Stephen Carpenter shares a peek at his epic guitar rig in new playthrough for Deftones' Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)
The Deftones man treats us to a crushing playthrough of one of the metal innovators' biggest tunes, and shows off some choice gear in the process
Stephen Carpenter has spent a small chunk of the last year of so sharing some killer playthrough videos of selected Deftones tracks. Now he’s unveiled his latest, a run-down of Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away).
The song, taken from 1997’s Around The Fur, is perhaps the quintessential Deftones track: capturing all of the creeping anxiety, monumental riffing and catharsis that immediately set the band apart from the 'rawk' pack upon its release in the late-90s.
It’s not the first track we’ve heard Carpenter demo from Around The Fur. The guitarist has seemed to pick and choose tracks from his extensive catalogue at random, but has been playing older material in recent months. Most notably My Own Summer (Shove It), which he dropped last month and Bored, from 1995’s Adrenaline, back in July.
While most of the previous clips seem to have been recorded in a more makeshift home space (understandable given, you know, the plague), the last few have been taped at a more luxuriously equipped space, showing off a bit more of Carpenter’s rig in the process.
In the most recent videos, Carpenter is playing the gold, seven-string ESP Custom he had built (around 2018, we think), known as Goldie.
Then there’s the rack units. We’ve spotted a Fractal Axe-Fx II, Marshall JMP-1, Rocktron Intellifex Multi-FX, a tray of stompboxes (including a Strymon Big Sky and Timeline) and two Fryette Two/Fifty/Two power amps in the rack.
And that’s a very nice wall of Sound City SC412 and SC212 speakers, in case you were in any doubt.
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Back in summer Deftones once again postponed their North American dates with Gojira moving them to April 2022, so we’ll take all the playthroughs we can get in the meantime...
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Matt is Features Editor for GuitarWorld.com. Before that he spent 10 years as a freelance music journalist, interviewing artists for the likes of Total Guitar, Guitarist, Guitar World, MusicRadar, NME.com, DJ Mag and Electronic Sound. In 2020, he launched CreativeMoney.co.uk, which aims to share the ideas that make creative lifestyles more sustainable. He plays guitar, but should not be allowed near your delay pedals.
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