Hot Milk’s Jim Shaw - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 578

Hi, I'm Jim from Hot Milk and today I'm going to talk to you about our gear on the road. We've got an album coming out on the 27th of June called Corporation Pop. Go ******* buy it. Yeah, I'm going to talk you through it all. I've been with Gordon Smith for about six or seven years now. We got introduced by a mutual friend and they've been brilliant all the way through. They've supported us like on whatever I've needed. They've always kind of listened to us. It's a great relationship. So each one of these guitars is custom made for me like you can't buy them anywhere else. This was actually probably the third guitar I got from them. It's kind of, so it's a Gatsby shape. So it's like, I really like the offset shapes. They just sit really nicely. I always go for like a sand off here to kind of fit my arm better. It's a real simple guitar. We've got a three-way switch here, controlling P90 pickups. Got through ferrule for strings on the body. Most of the, I think the hardware is Gota on most, on most or if not all of these guitars. Got some locking tuners here. Then yeah, this hasn't got push pull. It's just a simple volume knob for both and a tone knob. So for this, most of it will come from the bridge pickup. Most, all my cleans, 90% of my cleans switch to neck. Just gives a bit of a warmer, more rounded, well-rounded sound. I'm using D'Addario NYXL strings on this. They just last so long. It sounds so bright and crisp. 52 through 11. They just sound great. They just really rip. And then we've got a bunch of custom picks somewhere. We've got, we had a bunch of custom picks. Yeah, we're down to the last three now. So yeah, there's one left. You're in luck. Oh, two left, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, here we go. I think it's 0.73, yeah. And it's Intune GP who make these. They've done us a really good deal. Just love how they feel. Most of the time, the tone's set fully up. I'm just rolling up and down volume as and when I need to. And then we've got a bunch of wireless on this. So we're using the Sennheiser EXW, yeah. This is Jay, by the way, our guitar tech. How's it going? You okay? And this is in, it's not in GB. Whatever band America has, we've got two different rigs. We've got GB for the UK. I kind of grew up listening to folk music and stuff like that. I just feel like it just has a really big, powerful sound. So yeah, all of our guitars are in this weird tuning. So to keep us locked in, we write them here. So these two are both in the same tuning. And then this is in the C sharp equivalent. So it's just dropped down another semitone. And then this is in the C equivalent. So that's a tone compared to this one. Just going back to this one real quick. This one only comes out for one song on this set. It's for Zoned Out. It's a bit of a kind of brighter, poppier song. And the P90s just seems to cut through because there's quite a lot of synth in that song. So I just felt the balance was a little bit better. Because it wasn't super overdriven. Oh no, it's taken a hit. So this is the first time this guitar has ever come out. This is a brand new guitar. It's come out, we had this made just before we started this tour. So, oh, one thing I forgot to mention is all my guitars got my name on them, which is cool. Again, Gordon Smith killing this. It's the same, it's based off the Offset Gatsby shape. But it's a slightly different shape. It's a little bit squarer off here. Goes a little bit higher up here. Obviously the scratch board is on this one, but not on the other one. I decided that I just wasn't getting any use out of the Tone Pop. So I've just stuck to a simple volume knob. Again, three-way switch. And then in these are... So Gordon Smith custom-wined their own pickups. Essentially, they're kind of based off, I think, a 500T Gibson model Humbucker. I found them in the studio. They were just super ripping on rhythm tones. And they're equally as good for lead. So this is currently what I'm playing most of the set on. Playing for songs like 90 Seconds to Midnight. I Just Wanna Know What Happens When I'm Dead. It's got quite a... Again, both of them have got quite a thin radius on the neck. I just find it easier to get round rather than like a big thick Gibson neck. It's not too different to the last guitars. Still, this one hasn't got locking tuners, but it's go to again. Go to bridge. Yeah, there's not so many differences here. And then we have on this one... So this was the first guitar I ever got from Gordon Smith. It's their deluxe model. Again, this is when I was first starting out. So kind of working out what I liked and what I disliked about guitars. So this has got a Tone Pot on this. Again, I don't really use it. It's just locked at full. Volume knob, three-way switch. They've got this Wraparat. So this is great for intonation, but it's... As you can see, it's a slight pain in the arse to restring as you end up chipping away at the paintwork, which is this kind of... Depending on where you're looking at it, it's this kind of like oily purple that sometimes looks green, sometimes looks red depending on where the light goes. I just thought it was really cool. But unfortunately, it's had a few wall wounds, which is not very easy to fix. We've got lace drop and gain pickups in this. They custom did these, which is amazing. They gave it to us and it just sounds ripping. This is on a lot more of the heavier songs as it's tuned down to C sharp. So songs like Horror Show, Heart of My Deathbed, where it's a bit more single note heavy, just has a bit more body to it. Same strings, I guess, then. Again, wireless. And we change these. I basically flip the mute on and off as and when we change guitar. So that's this one. And then finally, we have this one, which is another deluxe. This one, I don't know, it does have a... Yeah, so all my guitars have got this kind of roll off on the back just so when I'm standing, it sits a bit better in the body. This one, I've got slightly different pickup set up. So I've got the humbucker here and then I've got a lace sensor for my neck, which is because I play a bit more clean on this and it's just, it's not as low heavy. It's not as kind of muffled, if you will. Again, same deal down here. Got tone, got volume, got the wraparound bridge. We learned