King Buffalo’s Sean McVay - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 560

Hello, this is Sean from King Buffalo. We're going to be talking about some of my gear I use on the road today and Starting it off. I will talk about my guitar This is a parts caster. I built It's a warmeth neck and a warmeth body That I just bought off their website I've been wanting to do a Telly style build with strat controls for a while So the body they call it the hybrid telly So it's the route inside is like a strat and obviously the three pickup or the sorry the three knob Control like a strat five-way switch. I just have a three-way switch because I just have the two humbuckers Tune-o-matic bridge, which I very much love neck is roasted maple Compensated nut It's great, this is my main number one guitar. I absolutely love it. It's mahogany body It's kind of I don't know sort of Put it together to kind of be like the ultimate road workhorse for me Stays in tune really well The humbuckers are bare knuckle mule pickups. I think they sound great It's just it's been really everything I could have asked for I built it Probably about a year or so ago at this point and it's it's my favorite guitar to play Strings they use NYX L's. I'm just using tens. I am considering moving up to tens with a heavy bottom So I think that would be like I think the standard tens are 10 to 46 And I'm considering moving they have a 10 to 52 set This is we do tune down low a lot of earth We're kind of go back and forth 50-50 into D standard is kind of home base And then we also do a lot in drop C. So with tens, it is a little loosey-goosey in drop C But it does work pretty well But I have considered moving up just to have a little more tuning stability when I'm in drop C The backup is very similar Another warmeth build. This one is actually obviously a strap body Same pickups bare knuckle mules in there Probably the biggest difference between this and the other telly Besides the body shape is the bridge. This has the schaler. I think it's the schaler 3ds Also known I think is the 475 So all the strings just go right through the top and it's got sort of a roller Bridge that you can position the strings over the magnets of the pickups This is primarily a backup on tour at the moment I haven't quite found my way with it yet to have it be number one Maybe someday Okay, pedal board kind of looks a little complicated, but it's really pretty simple. I have the Vox 847 a wah pedal I Have gone through a lot of these and sometimes a true bypass modem, but I've stopped doing that So this is just a standard stock right off the shelf 847 a That goes straight to this loop pedal It just basically lets me access my overdrives and fuzzes without having to step over everything so overdrive side I Honestly, it makes it pretty simple. I do switch this overdrive out pretty consistently this right now is an OCD style pedal I Often will have a blues driver in there I've had some boutique Actual tube overdrive pedals that I really like they were just kind of getting a little beat up on the road I was they kind of were not being super reliable having an exposed 12 a x7 on them So I kind of go back and forth all the time with what to actually use as my overdrive right now I'm using that and I'm already trying to figure out what I'm gonna switch it out with Occasionally I have used this Skinner box my stomp underfoot As it's a rat style pedal I'll use that as an overdrive just with the gain really low, but I I'm not using that right now right now. I'm actually just using that as a clean boost For the silverfish, which is my main fuzz and that has It's a sort of a big muff style circuit Left side of the pedal is your fuzz This isn't like an Octavia circuit and also has a gate to it so you can get really spitty sort of heinous fuzz sound Which I really like This tube screamer. I actually just started using Like a couple months ago Sometimes when I'm like really chugging away on sort of stuff that might be like a little more medley of a riff with the silverfish Sometimes it can get a little Woofie, so I started using this tube screamer before it basically as a clean Any cue control basically I turn the the overdrive all the way down I just match it to unity gain and roll the tone pretty much all the way off So it's essentially just a bandpass filter that goes into the big muff And you get some it's really like a cool mid focused aggressive big muff sound which I really like So kind of revisiting it goes wah pedal into the loop Green side is fuzz which goes straight from here into the tube screamer, which is almost always on Into the fuzz which is also over it pretty much always on and then I'll kick the octave on and off The fuzz goes into the Skinner box, which I rarely use as a clean boost I have a few spots where I'll loop things and so to get over the loop I might kick on that for like a solo comes back into my loop pedal Left side red side is my overdrive side