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
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