

 

SC:  Yes.  Plus, our shop is mostly t-shirts anyways.  I sort of lucked into having a boss who likes screenprinted paper gig posters.  So he just wanted to offer it as an option, even though he doesn’t really make that much money off of it.  I essentially have one of the only, if only, flatstock screenprinting jobs in the metro Detroit area.

There’s a lot of people who do it out of their basement, or for fun, but I’m really the only one who has it as a real job.  So I’m really grateful for that.

Gig posters is basically over.  One of our main clients was The Fillmore, which is this big 2500 seat venue here in Detroit.  I was doing posters for them 2-3 times a month.  That’s gone because there’s no shows.  But we also do a lot of really high end art prints for this Detroit online gallery called 1xRun and they do a lot of timed art releases with different graffiti artists and modern graphic artists, or whatever.  Luckily they have been popping.  They hit us with some really insane projects over the last few months.  They’re very intense, labor-intensive art projects so that has been a lot of fun.

We also have connections with Third Man Records and they have been doing, more recently, limited screen printed LP sleeves.  So I’ve done some jobs for them.  One was a Stooges live record and I did like 1500 of those.  I’m also currently working on a live Paul McCartney thing they’re doing.  I had to print a sample that he looked at and approved, so that was wild.

So gig posters have been gone, but these other avenues of flat stock work have slipped into the cracks which makes it so I still have a job.

I can print t-shirts, and I do for Child Bite, I just don’t really like doing it.  It’s frustrating.  On a micro level the processes are a lot different with the inks and the way you’re printing. 

The way Shawn hooked me up getting into the screenprinting business is awesome and I really haven’t looked back since.  I’ve always been grateful for that.  It’s what I’ve done for probably the last 8 years now.

 

So Shawn, you get a chance to collaborate with the screenprinting end with Child Bite, but as a result of your own art seen as part of the band, do you get offers to do art with other outlets such as show poster design, or art for other bands?

 

SK:  I haven’t done a ton.  I was doing posters for awhile.  One of my first screenprinting things was a Child Bite 7” that I did with a different guy, and we were doing it all ghetto style without a legit set up and the registration was all funky, but who cares.

But I was doing posters for awhile.  I’m not sure what other people’s perception of that world is, but I got a little burned out.  It was really saturated and I think the people who do collect that stuff were running out of wall space, or ran out of money.  A lot of the projects I’d do I could be picky enough because I was never reliant on art jobs for my income.  For some reason I try to not rely on that because I think it starts to kill it for me a bit and then I start to not enjoy it.  I like to try to separate myself from ‘here’s what I do for money, and this is what I do for enjoyment’.  I never really got to the point as a poster artist that other people did.  I never made a big dent in the art poster scene.

Sometimes I’d do projects that I financed myself just because I wanted to do it, and then it would turn out great, but I’d end up losing a few hundred bucks on it!  It got a little heartbreaking, like, ‘why am I signing myself up for this?’  I already do that enough by being in a weird band! (laughs)

So with art and screenprinting I had always been trying to do new things, and Sean is like this too, we’re always looking for what comes next.  What else can we do?  That’s what makes it exciting, instead of doing the same thing over and over. 

So I would try new techniques and that would sometimes carry over into the band.  For instance, I did a few posters on this holographic paper.  One was for The Melvins, a couple others for shows in Michigan, and that eventually seeped it’s way into a Child Bite project where we did these 7”s that had die-cut covers, but also had this holographic paper insert.  I think that was the origin of that idea and an example of how my art has carried over into band stuff.

 

I get the impression that between your art, as well as the screenprinting end, Child Bite has made some connections whether it’s an opportunity to tour with a band you made posters for, or design work for other labels.  Am I wrong?

 

SK:  One thing that didn’t exactly make something happen, but it sort of sweetened the deal is sometimes when we do tours with bands we offer up to design and print posters for the tour.  That’s not something that every opening band can produce.  We did that both times we went out with Unsane, we did it with Voivod, we did it with one of Phil Anselmo’s bands.

 

SC:  Most recently we did that with Today Is the Day, but, of course, that tour ended early because of quarantine stuff.