comes back out to the overdrive back in Tuner loop out goes into Tuner Peterson strobo stomp. It's a great tuner. Not much else to say about that Then it goes into a whirlwind. This is their phase 90 circuit Supposedly I've heard which of course every phase 90 person says The builder says that theirs is the most accurate Recreation of the original phase 90. I don't know if that's true. I just know it has one knob It sounds good and whirlwind has Rochester ties, which is our hometown and that makes me feel good. So I like that goes from the Out of the phaser into an analog man buffer From there, it goes out into the input of the amp, which we can touch on in a second I Use the effects loop in the amp the effects send comes into my striving timeline The timeline goes into my boss rv6, which is also a pretty new addition to the pedal board I have bounced between a lot of reverb pedals trying to find what I like I love the TC Electronics Hall of Fame, but the foot switches kept crapping out on me and they're pretty much irreplaceable The switches are so I was getting sick of buying a new unit every time the switch broke So I I'm just kind of looking for a new reverb. This is the one right now. It sounds fine It sounds like a whole and then it goes back into the effects return on the amp this here is just a expression pedal for the Timeline, which I often use to control the amount of repeats So usually I'll go toe down that'll be infinite repeat so I can take a sound and I can essentially just Have it cascade forever. I can back it off and the tails will die off and I Guess the only other interesting thing about the timeline is during a lot of songs I'll actually kick it over into looper mode and then I'll activate loops and I'll build pretty big big sounding stuff and It's pretty cool. I use it examples would be like Cerberus. I use at the end of Cerberus a lot of loops There's about five loop layers Mammoth I use a like three or three loop layers or so. We got a kitty cat coming in to say hi and Yeah, kind of go back and forth from loop mode and just delay mode That's the pedal board. This is my amplifier that I'm currently using Fender hot rod DeVille. It's the Michael Landau signature version of the hot rod DeVille Which is pretty similar to the stock hot rod DeVille as far as I know The only difference is they got rid of all the overdrive stuff. And so there's basically two Just about identical clean channels on the amp Channel by channel 2 has a boost button that will kind of make it a little more Mid-range II they I guess they describe it for filling out the bridge pickup on a strap. I don't really use that side I don't use the on-board reverb Occasionally, I'll dial in some presence thing. I love about this amp is It's it's really clean if you want it to be it's not as loud as my twin Anyone who has followed my rig over the years knows that I was a fender twin guy for a very long time But with all the looping I've been doing over the past few years I was finding going straight into the twin with the loop things would get a little mushy I'm able to use the effects loop on this and it's able to cut through a little better The speakers are great. They're Celestion V type speakers. The amps awesome It's kind of been my main amp for about a year now around the same time. I built that guitar Anyone on our most recent run in December may have seen me using an AC 30, which I just got and I'd like that a lot, but I decided to bring this one back up for this run so I am constantly It's going to be a little bit of a theme constantly pulling stuff in and out as I'm sure a lot of guitar players can relate To so I kind of start from down at the pedal board. This little blue box is essentially just a little box that converts This device the Keith McMillan 12-step to MIDI So it runs a USB out into that box and then I set a MIDI Cable to my micro cord and that basically allows me to kind of do like the poor man's Taurus like I can play I can trigger, you know I can program this to like play a chord if I want but I can kind of do little stuff and then Control it. It's basically just feeding MIDI signal to the To the micro cord and I'll change patches with this as you know as needed And I use this this has kind of been my main synth that I've used on King Buffalo Records since Orion Always kind of used a micro cork. They're cheap They're kind of fun to play with menu diving gets some you take some getting used to but once you kind of Get a little used to it They're a lot of fun and they're really replaceable you can get them at any Guitar Center and you don't have to worry about Destroying like a vintage nice synth on the road. All right. Well, I've been Sean from King Buffalo. This is my rig If you're interested in catching us out live, we have some shows coming up in Europe this summer There's a been a few announced for June, but there will be more to come Check us out at King Buffalo comm for more information