On this episode of DTB’s “Gear Masters”, James Kourafas, guitarist of the pop rock band, Friday Pilots Club, shows off the gear that he uses onstage, while on tour with Circa Waves. Friday Pilots Club is currently supporting their debut album, Nowhere.
VIDEO SUMMARY: 00:00 Introduction 00:27 Guitars 02:10 Amp & Pedal
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Hey there, I'm James. I play guitar in the band Friday Pilots Club.
We're right here at House of Blues Chicago for our Chicago date of our tour
co-headlining with Circa Waves. And yeah, figured I'd give you guys a
little bit of a rundown of what I'm working with for this tour.
So the guitar I use is a 60s Vintera Strat
in Burgundy Mist from Fender. It's made in Mexico, I believe. It's my
favorite guitar. I've been playing this for
some years now and I use this and then I have a backup Mustang
that's a little bit like modded with some different pickups.
But primarily I pretty much always use this guitar. I feel like it
works the best for our set, sounds the most versatile. The guitar is all stock.
I haven't changed anything about it since I got it
and I really pretty much always rock the middle pickup.
I think it works really well in tandem with Sean's guitar.
His guitar has a more mid-forward thing going and he uses a lot of bridge pickup.
So me on the middle pickup I feel like it
kind of creates this nice hole for him to sit in the middle for his lead tones.
And really I think occasionally I'll roll the tone down but pretty much I'm
keeping it pretty standard and letting the
pedals do all the heavy lifting for the bigger tone changes. But picks,
I'm using the Ernie Ball 0.73s and I play everything in E Standard
and I do a lot of tuning with the Quad Cortex
to avoid having to do a lot of tuning and guitar switching.
The strings I use are Ernie Ball heavy bottom skinny top.
It's 10-52s. Alright and as I was saying I use a Mustang.
Fender Mustang as a backup. I don't pull this out super often but
when I do it's always a pleasure to play it. I have a Seymour Duncan
noiseless strat pickup in the neck and a humbucker in the bridge.
Yeah super different than make any adjustments you need.
The tones sound great. I don't really do anything too crazy with uploading any
like captures or anything. I'm pretty much using everything that
just comes stock on the pedal. And yeah for the amps a lot of what I'm doing
we run everything in stereo. So I usually am running two different amps
just so even when I'm not using stereo effects I can get a little bit of extra
width and side I want to use because I like to
keep it to like one patch per song and just change the scenes.
And I think the thing about the Pilot's set is the songs are pretty varied.
Genre, tone, sound wise. And so I think that's where
for us using the digital boards really comes in handy because we have so many
drastic tone changes throughout the set that it's nice to be able to not be
tap dancing all over the place and be able to just instantly switch to
something that's really crazy different from what you were on previously.
As far as the pedals that I use again it's super dependent on the songs.
When I have like I like to add a little bit of dimension to the patches.
So when I have just even simple clean things I'll add like a little bit of
like stereo room reverb very subtly to kind of bring in a little bit of width.
I'm big on like modulations like choruses and stuff even used really subtly.
Like for instance here's one where our song Never Say No
where we have a big section where it gets really kind of fuzzy and big.
I'm actually modulating one side of the signal chain.
So before I hit the amp on the right side I have a little bit of a modulation
going on here just a boss chorus emulation.
So then just to give even more width and size.
But yeah as I said it's really really varied per track.
And another good thing that we've been doing on the recent runs is I have
me and Drew use MIDI switching to do all of our changes for us.
Which I think at first I was like a little uncertain on how I was going to feel about
like not doing the actual like pushing of the buttons.
But I think now that I'm used to it I really really like it.
It's one less thing to worry about with you know the BGVs.
And you know just trying to put on a good show.
You know just kind of letting it do its thing.
We sit in the room for a lot of time and you know mess with all this stuff ahead of time.
And then just kind of it's nice to not have to worry about it too much during the gig.
Thank you so much for watching.
You can keep up with Friday Pilots Club on our Instagram most easily at Friday Pilots Club.
We post all types of updates.
We're going to be working on some new music so hopefully we'll have some stuff out for you soon.
Or FridayPilotsClub.com you can find our our tour dates and all that stuff.
So yeah thank you.