But yeah, it was always a nice way to sweeten the deal and the headliners liked it.  We would ask them about making a tour poster and then splitting the money at the end of the tour in a way that’s favorable to the headliner.  Always at the end of tours they would be surprised because we would hand them a wad of cash because we sold 40-50 posters.  We would just cover our nut and then split it 40-60 or something.  Plus, we would sell them so they didn’t have to worry about it.  Plus, it brings their fans to our merch table.  It’s subtle, but it’s cool stuff that also plays to our advantage.  At the end of the day it’s just awesome because I’m a nerd and I love screenprinted posters.  Whenever a band has one I get excited about it so I always want to bring that sort of shit to the table in case there are other little me’s running around the world who also get excited by that stuff.

 

SK: (laughs)

 

SC:  Not related to me ‘me’s’, more like in a cosmic sense. (laughs)

 

SK:  Just jizz flying around everywhere on tour.

 

These sorts of things that bands would normally outsource you tend to keep in-house and it seems that it has been that way for as long as the band has been going.

 

SC:  Pretty much.  As much as possible.  None of us are pressing our own vinyl.  We’re not getting that far.  But as much as we can.  A)  It’s fun because it’s a creative outlet, and B) we’re a weird band where the peak of our mountain is not very high.  But if we’re going to commit to this long-term art project that is Child Bite we do have to think logistically about how we minimize the sacrifice as much as possible while producing what we think is cool shit and has value on some artistic level.

It’s always about efficiency, saving money, minimizing the amount of sacrifice.

 

SK:  A lot of times we’re doing those 7”s, or the records with the screenprinted B-sides, it’s all stuff that because we can do ourselves it ends up being mostly elbow grease.  If we didn’t have access to this equipment, and these skills to do it, and we just tried to get someone else to make that same product we would have to sell all these records for $30 each or something.  There’s just so many man hours being put into them.

It’s the glory of having awesome shit.  And I think we just want to have this long trail of rad stuff to look back on that we’ve spread around the world.

 

SC:  We’ve imbued ourselves with these skills, so how can we take advantage of them, and offer up some shit that would cost any normal person an astronomical amount of money?  We win because we get to make this cool thing.  You win because you get to get it for a totally normal price.  Even with our music we’re trying to do things that other people aren’t willing to do, or would not think of doing.  In a world of repeats and remakes, as much as we can possibly muster, we’re trying to do something that is new.  Whether it’s good or bad, I don’t know.  It’s a new step on new ground, and I think we would rather hack through the jungle then tread some path.

MIXED BAG OF SUMMER TIME REVIEWS

 There's all sorts of stuff in store here for this reviews edition.  No two releases alike!  Multiple subgenres represented, as well as one great autobiographical graphic novel about a year in the life of a young punk!  So whatever your interest I'm sure you'll find something to pique your curiosity here.

CANDY, “Heaven Is Here”

A band that truly encapsulates utter chaos within their music, the kind of extremity fit for raging in a wasteland as things resembling humans circle pit around a burning cop car under a toxic sky, Candy release their second full length and there’s all sorts of stuff going on here.  They somehow manage to combine doses of punk, metal, thrash, hardcore, industrial, and powerviolence into a melee and it all flows together.  The first half of the record tries its hand at all these subgenres a bit more while tracks like “Hysteric Bliss”, “World Of Shit” and “Fantasy/Greed” lean more into Japanese hardcore, thrash, and ridiculously speedy punk for a trio of fastcore blazers.  However, both “Transcend To Wet” and “Kinesthesia” are full-on industrial experiments that honestly don’t do a thing for me.  I enjoy when the band has added those elements to songs just to make even more noise within their music, but as stand-alone tracks it just feels like filler.  The final track- a 10 minute soundscape further makes this album feel more like an EP with a bunch of added experiments that go on too long.  It’s cool that Candy continue to expand their sonic terrorism into various styles and make it all sound like a chaotic nightmare (the album cover essentially gives you a visual impression of what to expect).  However, the live instrumentation, coupled with various samples, is where the band shines.  I can do without all the added stuff in there. (Relapse)

 

