Friday Pilots Club’s Sean Burke - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 582

Howdy. I'm Sean Burke. I play guitar in Friday Pilots Club. We're on tour for our second leg of the Nowhere Tour. We released the album, I think it was last May. So yeah, we're coming up on a year now. We're playing House of Blues in Chicago tonight with Circle Waves. Yeah, stoked to be home and to be doing this. This is my rig. This is my guitar. It's a Fender Strat, American made. I believe it's a Highway One. Bought this thing when I was like 13 on eBay for about $1,000 less than I should have. So I feel like it's a steal and I think it's the only guitar that I've ever owned. So this is all I got here. The color. The color is this nitro blue finish and you can kind of see the wood through it. I actually, believe it or not, didn't do all of this wear and tear on it. I bought it like this and as a 13-year-old lover of John Frusciante, I was pretty drawn to that style of guitar. All his guitars are from the 60s and pretty worn down. I loved it. It had the rosewood fretboard. And honestly, I think I played a few guitars beforehand, but none of them felt very good in my hands. I think I just got lucky with this one. I played it immediately and even all of my guitar player friends think this is one of the better guitars they've picked up. I feel like I got lucky with it. Definitely inspired by John Frusciante and the Chili Peppers and stuff like that. Everything is stock. I briefly, for a couple years, used a maple neck instead of the one here, but this is the original. I put it back on. I just feel like it's great. I use everything pretty much all the way dialed up. I use my bridge pickup. Every once in a while, if I'm playing... Certain songs call for a little less of a gnarly, intense tone, so I go to this middle pickup, but for the most part, it's just bridge. A lot of the things tone-wise, I try to control on my pedalboard and keep this as straightforward as possible so I don't have to mess around too much on stage. I tune to E-flat standard, which really for no other reason than that's how I learned the songs in this band. Usually I go E standard, but we use Ernie Balls. I do a heavy bottom, thin top, so I think I use 11s to 52s. They're great. You can get chunky with them. I can also play leads up top and feel pretty smooth. I can bend pretty easily. It's comfortable. It gets a little bit of both worlds in it. Usually I like to use the .7s, the tortoise ones. We're using Ernie Balls right now as well, which are inherently a little bit thinner, I feel like, or a little bit more flexible, so it's a little easier to play some of the funkier stuff, which is definitely a constant in this group. I think there's a lot of bouncing off guitar parts and stuff like that rhythmically. It's nice to kind of do that thwacky thing that I feel like the strat lends itself to, which is the very funky kind of percussive thing. So yeah, I use the thinner Ernie Ball ones. I guess let's go through maybe one of the more complicated ones, I suppose. Let me see here. So for our song, Bury Me, it goes from these very funky kind of soft riff-based stuff in the verse, where I play a lot of ethereal stuff. So I have just a couple delays going. I basically, through all of my patches that I have on this, I do an initial noise gate because my single coils on the strat are very noisy. And then I do a little bit of compression, just kind of standard. This one I have a low cut on, just ever so slightly. I feel like the bass ends up building up a little bit, but it's not much. It's probably to like 100. Yeah, it's to 110. So this is kind of the effects that I feel like I gravitate towards the most. This vibrato, it's definitely like a digital vibrato, but I think I gravitate towards the vibratos that have a lot more movement to them, and that you can really feel the kind of like authentic warble sound. And this one is great. I feel like I use it pretty much on every one of my patches. So I use that, and then this delay pedal I have going. Again, more analog sounding is usually what I gravitate towards on the Helix. Some of them can get pretty digital, which is cool, because you can do a lot of unique sounds and stuff like that. But just because of the style of the music that we play, I kind of lean towards the things that sound most authentic. Yeah, so I have basically how I set up all of my patches just for ease is like each row is a song, and then I usually have like a verse patch and a chorus patch. So this verse patch, for instance, is mainly delays, reverbs, and then like dry tones. This one is pretty intense. We've got like some pitch shift going on. This song is like in, I think it's in C standard, so you go pretty deep with it. Therefore, I don't have to tune super far down, which is pretty nice. And there's a big riff in the chorus, and it translates pretty well. So I'm actually happy with the pitch modulation on here. And then, yeah, my chorus tone is just a bunch of fuzzes. This fuzz is super buzzy, which is cool, but I kind of mask it a little bit with this distortion. I feel like the distortion cuts off a little bit of the high end there. So they work together to kind of fill out this tone. Yeah, so this is a UAD AC-30 amp emulator. It's got like a surprising amount of control over it, and I use an AC-15 at home, the actual amp. The beauty of it is that it kind of always sounds good, but there's not a lot of controls on the amp itself. It's kind of just bass, treble, volume. You've got your top boost. This one, you can add different room sounds on it and stuff, and you can also save presets. So I have a personal preset saved that I stick with for every song, and then I run this through it, just to kind of get some natural saturation in it. Stuff like that. Yeah, this is just a stereo box. We send both of our guitars in stereo. Yeah, and then I just use this one spot. It's pretty straightforward here. It's kind of a jerry-rigged situation, because the Helix thing ended up breaking on us. Yeah, it's pretty much that. Yeah, thanks for watching. Yeah, you guys can find us anywhere on Instagram, Facebook, all that stuff. FridayPilotsClub.com is our website. We're selling tickets for the rest of the tour with Circle Waves here. Yeah, come check us out. Thanks for watching.