>>Hey this is Si Truss from MusicRadar. I'm here at Bristol Academy with John from the
band Mogwai, who's going to show us a little bit through the live rig that these guys are
using on their current tour. So John shall we start with your amps here?
>>Yeah, that's as good a place to start as any. I've had this since I was 17 and its
amazing. Its a Marshall Super Bass Mk 2 I think. Its 70's I think. Its great, really
loud, its really clean as well, which is maybe not what everyone would want from an amp but
I've got enough dirty things down there to make it dirty. That's just a Marshall 900...
My other 900 is not working at the moment. Its a Joe Satriani Signature model
and its lovely, its amazing. That's quite good that amp, its not as good.
>>We've got a custom Tele on stage here at the moment. You seem to have quite a love
for Fender guitars and Teles in particular, is that right?
>>I do find that Fender make a nice guitar, yes. I like Gibsons as well, but I think the
shorter scale just kind of freaks me out a wee bit. >>Yeah
>>That's why I don't use the Jaguar that much either.
>>Shall we talk through the guitars, shall we have a look at the ones you've got back
here? >>I've got another couple of custom Teles
with EMG pickups put in them. One of them has got a xxx on it though. Good guitars.
Not really that expensive. >>How many Telecasters have you got in total
then? >>In total I've got 4. I've only got 3 of
them here. Recently we had to buy a second set of stuff so we can play concerts the day
after each other. Ship all of them miles away. So normally I just have 2 but I've got 3.
We use a lot of strange tunings and its handy to have more guitars than nice guitars really.
>>Yeah tell us about this beautiful looking, beaten up Jaguar here.
>>This is a lovely 60's xxxx Fender Jaguar which had this in it when I got it, but I
never really use bridge pickups so I never bother putting the original back in. Its great,
its a lovely, lovely guitar. A bit quieter than the other ones, than the Telecasters,
so I don't really use it that much.
All your pedal levels go out a wee bit and you get a bit confused.
>>Yeah. >>This lovely Music Man Stingray, which is
a beast of a guitar. I only use it for a couple of songs because it is in really crazy tuning.
It is in ABCDEF. Its pretty much all A and D strings at the moment I think.
>>So which songs do you use that for? >>This is for Friend of the Night and I use
it on a new song called Rano Pano because it consequently has two of the strings tuned
to the right notes. >>You were saying earlier that's because...
fitting in harmonically with what the other people in the band are doing.
>>Yeah when Barry wrote Friend of the Night he wanted it to start with harmonics of certain
notes and the only way to do that was to tune the guitar in a funny way and then I had to write a
part with that tuning as well which serves me right. But I wouldn't advise anyone using ABCDEF
tuning. Its ridiculous. Couple of lovely Fender Twelves. This one is the best one. This lovely
Sunburst number. And this one's alright, but some one's replaced the nut on it and its
just not great. The strings are too close together up at the top and it kind of gives
it some fret issues which is a bit annoying. >>So which songs is it you're playing on 12
strings in this tour then? >>12 strings - Mexican Grand Prix and San
Pedro. Mostly for them. Maybe a bit of Two Rights as well. But Mexican Grand Prix and
San Pedro are both in the same tuning. Two Rights is in standard tuning, so its just
a pain. Too many weird tunings, its just a pain. This Telecaster here belongs to Barry Burns.
We can go and look at the rest of it. >>Let's go take a look at Barry's stuff.
>>So this is where Barry works on stage as it were.
>>This is where Barry plays his guitars. We've got an amazing SG called The SG. Its not just
an SG, its The SG. Its brilliant, its a fantastic guitar. I also once found a Les Paul, the
brother of it, called The Paul and that was rubbish. But that's a lovely piece of guitar.
A wee Orange. This is not the one he normally uses. The one he normally uses broke last
night. This is a new one. Its good. >>Is it normally a Rockerverb he uses and
he's just replaced it? >>No its an older one and I'm not sure what
it was called. A standard Orange. Good amps. He likes the kind of dirtier sound from an
amp. >>Here we have the little keyboard section
tucked away behind the amps. >>Electric Barry Land. Mostly his keyboards
are coming off these receptors, VST hosts. Lots of pianos and organs and whatever you
want coming from that. Lovely vocoder thing, which has got... kind of choir sounds. It
sounds great, its amazing. Another vocoder down here. Its good to have vocoders.