CHIME OF BAYONETS/ PERSONAL STYLE, “Tap To Load” b/w ”Black Sage”  split 7”

We live in a time where the idea of bands self-financing (well, mostly) a two-song 7” record that clocks in with a total of probably 6 minutes of music seems outrageously foreign to me.  Like, do you know how much it costs to press a record, like any kind of record?  And how long you have to wait to get that record pressed?  If I were to do that (and this is primarily why I don’t make 7”s anymore) I’d have to be convinced that those were the two best songs I’d ever written in my entire life.  The ‘more bang for your buck’ allure towards pressing an LP really makes the expense and patience one must have feel a bit more worthwhile.  Just putting that out there.  Yet the dudes in Chime Of Bayonets and Personal Style have pressed a couple 7”s at this point, pretty much on their own.  I’m unsure if they consider these the two best songs they ever wrote, but they certainly are consistent with the rest of the music they have created, which errs on heavy indie rock/punk I suppose?  When I listen to them I really feel like I’m back in the late 90’s checking out random selections from the Southern Records catalog, or anything advertised in Punk Planet and being satisfied with having taken a chance on a new band.  One song here is slower, a bit more somber, and adds some horns here and there while the other track is way more upbeat and energetic.  The cover is printed on clear plastic (acetate perhaps?) and it makes things look both interesting and confusing.  (HabitForming Records)

 

CLOAK/DAGGER, “Temp Life” b/w “Dawn Patrol” 7”

They stay quiet most of the time, but every few years the VA-based Cloak/Dagger will emerge from their slumber to dish out some garage rock punk action that is sure to be a worthwhile listen.  While this newest offering is only a two song 7” it does offer a glimpse of what they’re up to.  I feel that since they are such an extremely part time band anything new they put out will undoubtedly bring in a new audience and this is a fine place to start.  However, I’d like to offer my opinion that their last full length, “I Want Everything” (from 2017) is probably their best material to date so if you want to explore more than just the two tracks here I’d highly recommend that record as well.  So you get a 7” that looks a lot like those Sub Pop singles you see here and there and sounds a hell of a lot like Hot Snakes with more gruff vocals.  (Quit Life)

 

DEADGUY, “Buyer’s Remorse”

I’m going to reiterate some things I stated when reviewing a 7” of lost material released by Deadguy a few months ago and that’s that I never thought I’d ever see this band do anything ever again.  They didn’t exactly part on the best of terms and I figured too much time had elapsed for them to even give a shit about giving it another go.  But here we are and they have played several shows, the first of which (from 2021) is documented in full on this live LP.  There was another live recording from the band from their second lineup where the sound quality is pretty awful that was released 20 years back.  I saw that incarnation of the band a bunch of times and was happy to have been able to see that.  But I never saw the original lineup of the band and my feeling (backed up by some grainy 90’s footage) is that it was a chaotic trainwreck of broken guitars, damaged eardrums, and permanent injuries is only half true with this recording.  The setting of this live document comes from a much better sound system, far better live recording techniques, and a large stage mostly out of harm’s way of Huckins guitar swiping you across your scalp.  So it sounds pretty darn good.  The band hits a few off-notes, which, given this is Deadguy going off, they had better be.  But overall they play really well, on the cusp of all-out chaos and legitimately ripping it up.  The songs are pulled from both “Fixation..” and earlier material (I never got to see them play “Puny Human” live so this was an audible treat).  Having the added visual presentation from Tim Singer is always a plus and that almost hidden watermark imagery on the front and back cover is just a little chef’s kiss on top of an already good-looking (and sounding) LP. Here’s to hoping those maniacs keep this up, squeezing a little more life out of Deadguy for all us misanthropes who swear by their material.  (Decibel)

 

