On this episode of DTB’s “Gear Masters”, Cole Clisby, guitarist of the indie pop band, Almost Monday, shows off the gear that he uses onstage, while on The Dive Tour. Almost Monday is currently supporting the deluxe edition of their newest album, DIVE.
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!
What's up? I'm Cole. I play guitar in Almost Monday, and here's my rig. If you're a gearhead,
you might be pretty let down because it's not very cool. It's a Fender Telecaster Deluxe.
Cool thing about this guitar is it has these pickup switchers, or whatever you call them,
that can turn it from a humbucker into a single coil. Yeah, coil splitter, that's the right term.
Each pickup individually, which is nice. Yeah, I mean, I use my pickup selector quite often for
like different tones, and then I go to single coil for songs that sound more like they're
supposed to be on a strat, and I recently switched to doing that this tour just because
switching to a strat was getting annoying and causing too much time in between the songs, so
I dialed in my tones now so that I can just pop them in, switch the pickups,
and it's way quicker. Yeah, the guitar I got through Fender, and I've been playing a different
Telecaster Deluxe. It was a Chris Shifflett model, the guitarist for Foo Fighters, who's a friend of
mine. He gave it to me when I was like just starting out on guitar, and I've been playing
that for like years, and then I wanted to upgrade to the newer one that has like the coil thing.
So yeah, I switched over to this one pretty recently, and it's been playing great. It's good
for the road. It's really durable. I play the Elixir 10 Nanoweb, and they hold up pretty good.
I did have to get an aftermarket little saddles, carbon fiber ones, because I had the brass ones,
and I just like kept breaking strings, so that's one thing I had to change on the guitar.
Oh yeah, just standard tuning for pretty much everything. This one actually, as of tonight,
we switched our backup guitars between me and Dawson, because this last run of rehearsals,
I dialed all my tones in to only CP sounding pretty much good on Telecasters. The strat sounds
quite different running through Kemper, so in case I play guitar in every song, so in case I break a
string, I have this one to go back to really quickly with a A-B selector, but I used to play
this strat over here. That's just a really basic stomp kind of strat, but I've been loving playing
just one guitar during the set. It's been great so far. So yeah, the reason why I said it's not a
great gear head video for me is because I just have a Kemper, which is like an amp modeler thing
for people who don't know, so like all the pedals and the amp is like inside this unit.
It's pretty much just like a computer thing that goes directly out from the board to the house.
There's no amp, like physical amp behind me or anything like that, and then I just run a
just a Boss tuner and then a Boss line selector to switch between guitars.
They have a tuner on the Kemper. I used to use it, but it's just not as great, and this one's easy
to read on stage when it's dark and stuff. For most of it, I only use like two different amps.
It's like a Fender Twin Reverb and the blanking on the other one, I want to say it's a JC-100
or something like that for a more just like funky like strumming and stuff like that
on the neck pickup. But yeah, mostly use the same amp, and then what I just found out this
last rehearsal is I just added like a Wi-Fi element, so I can have an app now and I can
hook up an app to an iPad or a phone and like tweak stuff as much as I want through that,
which is like super helpful, way more convenient than having to like do it on the board here.
But yeah, I can hold up to like eight pedals per patch, so I can like go through songs
here, and then each song has like, you know, the benefit of the Kemper is you can switch,
you know, I have let's see like seven pedals on one patch, and then in the click of a button
I can change everything, and now I have like four different pedals, so like you can't do that with
a normal pedal board unless you have it routed through like a sort of like remote thing that
does it for you, but this is just I guess all in one thing. Yeah, I don't know what else there's
much to say about the Kemper other than that. They're really useful for touring, don't have to
lug around an amp, but I would like to have an amp one day if we can have carry around amps like that
and have more gear. Would be fun to play through one on stage, it's mic'd up, but we'll get there
one day. These picks have all been used, so there's nothing on them, but they're the Dunlop Jazz 3
1.14 thickness. I've been using these since I started playing guitar when I was like nine,
so I'm just super used to them. They're pretty small, so they're good for like fast picking
and like lead stuff, but yeah, they're pretty thick too, but yeah, I've just been really used
to them. I can't really play well with like big picks or like flimsy picks, and yeah, I have like
the custom UE ears, just basic. I think they're like the UE 7s or something. They're for like
guitar players supposedly, and yeah, that's pretty much it. For those of you who don't know,
we just put out our debut album last fall, Dive, and we're on the Dive tour right now for
the next few months. Europe, US, and yeah, more soon probably.
