Royal Canoe's Bucky Driedger - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 275

Hey, I'm Bucky from Royal Canoe, and I play guitar in the band and do some singing. We're going to take a run through what I play with today, and we're going to start with my amp. So this is just a classic, a good old standard classic, a Deluxe Reverb. I used to play with a Hot Rod back in the day, but this amp just has way more clarity. I mean, I toured with it for like 10 years, and it never broke on me once. That was the benefit, but this one just has so much more clarity with all my pedals and different tones, and the clean tone is just so much more pure. I know there's like nicer amps out in the world, but I just really like that Fender sound, and I really like the Fender Reverb sound as well. So I've just been stuck with these amps for a really long time, and I like it. When I dial in my amp for a show, it's pretty much the same every night. I don't change that much. Because I use so many pedals and stuff, I'm not doing a ton of just straight up pure clean guitar stuff, so I'm basically just keeping my volume as low as I can, because the other guys will yell at me otherwise. And the EQ is pretty much just right down the middle, and occasionally I'll put on some reverb for some songs, but honestly it's pretty simple. I do a lot of my volume management stuff on the pedal end of things, so yeah. So this is my pedal board, and I'll run you through the pedal chain here. It's a bit too big, but I like all my pedals, so I'm not giving any of them up. So it starts with a line selector, I actually have a mic that I run through my pedal chain quite often to do effects stuff through my amp with vocals, and then I have a guitar in, so I just can flip between them really quickly during the set. It goes to the tuner, nothing much to say about that, then it goes to this Empress compressor. Empress is a company from near Ottawa in Canada, and I have a couple of their pedals on here, this Super Delay which I'll get to in a bit, and they also make a really rad tremolo pedal and a bunch of other really awesome stuff. But this compressor is super pure, it colors the tone but not too much, it's just a really pure, awesome compressor, so I really like it. Then, where do I go, I hit my Space Echo, which is a digital version of the old Roland Tape Machine Space Echos, just tons of really great reverb and delay in there, it's got tap tempo which is great, and if you hold down the tap tempo it does all sorts of great swirling and twirling, and that's really nice. Then I get to this MXR Phase 90, I really like this Phase because it sort of adds a little bit of drive to it as well, it seems to push the signal a bit, which I really like. Then I go to the Pog, which basically is just like an octave generator, I'm sure if you're watching this you care about gear and you know what this pedal is, but it just has some filters and I usually end up adding higher octaves to things, often if I'm doing a lead thing I'll add a little high octave to help it punch through a bit, or I do some other stuff like with my vocals through the amp where I'm making really high pitched squealing stuff, it's just a really versatile, great pedal. Then I hit this Gate, this Gate actually serves a really weird function in my pedal chain, I use it a lot to interact with this fuzz pedal, which I'll get to in a bit, but it allows this fuzz to just squeal at these very weird pitches that I can change with a knob, and then also sometimes if I'm doing a really tight clean thing, I'll put a bit of a gate on it with the compressor so it's just like a really tight, muted, Dr. Dre style, tight clean guitar thing. Then I go to the Big Muff, which is a great pedal that always breaks but it's really sweet, just big loud fuzz, awesome. I use it actually a lot in conjunction with the Space Echo to just get these big long fuzzy, washiness situations going on. Chorus, not much to say here, it's just a pretty classic chorus, I pretty much have it set at this setting all the time, it's pretty up the middle, just a pretty basic chorus but I really like it. Then I go to this Fairfield, oh no, sorry, I go to this Fuzz Factory next. So the Fuzz Factory is from Zvex, which is a Minneapolis company, it's like one of my favorite pedals in the world, it's just like super crazy fuzz, it can squeal, it has a gate on it, which you can get these really, if you're playing stuff you can get this, when you come off the note it's like a zipper closing, because it really tightens it up right after, which I really like, you can really rein it in in a very cool way, it's an interesting effect. And then I've got another Zvex pedal, which is my second favorite pedal, this is the Lo-Fi Junkie, which is kind of like tremolo, phaser, tape, warble type pedal, it just adds some warble and degradation to the tone and just makes it sound super vintage-y and old and cool and it also compresses the sound in a really cool way, so I end up using that pedal quite a lot. Then I go to this Fairfield Circuitry Barbershop Overdrive, I actually got it originally just to replace, I used to have a Hot Rod Deluxe and I would just use the amp distortion on it and I got this to replace that, it's better than that because this one really responds to how you play, so it's not just on-off overdrive, if you dig in more it breaks up a bit more, so I really like that feel part of it. And then I go to this Last Empress pedal here, which is a super delay, this is a sweet, sweet, sweet pedal, it's got so many different things on it which can be daunting, but the settings I use the most on it are the tape delay, you can select between like a new, medium and old tape, and I usually have it on the old tape so as it delays it's detuning on itself