HIGH DESERT, THE, by James Spooner

There’s something immediately familiar, as well as some things outside my experience, that make “The High Desert” such an appealing read.  Some may be familiar with the author/artist of this graphic novel James Spooner via his documentary “Afro-Punk”, which came out over 15 years ago (yet it still makes the rounds), as well as the accompanying music fest of the same name that went on for a number of years afterwards.  This is his first foray into the world of comics and it is an autobiographical telling of his time coming up as a young punk in the middle of nowhere.  What was a familiar concept to me is that I’m likely about the same (or similar) age as the author so I’m aware of discovering the mystery of punk rock pre-internet when you had to search around for things, find ways of making conversation with the local skaters and weirdos, and just fumble your way through it.  But what a payoff!  I also came up in the early 90’s with similar experiences of knowing a few punks a little older than myself who introduced me to that life, or people my age also trying to just figure it out and dealing with social pressures from high school peers who made fun of you for the way you dressed day in and day out.  The difference, though, is Spooner had the distinction of growing up in the middle of nowhere (I also grew up in a small town but it just happened to be one of the hardcore epicenters of the world at the time so access to things was a little easier to come by), and being a black kid in a predominantly white scene (snow is my natural camouflage like most of the punk kids I grew up and became friends with).  It’s a great story about a year in his life when he was just getting into skateboarding, figuring out his relationship to his family being not only bi-racial but also bi-coastal, expressing his identity, and dealing with straight up Nazis in small town America some 30 years back.  I always love a good ‘punk kid coming of age’ tale and the 350+ pages of this kept me reading pretty much non-stop to the end.  (Harper or your local indie comic retailer)

 

MUSEUM OF LIGHT, “Horizon”

Imagine yourself out in the forests of the Pacific Northwest near a mountain lake.  It’s a bright, crisp summer morning.  The weather is cool, the air calm.  You contemplate the scenery for a bit and then begin your hike up the massive mountain that lies before you.  Throughout your day-long upward journey you take in the monumental size of the thing before you, how it expands above seemingly forever.  Yet you push on. You know you can reach the top, even though your calves ache and your back is becoming permanently hunched.  As you get closer to the summit you round a switchback and the sun casts a striking, golden glow upon the peak within your view and it’s glorious.  Moments such as these are few and far between, and often best experienced alone.  One person versus a mountain.  You reach the top, plant your feet, breathe in the cool air, contemplate for a bit as you survey the land 40 miles in every direction around you and take it all in, and then you begin to descend.  Museum Of Light is the soundtrack the whole time.  They make big, giant rock songs that move slow but fill with melodic howls of victory.  They are masters of tone, executing perfect giant sounds.  The songs are semi-lengthy, but never overstay their welcome.  It’s just enough. “Horizon” is the mountain climb and the massive apex all in one.  Enjoy.  (Spartan Records)

 

NEOLITHIC, “Shattering Vessels”

While a couple of the guys in Baltimore’s Neolithic may be rooted in the hardcore scene (Pulling Teeth, End It, Ruiner, etc) the closest these dudes come to playing anything remotely hardcore might be on the track “Impious Devotion”, which has an All Out War feel to it….  So still pretty metal.  The rest of this debut full length is straight up death metal.  There’s lots of chunky, double-bass groove, a fuck ton of blasts, and a whole bushel full of guttural growls.  And what sort of apocalyptic ode to the end times would be complete without some samples of a wise, yet broken, old man poetically musing about the folly of mankind and our hubris in the face of extinction?  It’s got it all I tells ya.  There’s even a painted cover depicting a frost giant or something approaching Dracula’s castle or whatever.  I’m no expert on death metal, and I’m generally fine when it comes my way, but judging this in comparison to other death metal records is above my pay grade.  I have no idea.  I’m typically no fan of death metal vocals but the music does the job of shoving extremity down your throat.  So there ya go.  (The Other Records)

 

PASSIONPLAY, “Sinking”

I can only imagine the dudes in Providence’s Passionplay spent a good chunk of lockdown practicing a lot because the songs on their second release are such a big step forward in terms of technical mastery and intensity. It’s not that their previous record was disappointing in any way.  I enjoyed that one too.  This just ups the ante with their (sort of) Converge-school of metallic fast hardcore with totally insane drumming, plenty of blasts, lots of technical guitar riffs that do some showing off, but not so much that it doesn’t let the song flow, and most songs under (or at) two minutes.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Save for a short instrumental in the middle and the last track doing a lengthy (comparatively) outro the rest of this thing is fast, blasting hardcore that is undeniably raging.  Bonus points for referring to children as ‘faithful, hateful, little shits’ in “Rubberneck” and it’s ode to God and guns and the deranged parents who can’t get enough of either.  (self-released)

