This is the Loud Fast Gear Report. Before we get started, if anyone has seen or knows the whereabouts of a Yamaha Organ with the name “fun” in it, contact Bryan Dainesly. He wants to play it again.
I met Bryan at this year’s Gremfest. He was playing real cool riffs in his band Dainesly and stood in on guitar for Jake Houston and The Royal Flush. That night I asked him for a lighter and he gave me a hug instead. We got to talking around a campfire and I quickly realized that this guy is pretty serious about his pick ups and guitar tone.
This conversation took place on a windy afternoon on the rooftop of St. James Infirmary. Many times did I think my coffee, Bryan’s beer and the roof were going to fly off, but all that added to the whirlwind of great gear and bad sound stories we had to talk about.
What’s your name and what band are you in?
My name is Bryan Daines, I play in the band Dainesly.
What guitars are you playing on?
The main one I play on is a Telecaster. It’s a 2011. It was a Custom Shop design and build but it’s just the regular American Telecaster. What’s unique about it is it’s Burnt Pine, which is as far as I understand it, the Broadcaster, which were kind of the prototypic guitar for the Telecaster. They had to change the name for copyright infringement. Some of those were Pine and for some reason they changed the wood. I don’t think they liked having such a light wood. The guitar presented some problems. Nowadays they feel comfortable with that. I love it. There’s a couple unique things about it. I dabbled with 60 cycle Hums for like years with single coils. So it’s gone through a couple of different incarnations of pick ups. So first kind of thing I had to do with it was shield the crap out of the inside because they only did the spray on shield paint. I mean I had to put a whole roll on the inside. This was kind of when I was still touring with Dead Winter Carpenters. We played a lot of rooms that would have weird things going on with the power, like lights right next to you. So the 60 Cycle was becoming more and more a problem with my day to day shows. Almost to the point where sometimes it sounded like a busted ground wire because of what was going on with the power situation there. I switched to I think they’re called Duckbucker. A Seymour Duncan pick up the same as the bridge pick up. The problem with the humbucker is you lose some of the nuance with your fingers. I mean they’re great for certain things, but with a Telecaster you want that single coil sound. After that I switched to these Joe Barden pick ups, which were developed specifically for Danny Gatton, whose kind of like one of those mythical players that no one knows much about. Never really made it big, but fuck, Tele players worship that guy. So versatile and that tone. Anyways, it’s essentially like those Hot Rails. It functions similar to a humbucker but it really has the single coil sound to it. If anything it has a little bit brighter top end so you got to be careful with that and roll it down or else you’ll twang everyone’s ears out.
I was an acoustic player for a long time. I really tried to do Bluegrass quite a bit. I had a Blueridge, I want to say it was a BR180. I’m not good with model names. You know there’s those dude you talk to and it’s like talking to a parts catalog? It’s kind of fancy. I’m not even sure if it’s real inlay but it’s got crazy like design in it. They’re American design and maybe Japanese or Chinese build. They use a lot of the pre-war Martin specs, so scalloped bracing and stuff like that. Really nice dreadnought. Super punchy and super projective. I had that when I was living in Seattle and I came back and was kind of slacking on keeping the humidifier in there and it got a top crack. So I need to get that thing fixed. It’s lost a lot of volume as a result. Those are my two main ones.
What amp do you use?
I play a Fender Deville 2×10 Deluxe. I also recenetly got an AC15 because I had a bunch of Sweetwater credit. For a while with Dead Winter were doing more fly dates, so back line amps were an iffy thing. For a while I was trying amp simulators and preamp pedals. I found this one by Two Notes. It’s called like Two Notes Le Clean. I was playing with that for a while when we had fly dates with a shitty back line. It was actually pretty good. It got the signal up to a good level. It sounded pretty good clean. The dirty sounded like shit. I mean like the worst solid state Digitech distortion you’ve ever heard. So I only had that for like one Summer and towards the end of that Summer I realized I was going to be leaving so fortunately the Sweetwater guy let me return it. I just sat on the credit for a while. Now I do a lot of sub gigs, like fill in for country bands.
What effects do you use?
More and more I try to keep it minimal. The big battle I’ve had since playing electric is the compression. I started off not using compression at all. Sometimes like drive pedals, I used to use a soviet Big Muff and that thing was sweet. It howled but sometimes a little more than you wanted it to. It could get pretty unruly. So that’s like why I started using compression. I could keep really gainy signals a little more controlled. So that first one I used was a Keeley. It’s the four knob one. I forget the model name. That thing was alright but it squashed the signal way too much. More and more I value transparent compression. You don’t want to know its there. I like doing things that can add the sustain without adding too much volume into the rig. Because you know, no one needs to be that loud a lot of the time. After I ditched that I started using the SP compressor from Xotic Effects. That one’s nice because it has a blend knob. It has a high, medium, low setting. I keep it on low. I have mostly the clean signa goingl but it adds a little sustain to the notes. It mellows out some of the high end. I noticed with the VOX I have to put the compressor on the middle setting, again because those highs will shatter your fucking ear drums. I’ve got one of those Fulltone Supatrems. I’m one of the few people that keeps it on high. I like the fast tremolo. A lot of people like that slow tremolo. I use a Fulltone Boost. GT500 I wanna say. It’s got a clean and a drive boost. I’m trying to rely on that less and less. More and more I’m trying to give myself a lot of head room in the amp and work the volume knob. The problem is I do a lot of volume swells with my pinky. So it’s nice to have that pot dimed so you always know you’re coming to the right spot. So having the head room is nice. Oh yeah and I use T.C. Electronics Flashback X4. Which I just downloaded a fix for it. I’ve had a bunch of problems with losing my presets. Supposedly the fixed that. I can’t confirm whether if fixed it or not. It’s a great pedal but losing your presets, I had to start writing them down because they were going away every couple of days.
