DZ DEATHRAYS
What is it about Queensland that fosters wildly innovative guitar talent? DZ Deathrays guitarist/ vocalist Shane Parsons uses a multi-amp/ multi-effect setup to cover the entire sonic spectrum, adding lashes of psychedelia to the duo’s thrash-pop sound. Parsons’ approach is a brilliant reminder that the guitar can be anything you want it to be while still being a guitar.
Why do you play guitar?
Some of my friends started playing when I was about 12 years old, and them and their brothers were learning Nirvana and Metallica covers. So I was like, “Dad, I really want a guitar…” so he got me this s**tty acoustic guitar with insanely high action. From there I just learned from those guys and then started writing my own stuff and getting into bands. I got an electric and a bass as well, at a garage sale, and a crappy little solid-state amplifier with a tremolo on it. So that was my first stuff: a bass that hardly worked, a five-dollar amp and a terrible acoustic.
So how did you come to be so musically self-sufficient? You cover a lot of ground.
The whole thing was because when I first started jamming with Simon [Ridley, drums] in DZ, even when we had the band that was before this band we didn’t have a bass player so I had to figure out a way to do it. A friend of a friend was selling this old Blues Boy 100 bass amp, so I went and bought it and then just figured out pedal-wise how I could make it into some kind of bass sound. It just came out of necessity, to fill that gap, and over the years I started figuring out which frequencies need to be covered, then just layering the tones to become this monster guitar sound.
So what are the secrets?
It’s a really simple setup; I split the guitar three ways. One goes to a DI, like a powered SansAmp kind of thing that has a gain on it, and that’s just a really dry distorted guitar that goes straight to the PA. Then there’s a guitar amp, which has all the effects on it. Modulation, delay, synthesiser effects, which can be the really wobbly stuff but it sounds warmer because it’s through the amp. And then there’s the bass amp, which has a pre-DI and then a post-DI and then a mic on the cab. The pre-DI is the sub, the mic is the midrange, and the buzziness comes from the post-DI. And with each one allocated to do their thing, and if it’s mixed right, it usually comes out sounding huge. I can bring everything really
minimal, just go into the SansAmp DI with a really thin guitar, then bring the two amps and the other DIs in and it’ll become this really wide-sounding noise from the guitar.
When you’re in the studio do you record this setup live, or do you overdub?
The first record we set it up as I had it live and I was switching the amps on and off with the switcher. But this record we’ve just done [ Black Rat], I did everything separate, each part of each riff, so that even the low notes from the riff would be a different tone to the high parts. I’d split the riff down the middle and played the lower-end notes in one go and the higher notes with some different pedals. It was a more electronic way of doing things, like if you were writing on the computer, putting pieces together and effecting everything separately. The idea behind it is it doesn’t wear your ears out because you’re hearing the same tone. It keeps alternating and flipping around and changing. When you hear it as one whole thing you don’t really hear it but when you listen closely those notes are flip-flopping in tones. I’ve always had the idea to look at the guitar as a controller.
You can hear that in headphones; there’s a lot going on!
Yeah, we did some interesting stuff, like we ran the bass tones through octave pedals, an analog synth and stuff like that to give it more balls. It’s just trying a bit of trial and error to see what worked the best – and then just punish the amps really hard!