INTERVIEW WITH MULTICULT FROM TRANSLATE ZINE #10

 So back when I released TRANSLATE issue #10 I intentionally only interviewed bands associated with Hex Records.  I snuck in an interview with MULTICULT as a hint that I'd be doing a record for them in the near future, but didn't say anything.  The intention was that people would say 'wait a minute, they haven't released anything through the label!' and then a couple months later I'd spring the freshly released MULTICULT/CHILD BITE split 12" on them as a surprise.  Of course, that was over a year ago.  Things kind of got delayed but I still kept the release a surprise, which came out last week.

That all being said, I always intended to put this interview up online because it's an awesome interview and it helps promote the record.  

There's still a few copies of TRANSLATE #10 (and for that matter #11) HERE if you like physical media, and, of course, you can get the split LP HERE. 

 

REBECCA BURCHETTE lays down the low end in Baltimore's Multicult and she is a certified technical wiz.  Outside of rocking one of the meanest bass tones on Earth she runs Robo Pedals, where she builds custom guitar pedals for others.  If you enjoy technical talk you will enjoy this.  If you also like a good story this will be a kicker.  Enjoy.

When you’re playing with the band do you exclusively use only pedals that you have made, or do you use other pedals that you haven’t built yourself?

 

What’s funny is that I’ve never been a big pedal person.  I’ve always thought that less is more.  So people are always contacting me about their tone and stuff, and I have this pretty developed sound, so they want to know how I do it and what I use.  And my response is, ‘Nothing!  Just stop using a million pedals to cover up your whole sound and start playing the actual instrument!’  You can get a lot of sounds by how hard you’re hitting, and I concentrate on the actual physical instrument to get my sound.  The pedals come last.  They add a little bit of color.  I only use two pedals.  And those are two pedals that I built.

I never think about adding in other pedals because I don’t need to.  I’m good.

So I think it’s funny that I build pedals, but I don’t have this huge pedal board or anything.

Do I try other pedals?  Maybe if I was in a different type of band, or trying to do something differently, but I don’t need that for Multicult at all.  Too many pedals would just ruin the sound.  Each time you put another pedal into your circuit you’re downgrading your signal once it gets to your amp.  Even the pedals I use are not being pushed very far.

But would I use other pedals?  I’ll give them a try.  I’m more of a tech person and I look at things from a technical level.  So I’ll see a pedal and say, ‘oh, it’s this type of circuit with this added, and I can just look up the layout of the circuit, and I can make it myself.’

I’ve always been a DIY person and I know how to make all the stuff.  I have my own workshop, I know how to make the boards, I know where to get the materials, I know how to do circuit layouts on the computer and print off boards.

I don’t have anything against trying them, or giving them a listen.  It’s cool.

 

So despite using only a couple for yourself with your business you make a variety of different models for others, correct?

 

Right.  When I first started I would pretty much build anything anyone asked me for, as long as it was analog.  I’d say ones that were considered ‘vintage’, or it was wasn’t made anymore and you had to find it somewhere like Reverb.  But when you buy old pedals from the 70s or 80s the components in those pedals have been used for many years and those components degrade over time.  So the sound degrades as well.

So I would build people a vintage circuit with all new stuff and parts so it will be louder and more clear.  Also, if someone wants me to build them a pedal and they send me a link to what their band sounds like I can check out that sound and build a pedal with certain types of caps that will get the sound they’re looking for.  I don’t even tell the people I’m doing this for these types of things because most people are not that geeky.

So I’d build these pedals tailor-made for the person, but also add an aesthetic thing with the colors they like, or being intuitive about what I thought they would like and surprising them with something no one else had.

So the ones I was building and re-naming as my own thing, and was building a lot of, were what people asked for.  And I sort of just fell into it.  Though once I was posting online about them people thought it was MY pedal, like I invented it.  But I really wasn’t.  It’s just an old circuit that isn’t available anymore.  I personally like the old stuff a bit more that just has the intent of having a good sound.  Older pedals, with new parts.