a little bit, which I really like, and then I use the looper on it a bit, there's a loop setting, and then I use the reverse setting a bunch, and one of the coolest reverse settings, if you select it to C here, you can get, it does reverse delay and octave up from whatever you're playing, so you get this really high sort of fluttery sort of stuff going on, and I hadn't really heard that on a bunch of records, but since I got the pedal I've been hearing that sound on a few records, like I know the new Jeff Tweedy solo record, it definitely sounds like there's some of that fairy noise going on, which is great, and then lastly just the volume pedal at the end, sometimes I make like little loops on here that I fade in, so I like having the volume at the end, and just like gives me a fail safe if one of my pedals is squealing or whatever, and do some fade in stuff, other than that I have my little maps, I make little maps for my songs, just because like almost every song I have like different settings, which is stupid but also great, and almost none of these have saveable presets, except for the Pog and the Super Delay, which I actually don't end up using these presets, because I have these maps anyway, and that's my pedal board, oh wait I forgot about this, this is an Electro-Harmonix voice box that just sort of sits on the side, I use a thing on here where you can, I can plug the guitar into here and play chords, and then it tunes your voice to that chord as you play, so there's in this set on this tour, there's only one song I use that for, but basically I'm just like playing a D minor and singing, and it creates like a four voice chord in D minor, which is pretty cool, yeah, that's the pedal board, this is the mic that I run through my pedal board, it's a Behr Dynamic mic, honestly I used to use this as my main vocal mic, and it sort of got a bit dead sounding, I think it was getting old, so I don't mind like, just because I'm often like when I'm using this pedal amp, I'm like singing, and then I like have to quickly drop it, so I kind of like try to like let it down a little bit like a vine through my hand, and I've worked out a few little moves to like let it land gently, but sometimes it just smashes on the ground, and that's just stay okay, and then for like my main vocal I use this Sennheiser 935, I just really like the clarity of it, it's just like, even just for my own like monitoring, it's just like a super clean present tone, and I've found it like cuts through, like if we roll into a venue that doesn't have nice wedges or anything, this still really cuts through really nice in the wedges and I can hear myself well, so. So this is like, actually about like three years ago, our entire trailer got stolen, so we had to replace everything, and this guitar replaced like the guitar I bought when I was 18, which is really sad, but I used to have just like a regular Telecaster, but I replaced it with this Deluxe, I like the Deluxe more I think now, I like, I feel like there's a bit of a wider range of tones you can get with these pickups, you can get a little mellower instead of it just being like the super bitey Tele sound, but also if you're on the full bridge position you can get it to sound pretty Tele-esque too, like the classic Tele, so. Always standard tuning, except a couple songs I tune down the E to an E flat, and then I play D'Addario strings, I usually play like the medium D like blues style I think, so the bottoms are a little bit heavier than the tops, but it's like usually that, or just like straight up medium gauged D'Addario strings, and that's on both guitars. On this guitar, tone wise, I have everything at 10 all the time, that's it for this guitar. Both these guitars I used, like swapped throughout the set, it started that this was like my main guitar, and I got the SG just because I wanted something different to back me up, and then when we recorded this last record, I ended up using the SG for everything, and so now that's become like, so any of the new songs we're playing is all SG, and all the old songs are Telecaster. This is just your classic standard SG, again I have all the knobs at 10 all the time, and honestly like I never thought I'd be an SG person, I always thought it was like a super rock guitar, which is not really my vibe of playing, but when I got it, the clean tone is actually like super rich and full, and I really ended up liking it. Like I said on this last record, any time I thought it should be a Tele song, I'd pick it up, I wasn't really digging it, I'd pick up the SG, and then I was like, yeah, this is the tone. So I've kind of fallen in love with the SG in a weird way. This is a stock, I can't remember what year it is, like 2005 maybe, something like that, but yeah it's pretty stock, it has some wear on it, I bought it used, but it feels really great, it sounds really great, and then I guess I'll just give a shout out to this strap actually. This is made by this company called Stinger, based in Montreal, and they were gracious enough to give me one, which is really kind of them, and it's super comfy and durable, it's my favorite. Make sure you check out our website, we're on tour quite often, so check out royalcanoe.com for our tour, and we're backslash Royal Canoe at all of the different social media places, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and our record came out at the end of January, our brand new record called Waver came out, and it's available on the internet in your local record store, I'm sure if they don't have it they can definitely order it in for you, and it came out on vinyl, gold vinyl, the first pressing, which is really sweet, so if you're one of the first, I think 500 people to buy it, you'll get a gold version, which is really rad.