Saves you from having to actually sing. Oh these things, a Juno-60. Its amazing and that's
amazing as well, that Dave Smith xxxxx >>We've got the laptop here so what's running
out of this laptop? >>This is... its kind of like the Mogwai karaoke
machine. >>So you've got Ableton Live running here.
>>Yep Ableton Live seems to work pretty good. It doesn't stop that much. When we first started
using laptops we started using Cubase, and at the first concert, we were trying to watch
the cursor going across the screen and tell people when things were going to happen. The cursor
was in the wrong place and it was a mess, it was very very embarrassing. That one seems
to work. >>So how much do you use stuff coming out
of things like Ableton and computers on stage these days?
>>Varying degrees in different songs. I suppose about a third of our songs have got something
coming off of this. What's up here is the Mexican Grand Prix. Its got a drum machine.
Its mostly drums and... program to computer voice singing thing. That was never done by
a human in the first place so it doesn't seem like cheating to have it coming off a computer.
>>So the vocals on that track on the album, is that all computerised vocals or do you
do some human ones as well? >>There are some human ones done by our friend,
Luke, whose set up this is here. He's playing the violin through another wee Holy Stain
with some distortion on it. [inaudible] >>So is this the first tour that you've had
a violin player with you or have you toured with strings before?
>>We've done a few shows with a quartet, but its quite expensive.
>>Do you find it makes things difficult, having stringed instruments like that on stage with
you or does it fit into the set up quite easily? >>Its not difficult with Luke because he comes
from an indie rock background. But when we had a string quartet, because they were classically
trained, it was a wee bit curious for us, interacting with people who knew what they
were talking about. >>We've got a jazz bass set-up here.
>>Fender jazz bass with a picture of a lady on it.
>>So there's another Fender fan in the band then?
>>Yeah, I think... its quite good really. They don't look stupid. If you get a nice
one, they play well. They don't tend to break too much. Moving on to another Fender, we've
got Stuart's Telecaster with a wee Humbucker, a wee skinny Humbucker put in the middle there.
He's got batman stickers. I think he got that when he was 10. And I believe it used 0:11:11.2690:11:17.260 to belong to xxxx at some point. >>That's a nice guitar with a bit of history.
>>Its got a really flat fingerboard. Fingerboard? Fretboard... whatever its called.
>>That bit, the bit you're pointing at. >>Its really flat. My Teles have got more
of a curve on them. That kind of freaks me out. Fender Twin... My Joe Satriani cab, which
he's somehow managed to wrangle. And an Orange that's driving that.
>>This is a...oh he's still got the sticker in. That's disgraceful. This is a new Les Paul.
>>That must be very new if there's still stickers on it.
>>Yes its very new. Only got bought a few weeks ago. As I was saying before, we had
to buy a second lot of stuff. So yes, he got that as a replacement... Its so heavy... for this one
which I think is from 1968. Its lovely. Lovely, lovely lovely. Very heavy. And he's also got
this as a spare one for his blue Tele. [inaudible] This is also new. Quite nice. Same kind of flat on
the fretboard. Dominic's Fender precision bass with EMGs in it. Dominic's Travis Bean... which is
quite good, but its got some kind of xxxxx issue I think. There's no xxxx in it. Its
just one big stupid piece of metal. >>Yeah, so its quite easy to get out of shape
then. >>Yeah. Its nice. Just... nothing really looks
as good as a jazz precision when it comes to basses. I suppose its not so much that
Fender guitars look great, its that everything else looks terrible. Here is a Fender Six.
I think its from '62. Its lovely, its great. We keep trying to find uses for it, because we
bought it and it was really expensive and we have to...
>>Does it not get used too much then? >>It doesn't get used an awful lot. But me
and Stuart are huge xxxx fans... we had to buy one. So yeah, that's one for the future.
>>So that's pretty much it, I think. >>Pretty much.
>>The multitude of guitars and effects and various other things that go up into a Mogwai
stage show. So cheers for chatting to us John >>Pleasure, thanks very much.
>>This has been Si from MusicRadar at Bristol Academy, checking out Mogwai's onstage gear.