 

Related to that, what was your learning process for doing this?  Were you self-taught, or was it something you actively pursued through classes or a mentor of some kind?

 

I’ve been working in audio industries since I was 18 years old.  I worked at a very big audio company, a job that I got two weeks out of high school.  I happened to be, at that time, playing in a band with a guy whose father was the boss at the local office of this company.  I didn’t even know his father did that.  So I’d go to practice at his house and on breaks I’d hang out with his parents while everyone else hung out.

On the day of my graduation I went to his house to pick him up and his dad asked me what was next- was I going to college, or whatever.  So I told him I wanted to do something with music, or sound, or be a sound tech.  But I didn’t have direction.  And he said, ‘that’s what I do!’  He would go and build weird drums out of…  I can’t remember, like some weird fruit?

 

You mean a gourd?

 

Yes exactly!

 

So he told me to come by his office next week and check it out to see if it’s something I’d be into.  So I did and I was hired, just as a tech, and I worked my way up from the ground.  After 7 years I was the fabrication manager of pretty much the largest audio shop in the country.  So I remained the fabrication manager for another 8 years, and then I flipped out and I couldn’t take the stress anymore because our jobs were huge- we would do NFL stadiums, baseball stadiums.  But after 9/11 things started changing a lot from doing the more fun audio projects, like systems for Universal Studios and Disney, and a lot of our contracts were coming from places like Raytheon and Boeing, the NYPD operations center.  And it suddenly hit me that ‘I don’t want to do this.  I’m participating in putting in systems for everyone to be surveilled.’  This isn’t audio, this is Big Brother.

 

Holy shit.

 

I kind of flipped out and I wanted to leave the company.  They begged me not to go, and they made me an engineer, which they had been promising to me for years and hadn’t followed through.  So I was an engineer for two years, by which point I had already lost interest.  So I would be going in and pretending like I was working, and doing drawings, but I really just wanted to do something fun again.

I had started building a workshop when I bought a house in 2008 so I could build all sorts of cool things.  And Nick (guitarist/vocalist of Multicult) was building a studio in another part of the house, which I helped with.  And at some point I just decided I was going to build myself a couple of pedals.  And it was so easy, compared to the work that I had been doing, which was like equipment racks seven feet tall filled with all sorts of stuff, and drawings that were hundreds of pages long, with wiring we had to pull, solder and  crimp the ends of ourselves, and labeling every end.  It was very intense.

So I eventually kind of lost it, but I stayed with the company a couple more years and in those two years I was often going into my cubicle and building pedals underneath my desk!  I became obsessed!

So I built a simple Gain Boost, and then re-built a vintage RAT pedal.  I sold that one.  And the one I re-built sounded better than the original!

I liked ordering the parts, I liked putting the circuit boards together, and I liked making the pedals aesthetically pleasing for me with bright colors, artwork, and so on.

Other people started seeing them and ordering them from me.  So then I just wanted to build every pedal circuit there was!  I looked up all the layouts and I was just obsessed, but that’s me.  It was very easy for me to do to solder these little wires and circuits, especially coming from where I was coming from with these huge projects.  It was so easy.

I didn’t have to teach myself anything.  I knew how to solder, I knew layouts and schematics.  I had already been doing that stuff for 17 years on a much larger scale.

 

So I guess around this time it became your own business then?

 

Pretty much.  I didn’t need to make it a business, but it kind of fell in my lap.  Also, around this time, Multicult was doing more and becoming a bit more known.  And since the beginning of the band people already knew about my tone and I was getting messages every day from strangers about my sound and what sort of gear I was using.  So, discussion about my pedals naturally came from that and people would then order pedals from me.  So it became a business.

The day I decided to quit my job was very much an ‘Office Space’ sort of experience.  I just kind of said ‘fuck it’.  I just quit.  And that same day I got my first official order from somebody for a pedal, and it just began picking up right from there.

 

That’s great!  Kind of an unexpected door opening ya know?  So I always find it cool when bands can involve themselves in another aspect of their craft aside from just writing music and playing shows, whether it’s recording, or a graphic design, or building their own guitars.  So Multicult seems really DIY in that respect, particularly between you building pedals and Nick doing recording/engineering.  Aside from pedals, is there any other aspect of your band that you have taken on the task of creating yourself?

