Fluff and I have known each other peripherally for a few years, after occasional meetings at Sweetwater. When I sat down with him at Andy Wood’s Woodshed Guitar Experience, I asked him if he had a story about a “magic bullet,” a piece of gear that changed his life or a musical light-bulb “Aha!” moment.
Fluff: “I’ve got both.”
Then he launched into two great stories about when he first started playing guitar and then when he rediscovered his musical muse. Here are two tales of a young musician’s adventure of discovery and reawakening.
On Discovering Pedals
Fuston: Tell me what piece or pieces of gear changed your world.
Fluff: I don’t come from a particularly musical family. So, there is one person in every generation that usually has the bug, but everyone else, they can’t play anything at all. I have an uncle, my uncle Mike, who’s a drummer and a mastering engineer but not a guitar player. But my other uncle, Dennis, used to mess around with guitar in the late ’70s, and he had a kit guitar that he gave me. So, my first couple of years playing guitar, I was in a bubble.
I remember I had a ’70s Dean Markley Spectra combo amp that sounded awful, and it had a Drive and a Not Drive button, and that’s all it had. Did I mention that it sounded awful? I just learned to live with it, and I would use my volume or whatever to change sounds.
Then I saw a photo of Kurt Cobain with his BOSS DS-1 — that was when “Smells like Teen Spirit” had just come out. The next time I saw my uncle, I asked him, what is that thing? He said, “Oh, that’s how he’s turning the distortion on and off.” And I was like, “What? There’s something where I don’t have to go over and push a button on the amp?”
Then I got the Siamese Dream record by the Smashing Pumpkins and read an interview where Billy Corgan talked about having a Big Muff fuzz pedal. And again, I was like, “These pedals, I’ve got to find these pedals!” And it so happened that a buddy of mine knew a guy at his church who told me, “You keep talking about wanting pedals. I think I have some of those guitar pedals.”
I was like, “You have guitar pedals?” I was a kid, so I didn’t know brands. I didn’t know anything. Turns out, he had a box of ’70s Electro-Harmonix pedals. He had a Doctor Q, a Big Muff, an Electric Mistress, a Bad Stone, a Small Stone, and a mini LPB-1 booster.
So, I said “Oh man, can I get one of those, or can I trade you something?”
He was like, “None of these work. I don’t even play guitar. Just give me something for them.”
So, I said, “Well, I’ll give you 20 bucks for the box.”
He was fine with that, so I bought the whole box full of pedals for $20, but they didn’t work.
My dad was an engineer, so he taught me how to solder when I was 12. And so, I took this box of broken pedals to my dad. We opened up the chassis, and you know how Electro-Harmonix used to have the battery connectors soldered directly to the board? Turns out every single pedal just had one of the battery cables pulled off the board. We just had to find out where it went. We resoldered it, and they all worked!
That’s amazing. What a score! So, what did you do with all those pedals?
Well, my dad made me my first pedalboard when I was 14 years old out of an old tabletop, and I daisy-chained all seven Electro-Harmonix pedals. That sucked the hell out of the tone, but I suddenly had the Smashing Pumpkins sound; and I had all these pedals that I could turn on and off with my feet, and I didn’t have to go over and push a button. So, discovering guitar pedals blew my mind.
Wait. If you had them all screwed down on a board, then how did you change the batteries?
I mentioned my dad was an engineer, right? He worked on the B-2 bomber program at Boeing and then later did some really, really crazy stuff. So, bless his heart, he made a 9-volt power adapter using a heavy-duty coax cable. He rigged up a power supply to go directly to all the 9-volt battery terminals. At the time, it was pretty cool, but it sucked — it was so noisy. But when I switched the Big Muff on, it didn’t matter. So, finally, I could replicate the Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream tone, which was just a wall of fuzz into my Crate 112.
Wait, are you telling me you literally just strung ’em all together?
That’s right.
Did you ever play with the pedal order?
No, I don’t think so.
Just, “Let’s put the little ones over here and the big ones over there?”
