King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's reputation for pushing even experimental rock – a genre that's inherently, well, experimental – over the edge cannot be overstated. On Flight b741, their 26th album in 15 years, the band managed to produce an expensive-sounding record using the cheapest equipment possible.
The inspiration behind this low-cost philosophy? Band lead Stu Mackenzie’s guitar-teaching days.
“I used to teach guitar. I used to teach kids and teenagers when I was a teenager myself,” he tells Total Guitar. “People would always come in with these tiny amps, just the classic $30 amps you can buy at the pawnshop. It’s just the cheapest way to get started with electric guitar, and sometimes these things would sound amazing if you cranked them up loud enough.
“You crank them up to a place where they are not supposed to go, and they are distorting when they are on the clean channel… That is awesome to me. A lot of the time it’s the speaker that’s distorting, and there’s something rattling that is not supposed to be rattling, but it’s all harmonics and everything. I am hugely into that.”
To test his theory, Mackenzie needed to source these tiny amps – and lots of them – and that’s when downtown Melbourne's Cash Converters came in handy.
“I bought about six or eight, maybe,” Mackenzie adds. “I didn’t spend more than 20 or 30 bucks on any of them. They were just tiny, tiny little speakers. Sometimes they would have a little gain channel that was absolutely nasty, but usually we would have them on the clean channel and just crank them.
"We had no pedals on the record, just guitars, straight into the amp, turned up loud enough so that it sounds nasty. In my mind it was like the first couple of Black-Sabbath records distortion."
Tiny solid-state amps have been on guitarists' radars since Josh Homme revealed the Peavey Decade was his "secret weapon" with Queens of the Stone Age – that is, of course, unless he was bluffing all along.
King Gizzard's ongoing tour in support of their latest album included a special moment with a fan who joined them on stage to play guitar in memory of his friend who died in an avalanche.
For more from King Gizzard, plus new interviews with Yungblud and Michael Schenker, pick up issue 389 of Total Guitar at Magazines Direct.
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