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Jade explains his love for the lighter Gibson Les Pauls…
GIBSON LES PAUL STUDIOS
“On the road, I was originally playing Standards. But they were so frickin’ heavy, man. I move around a lot on stage, you can’t do that with a big tank around your neck! I needed the next step lighter, so I started working with Studios, which had the right weight and still sounded good – with enough wood in the guitar.
I have three Alpine White Les Pauls that are always in 440 standard tuning. We have different tunings like half a step down or dropped D, so white must symbolise neutrality! I had six at one point, I bought three and Gibson gave me three free on top of that. But about seven years ago, I had 20 guitars stolen, so now I only have half of them left. The black one has the logo from our Crash
Love record, which came out in 2009. There’s another black one with the eclipse from the cover of [2013’s] Burials. I had that modded with LED lights that I control with a dimmer switch to create an eclipse. It’s my dropped D guitar, and looks good with loads of fog in the room!”
GIBSON LES PAUL STANDARD
“I also have this blue/brown Standard, I was looking for something that wasn’t one of the tanks and could be used live. Believe it or not, it was the lightest Standard I’ve ever found… it’s probably the lightest guitar I have! Plus, it’s got a funky look to it – a blue body with a brown neck, it’s like an outfit you wouldn’t want to wear, you know? All the wrong colours, ha ha! I keep all of these guitars with the stock pickups except for one that has an EMG set in it. The way I look at it, my first guitar was all stock, I couldn’t afford to change the pickups, so I just grew to love the natural sound… they’re never quite the same for each instrument.”
“standards are so frickin’ heavy, man”
patches that could never be done with outboard gear. You can make some really wild stuff, and I use it on our records, but it’s such a hassle to have that setup running parallel to the main rig. I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll make that jump using software like Ableton…”
How did you end up discovering Diamond Amps?
“I started out with a [Mesa/Boogie] Dual Rectifier and I really liked that sound, but then I realised that everyone else had that too. No disrespect, it’s a great combination with Les Pauls! So I looked for new things, and for a while I used the Hotrodded Plexis with the Billie Joe mod, where they crossed two of the inputs and did some weird modifications. But that wasn’t quite right. I kept on searching to find what I wanted. Eventually, I got to Diamond Amps, which is a boutique company based in Texas. I always think people know about Diamond Amps but everywhere I go, no one seems to recognise them. Diamond make a bunch of different heads – the Nitrox has just the right sound that I wanted. It’s got the heaviness and crunch without overdoing it. The amp sounds like what I always want to hear, so I’ve been playing those ever since, probably for about 10 years.”
There’s some really anthemic guitar breaks in AFI’s songs, but do you see yourself as much of a lead player?
“I do play leads occasionally; every record, I’ll pick one or two songs and really go for it with tapping and fuckin’ arpeggio sweeps, ha ha! I suppose I’m not a shredder but I do like to shred. When I’m at home, I’ll happily do it for two hours, it’s fun but not necessarily appropriate for AFI. That said, playing punk is fast – doing tight rhythms on all six strings the whole way through the song – it takes a lot of wrist. And I’m a wrist player. You know, I’ve been in bands for over two decades and I’ve never broken a string on stage once. It’s all in the wrist and there needs to be finesse. It’s not like The Ramones just doing downstrokes, you need to perfect it otherwise it just won’t work.” What kind of shredders did you look up to? “I watched the movie Crossroads in the 80s before I was even a guitar player, and I remember seeing Steve Vai in the scene at the end thinking, ‘This guy’s crazy. His guitar sounds rad!’ So I love that kind of shredding: Vai, Satriani and Yngwie are absolute guitar heroes to me. I love the dudes from Slayer; Kerry King has such a mad style. The leads on
Seasons In The Abyss are just killer, they’re so melodic and the scales are insane. It sounds like he’s not just shredding, he’s thinking about the structure of the solos. Jeff Hanneman was always the guy that sounded like he was playing five million notes-persecond, but around the time of Seasons… Kerry King took this leap and started playing solos that were really unique. It was like songwriting, everything made sense and there was a plot or a narrative to them. One of my favourites of all time is both of them on Angel Of Death, that song just keeps getting more and more insane as it goes. I love Slayer!”
Of course, early on in AFI’s history the Misfits must have been heroes too – though much less in recent years…
“I’ve been playing in the band almost 20 years now, and that whole Misfits thing was coming to an end when I joined. AFI covered Misfits songs and, obviously, [singer] Davey Havok had his makeup. We definitely have an interesting history. I wouldn’t say that we’re trying to distance ourselves from that, it’s more like we’re just not that band anymore. With AFI being together for 25 years... just like any human beings – we’re not doing exactly what we did all that time ago. We’re listening to new things at new points of our lives.” AFI’s self-titled new album is out now on Universal
“playing punk is fast... it takes a lot of wrist”