That’s kind of it. It was kinda like whatever looked cool. So, I had the Big Muff going into the Dr. Q envelope filter, and they were all screwed down, so they didn’t come off. We screwed ’em down through the chassis.
Which you could do because you had the external power supply.
Yeah. So, discovering pedals to me was just so game-changing. Now I could play light stuff and then go super-heavy with my friends. The concept of the pedal — the stompbox — just blew my mind. No one ever told me about that because I didn’t have anyone that was playing guitar with me. Wow. Yeah, it was pretty nuts.
That’s amazing.
Then I got a BOSS DS-1 and was really disappointed. That didn’t sound like Nirvana at all! (Laughs.)
On Rediscovering Music
So, what was the next big moment after that?
Fast-forward to 2001. My daughter was born, and I was pretty bored with guitar at that point. I had kind of gotten past my initial influences of Nirvana, and I was a grunge kid in Seattle growing up in the ’90s. So, Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell was just a god to me. But by the time 2001 rolled around, I was 21. I was kind of tired of the punk rock stuff I’d been playing and gigging with and touring with, and I didn’t play guitar for a solid two years. I was busy being a new dad, as well. So, that took up all of my time.
And then Thrice’s The Illusion of Safety came out with their guitarist, Teppei Teranishi, and they got played on the college radio. They were a small, independent band at that time, and I heard them on the radio, and they were spearheading this new genre called post-hardcore, which was basically really heavy and kind of technically precise stuff but with huge, soaring chorus melodies.
That had never really been done before because it wasn’t metal, and it wasn’t the tough-guy metal. It was guys in regular jeans and T-shirts playing super-riffy stuff but with choruses that your girlfriend could sing along to. And it was my girlfriend at the time that said, “Hey, you should check out this band called Thrice. I think you’d probably really like them.” And Teppei’s guitar playing was so fresh and blue — I’m literally getting goosebumps thinking about that Illusion of Safety album. I immediately went to the record store and got it, and I learned the entire album front to back in two days.
Two days? Wow.
It completely changed the way I looked at the guitar. It was incredible for me. Yeah, unbelievable. The song “Deadbolt,” specifically, blew my mind. It was so shreddy, but you could sing along to it. And they were even better live when they came through town on tour. I didn’t understand how that happened. Then they subsequently signed a big major-label record deal and blew up. They are still a huge band today.
That’s amazing.
Illusion of Safety, kids. Check it out. Yeah, it was a really unbelievable album. All of a sudden, I felt like it was all about the song, and I didn’t have to learn how to do scales but real cool, just nifty, little melodic-run things. I don’t know how to explain it. I guess you’d have to hear it.
So, what year would that have been?
2003.
Okay. Was it on vinyl?
No. It was a CD.
So, it’s not like you could easily slow it down to figure out the riffs.
No, no, no, no. Nope. Nothing like that. Nope. It was crazy. It was hard.
I was going to say, that takes some time. That’s intense.
I had nothing else to do but bottle feed, and sit there, and change diapers, and learn the licks. That’s literally all my life was then: The Illusion of Safety and diaper changing. It was crazy. Yeah. Teppei got me to pick up the guitar again as a result. I’ve never put it down again.
What a great story.
Oh, that two-year break was kind of nice. Sometimes you need a break in order to make it fresh again, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Breaks are good. That’s what I tell people.
Wrapping Up
We went on to talk about touring and how many/few concerts the Beatles and Led Zeppelin ever did.
“Did you know that Led Zeppelin only played 261 shows ever. Total. Total ever. Bono hated touring. Hated it. Isn’t that crazy to think? Heck, I did that many shows in 2022!”
He laughs. And now Fluff is an Instagram personality (with 151K followers), a YouTube personality (with 422K subscribers), an audio and guitar nerd, and a major influencer. In fact, he’s just released a how-to course, Content Creation for the Everyday Musician, that was shot here at Sweetwater Studios. You should check it out.
If you want to start your own pedal-discovery adventure, then check out all the amazing Electro-Harmonix pedals Sweetwater offers.
If you’re shopping for pickups, then check out the Fishman Fluence Ryan “Fluff” Bruce Custom Series pickup.
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