Building The Church

Plini talks us through the rig he’s brought over for this European run…

“Before this tour, I had mostly been using a Mesa/Boogie model on the Axe-FX. Now I’m using an Atomic AmpliFire, which is a tiny little pedal but has a lot of the features of the Axe-FX. There’s a Friedman HB model on it, along with another 10 or so. I can get everything I need out of a very small package – which suits me! Effects are something I found I don’t terribly need in a live situation or even a recording situation, but on my last tour with Tosin Abasi and Aaron Marshall from Intervals… those two guys were so into technology, it kinda rubbed off on me. I’ve started playing more pedals and may now need to start acquiring them. Something inside of me just wants to get collecting!

“As for my guitar, I guess the first time I saw a photo of a Strandberg, I was just drawn to it. It took me a while to actually get to play one, but by then Tosin Abasi, Chris Letchford from Scale The Summit and Misha Mansoor from Periphery had already started touring with them. So I figured it must be a pretty serious instrument, even if made by a smaller up-and-coming brand. I fell in love with the way it played and sounded, and the rest is history!

“We did a limited edition run of my signature model to gauge the interest and it sold really well. So I guess now I’ve established myself a bit more, it’s become a proper production model for this summer. What I like about it compared to other headless models is that they tend to be designed and formed by pragmatic things and engineering. It looks weird and cool but that’s kind of a byproduct from making the guitar lighter and more ergonomic. I guess it’s a justified weirdness!”