The T.C. Electronics Flashback is very popular in Reno.
What are some of your good gig stories?
For a while I was trying to do a whole like one man show, looping everything. So I had this setup where I do my acoustic guitar and a whole bunch of effects, into a mixer, along with a vocals and a laptop. I was running like Ableton or something like that. There’s probably a way to do it with Ableton but the problem was that I wasn’t that smart with it. So I would take it and loop it into one of those Boss looping pedals, then I would run that into the main and I did that with effects or something like that. So I would do my little beats and play guitar and all that stuff. I did one show with it at the original Zephyr. It was pretty good. The first time went really well. I figured I could keep doing it. I booked another show at Red Rock and they’re stage has done different things over the years. There was an air conditioner back there and had a little fan. I totally didn’t take note of this at all. And my mic is pointed at the air conditioner. Again, I’m totally oblivious to this fact. I start playing and I make a loop and it sounded a little distorted. It sounded weird. So I said, “That’s fine.” So I make another loop on top of that. Now things get really distorted. I made another on top of that and there was a huge jump in volume. Things would get so distorted and shitty and I had no idea what happened because it totally didn’t happen before. So I’m frantically turning knobs on the mixer, doing everything I can to make this not sound like complete dog shit. A couple friends were out in the bar and several of them had this look like watching someone drown with no clue how to help them. It turns out what was happening the mic was picking up that fan basically. It was adding some hum and that was multiplying every time I made a loop and was fucking up every sound that was in that. I don’t think I realized that for like weeks afterwards.
Any other gig stories?
We played this show in Saranac Lake, New York and this was when I was playing with Dead Winter still. First off, we advanced our stage plot and we got the weirdest reply back. Our stage plot was organized like five mics, kick, overhead, and a just a list of inputs. So the guy copies that list and it was like this weird stream of consciousness response he had. Its said like, “Five mics, a little overkill but why not? Tom mics? Probably not. Kick and snare, yeah we can do that.” Like responding to these things conversationally. Towards the end of it it got weird. He was saying stuff like “Still up. Yeah whatever, DTF.” So already we thought something weird was going on. What had happened was like this kid, his Dad was a DJ in town and he had gotten him this job for this venue as their sound guy. Their first task for him was like to switch out the sound board. It was a sizable venue. Big snake on stage, several different monitors. So a fairly complicated setup. In retrospect we found out basically this kid had all weekend to do it and had taken a ton of Adderall and not slept the whole time. So we come in there and he’s got every cable, every adapter this venue has laid out on stage. Piles and bundles and shit like that. We asked if he wanted us to load in. He says, “Oh yeah, just work around me. It’ll take two seconds!” So we do that and he still has nothing put together. So we let him mic everything and put it together. We hang out for a while upstairs and he comes up and starts smoking weed with a buddy. We ask him if we’re good to sound check and he just goes. “Oh yeah! it’ll be just fifteen minutes!”. It takes so long that we eventually get dinner and we decide to do line check just just before we play. We come back and same thing, he’s smoking weed with a buddy. Nothing is setup on sage. People start showing up and there’s nothing setup. So he starts throwing up some mics and we’re just getting the worst feedback onstage. The drummer asked for a mic probably 20 times. Every time he was like. “I’ll grab your mic, then I’ll fix this, I’ll fix that and we’ll have an awesome night.” He ended crawling up on stage at one point. I remember him kneeling by my amp at one point. I don’t know why he did this but he’d have like an XLR going into an XLR to 1/4 inch adapter, going into a 1/4 inch to female to female adapter so he’d have these towers of adapters. He was fucking with the snake and it’s by my amp and he’s just getting blasted because his ear’s by my amp. He looks up and looks like, “yeah this is good!”. The best part was the kid’s name was Chazz. Everyone just had this reaction like, “Oh Chazz. That’s so Chazz. Weekend long adderall binge, when will he learn?”
Is there anything else you’d like to mention?
Oh yeah, my whole agenda for this: I had this organ that I found up by the University, someone was giving it away by the street. It was like a Yamaha. I can’t remember the name of the model but it had the word “fun” in it. It had a beat machine in it. You could do like sixteenth notes, it had Rumba, two-step, shit like that. It had an arpeggiator which was the best part. You could also do like a single note so you could press the root and do like 1-3-5 and you could also voice chords. It would arpeggiate through that chord. It would change the syncopation of it. You could do like sixteenth notes or like dotted eighth notes. You could switch back and fourth and in between. You could do so much fun shit with it. When I moved to Seattle I couldn’t take it with so I gave it to a buddy and I know he gave it to someone when he moved out. I’ve heard several different reports of it and it’s gone back and fourth . I heard it’s still floating around Reno and I would love to track that thing down. So if anyone has an organ gifted to them and sound like that, get it touch.
Dainesly is playing Rollin’ on the River July 28th and at Mountain Rambler Brewery in Bishop, California June 3rd.
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