me and my guitar chris webb Milk Teeth
Chris got a little help from his friends (Blink-182) in getting his Fender Offset Duo-Sonic HS
1 “Not too long ago I used to play a Gibson and it was beat up, so for a laugh I tweeted saying, ‘Someone buy me a new guitar,’ and then Mark Hoppus from Blink-182 replied and said, ‘Hey, do you want me to talk to Fender?’, which was mental. We were like, ‘Yes please!’. Now they’ve gifted us with these new Offset guitars and we’re stoked. What a weird way for that to happen…”
2 “I like the size of these guitars, I think they’re 609mm (24-inch) scale and it’s really lightweight. I used to play a really heavy guitar and this is way easier to throw around. It fits well in my hands. I’ve got really small baby hands so it makes sense for me. I think my guitar before was a bit long for me and this one feels great.
3 “It’s got a coil tap on the humbucker pickup as well. I mainly use the humbucker only, but sometimes I coil tap it – when I’m in the studio I’ll play around with sounds and use both, but live I’ve always preferred single pickup guitars. Straight-up guitars. And I always go with the most aggressive sounds, even on clean. Because my clean is never perfectly clean, it’s always a bit dirty. I always have the humbucker on.”
4 It’s completely stock, except for the tape. These are new models and I really like it so I don’t want to change anything about it. I like the colour as well – that surfy blue brings out my eyes! [laughs] It’s really easy not to hit any controls [accidentally] too… well I say that but I taped it down!”
5 “We play in drop D and use the Regular Slinky Ernie Balls. We’ve experimented with thicker gauge strings but these ones always feel natural to me. And we’re not that technical – we don’t have any specialised tuning. I think Bill [Hutton, guitar] plays a couple of songs in open D but I’ve always learned in drop D. It’s like a teenage boy tuning! I’m a big fan of it.”