from our mistakes first time. So we put a bit of tape here to stop scratching the ---- out of it. Yeah, again, custom finish on it. Kind of wanted this antique kind of feel to it. So kind of, you know, painted it sunburst, then painted it back and then they sanded it back. Kind of got custom inlays, lock-in tuners, go to lock-in tuners. And then, yeah, like Jay said, with this one, it's 56 through 11. Yeah, and again, this is in the open tuning, but in C. So this one comes out on breathing underwater. I think, is that it for this set? No, it's one more before that. Over your dead body. Yeah, so mainly because of the tuning on this one, most of the tones are exactly the same with this. So yeah, that's my guitars. So this is kind of our fly rig, but at the moment we're kind of rocking it as our pool rig. It's been a bit of a chop and change system for the last three, four years now. Just trying to get it to a point where everything's running smoothly and we've got redundancy in spec. So it was kind of a bit of an amalgamation between the idea that I had. Mixing it in with the old rig. Because we originally ran the playback system through Cymatic. So when we changed, because we changed, we had Kemper and Cymatic, then we went on to the Cymatic and the Quad Cortexes. So we built a rig for Quad Cortexes and Cymatic. So we sat down and we kind of planned it all out on Excel. And then Justin McGrath, who helped us out massively with this kind of playback system, he built all this. And then Jay has built all of this in his workshop. Yeah. Done a great job. Yeah, it's been good. It's been good. So currently we are running a double computer redundancy system for playback. We're running through Ablestack, which is controlled set-wise over here. And we've also got one over there with Della on drums. Super easy to change the set list or whatever. So this is kind of what it looks like in performance mode. And this is what it looks like in build mode. So you get an overview of this. And this is kind of where we lock in during the show, which is then controlling Ableton, which our entire session's in. So we've got click. We've got time code. We haven't got any time code in this because we're not running LX. All the individual stems put into here. And this is all fed out into these play audio. So this is running in an aggregate mode. So we've got, I think, 24 channels of playback split out just to give Jim a bit more control in front of house. Yep. This is also in this rack. We've got the sequencer here, which is powering everything. We've got a radial switcher, which in the event of failure in one of the computers, it will fall from A to B. So if we ever have any issues on stage, we're going to be picked up. We've also got these universal audio interfaces, which are going to mine and Hannah's mics, which have got preamps and effects on distortions, reverbs, etc. This is all the boring ---- that goes to front of house. And then we've got neural DSP quad cortexes over here, which I just really like the sound of. We've been, that's Tom's bass. Actually, I'll get mine out. We vary in tone quite a lot from song to song due to the difference in our songs. So we found that these were a real great compromise for still having a really solid sound, but being able to swap between tones and effects really quickly. So, you know, we've got all the songs dialed in here. Yeah, you can go through them all. Each song's got its kind of different tone. The way these have been set out, we're kind of still building them at the moment. We're going through like a second iteration of tones. So we've got like, you know, transposition here. We've got compression, distortion pedals up here. And then we've got a split between two different heads and cabs, which is then run through a doubler to give a bit of a wider spread. But for my ears, because I find it really difficult trying to sing and play guitar at the same time when everything's like super in the middle. So having that doubler, big shout out to Billy Hutton who helped us out there with this. But yeah, it's been a massive game changer. And then Jay, do you want to talk about, what else is in there? It's a bit, yeah, the building aspect of things. We're just, yeah, getting power locked in. We changed out the sequencers for, we had, initially we had Furman's and then we changed out the sequencers for, we've had no issues with it in terms of crashing now. It's a bit of a weird one because we changed two things at the time. It was the introduction of the Crux. As well as the Chops. As well as the, yeah, as well as the DC7. We introduced the Crux. At the same time, we upgraded the Furman to this sequencer. We've had no issues with how like crashing or anything now. So we don't actually know what was causing it. No. But it's now not happening. So it's one of them. It's a definite upgrade. I think, yeah, we- It's a lot more solid. Yeah, yeah, it's way more solid. And then we've also got this, a little baby bomb. It's a little power amp. So for bigger shows, we'll have like some Marshall 1960Bs on stage. And I'll just run this directly out of that. If you want to come around the back. We'll just run out of jack port here, straight into a cab. And I guess it's a bit of like onstage sound where, you know, if we're playing big stages, it just gives you a bit more body and feeling on stage. Yeah, it's kind of it. We've upgraded this from XLR out. We've still got them for redundancy, but most of this is now on LK multi-pin just to make for quicker, easier changeovers. You know, just plug and play. Bam, bam, you're in. But yeah, it's not that complicated. And then we've got a guitar pedal somewhere. It's just a poly tuner that I can tune during songs. At some point, I might put an EQ pedal on here. But again, most of the work is done in that rack over there. And then, yeah, my mic, which is a Sennheiser EW something or other, I think, or maybe it's a G4. I don't know. We've literally just upgraded these. And then we've got the SE V7 capsule. Just suits both mine and Hannah's vocals. And then, yeah, mic stands, picks, stage. So yeah, we've got a new record coming out. We're playing a bunch of new songs live on this tour. And then we're going to be touring around Europe, touring around the UK, doing some shows in Japan. Yeah, super excited. Thanks for watching this. It's been my rundown.