 

I built my own bass cabinet.  It’s a Frankenstein cab I built myself.  It’s hard to explain because I come from a nerdy, technical background.  But just using my ears I know what I want to hear.  My cabinet is an old Peavy cabinet, just the shell itself.  It was in a friends basement, it had water damage, it had two blown speakers.  It was a 2x15, which is what I have always preferred to play out of.  I asked what they wanted for it, and they asked for $25.

So I took out the blown speakers, kept the shell itself, pulled off all the old Tolex.  I sanded down the wood and re-Tolexed it, and put on some new corners.  But there’s stuff going on inside that cabinet that people don’t know about it.  I picked out my own speakers.  I use PA speakers, not bass speakers, because PA speakers can do the bass frequency and more.  The speakers are 400 watts each, but I wire them in series so they can actually do 800 watts.  Bass cabs in particular are different from guitar cabs because the bass frequency is so low, so the actual wave of sound is a lot bigger and is pushing differently.  So the inside of the cab itself is actually lined with acoustic stuffing and held up with a nylon netting to ensure no sound is coming out the little cracks in the cabinet.  This is the sort of stuff people don’t know.  I wired it myself and even put in my own connector plates.  It’s acoustically treated in a way so I get the particular sound I want.

Really the only thing I didn’t build, or fuck with in any way, would be the head that I use, which is an Ashdown head because it has the right wattage, it has a lot of power, and it doesn’t have a whole lot of weird features, or extra knobs, that I don’t need.  I like it to be simple.

 

From a complete layperson’s perspective, which would be me, what would be the basic run down of building a guitar pedal. Like an understanding of what goes into it.

 

I’m such a detailed person that I would want to go back to teaching about basic soldering and circuitry.  But if anybody would want to know, as a beginner, how to do it, you have to know how to solder.  You have to have the proper tools and the right soldering iron.  The actual building of it you could literally get a kit.  They make all these pedal kits for beginners that you can assemble so long as you know basic soldering. 

As a little girl I grew up overseas and didn’t have a lot of American TV to watch so I was always doing stuff like cross stitch.  And if you open up a cross stitch, or some crafty item, there’s these charts on how to build this thing out.  And it’s the exact same idea with these pedal kits.  It will tell you where these different transistors go and the chart will tell you the values that go into each one.  So it’s like building a little cross stitch, or a model kit.

That’s a good way for people to learn.  And as you follow the directions and start building it begins to make more sense.

But what goes into building a pedal is a complicated question because it can go in so many different ways.  There’s no one way to do it.  You can get into etching your own boards with chemicals, which I have done, and drilling them yourself, and loading them with parts, soldering in the parts, and soldering on the wiring and loading it into an enclosure, and wiring it to the connectors and foot switch.  Typically, once you have a board into a pedal enclosure the wiring stuff that goes on is basically the same.

It’s hard to talk about stuff like this because I’ll get into it and-

 

It’s tough to lay out in a simple way.

 

Yes!  Because I already know too much to be somebody who doesn’t anymore.  I started learning about this stuff when I was 18 so it’s hard to go back to being someone who doesn’t know. 

 

The curse of knowledge.

 

Yes, your brain gets wired differently after knowing all this stuff and it’s a skill in and of itself to try to revert back to not knowing, or explaining it to someone who doesn’t.  At the same time this isn’t rocket science and if someone wanted to learn about this they could by just learning a few basic skills that I feel I could teach almost anyone.  I’ve taught so many people to solder well.  I’ve written standards for the entire company on how to do this perfectly.  When I worked for that big company I tended to hire people that I already knew, but who also were musicians who had a great attitude and an interest in learning how to do this sort of this stuff.  They might be really intimidated by it at first, but then just learned to love soldering!  Once you see it and you realize the basic concepts of what you’re doing, and just build from there.  It’s a process of many years of staying interested in it and building your knowledge base.  You have to be into it to take to it

 

 https://multicult.bandcamp.com/

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