The
ToneQuest Report
Peter Stroud Interview
September 29, 1999
After
20 years of touring and studio work with bands including Athens,
Georgia-based Dreams So Real and
Seattle guitarist Pete Droge, Peter Stroud found himself on stage in
Wembley, England earlier this year opening for the Rolling Stones as a
guitarist in Sheryl Crow’s band.
Dreams So Real indeed…
Since
joining Sheryl’s band in January 1999, Peter has been enjoying an
extensive tour that recently included a televised Sheryl Crowe and
Friends concert from New York’s Central Park featuring Eric Clapton,
Keith Richards, Stevie Nicks, Chrissie Hynde, Sarah McLachlan and The
Dixie Chicks. TQR met with Peter in his home studio in Atlanta during a
break in the tour that will end with a swing through Japan in early
October. Peter is undoubtedly one talented, tasty and versatile
guitar player, and you can believe us when we tell you that success
couldn’t have touched a nicer, more humble human being on the planet.
Enjoy.
TQR Let’s start at the beginning Peter.
Sure
– I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina and started playing guitar
when I was 11 years old. My
older brother was bringing in all of these cool records in the late
60’s and I still remember them all – Johnny Winter, Ten Years After,
Cream, Hendrix, The Who, Black Sabbath.
I remember hearing the first Zeppelin
album and that record was so far out that I wasn’t really sure I
liked it until I heard Whole Lotta
Love. It wasn’t too
long after that when I discovered Billy Gibbons and The
Allman Brothers.
TQR Did you get into that Southern Rock thang?
Yeah,
in high school. But it
wasn’t really thought of as southern rock like it is today – you
know – redneck rock. It was
just rock n’ roll back then with a little different sound.
TQR How about the blues?
Guys like Mike Bloomfield?
Well,
sure. The one blues guitarist I was really
into was Freddy King, simply because a family friend that worked for
Warner Brothers had given me his Texas
Cannonball album, and then I saw him in Greensboro with ZZ
Top. I’ll always remember that show – Freddy came out with this
funky red polyester suit and just smoked.
They had festival seating with no chairs on the floor back then, and I
remember walking over to check the board out during the ZZ
Top set. The sound
engineer had these big-ass headphones on and he was just leaning against
the back rail while all the VU meters on this old board were nailed
straight into the red (laughs.) Hittin’
a groove I guess.
TQR
Thus anointed you were no doubt playing in local bands doing
cover those early years?
Yeah,
a lot of Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath early on, and The Stones, Faces,
ZZ Top, Zep – all the 70’s stuff.
I played all through high school but really didn’t start going
out on the road until my senior year, and I really started playing
full-time after high school. I
also applied and was accepted at Berkeley after graduation, but I wound
up unexpectedly joining a top 40 band for about $200 a week and the next
thing I knew we were playing lounges all over the country. We had to play everything from rock, country, and R&B,
even the disco thing.
TQR
Aside from whether or not you liked the music, that gig must have
been great training for you.
I
went for years without telling anybody about that gig!
But now that I look back, it was a great experience musically
because of all the different styles I had to play. And I was having a
hay day because I was making all of this money free and clear, still
living at home, and all I did with it was buy guitars. The bass player
and I – that’s where our paychecks went.
We got this big motorcycle chain and we’d chain all of our
guitars to the radiator in our hotel room.
I bought like 7 or 8 guitars and I still have some of them from
that time – the late 70’s – when they were still cheap. Then I
went to college for 2 years and studied music at UNC in Greensboro. In
hindsight, I wish I’d continued and gotten a degree, but I was really
dreading the music appreciation part.
Wish I’d pursued it now, though.
Then I moved to Atlanta to get something going again with the
guitar. I really didn’t
want to go to L.A. or New York, and I had a job with a telephone company
for 4 years that kept the bills paid while I was getting my act together
in Greensboro and here in Atlanta.
TQR When did things break open for you?
I
played in a band out of Athens, Georgia called Dreams So Real
for about a year and I started getting studio work in Atlanta doing
mostly commercials. Then things really started picking up after I got a call from
Brendan O’Brien to play with Pete Droge. Brendan had produced Pete’s
first album titled Necktie Second that
I was really into at the time, and he called to tell me that Pete needed
a guitarist in Europe in a week. I couldn’t believe that my favorite
new artist happened to be looking for a guitarist, but probably the
biggest factor in my getting the gig was the fact that I already had a
passport. So I spoke with
Pete once, he gave me the set list over the phone, and I flew to Germany
a week later. We met a 9 in the morning and played a 30-minute set at 1
in the afternoon at this big summer festival and I basically just walked
on the stage, hit two chords, and off we went – no rehearsals. It was
being televised by MTV and there were at least 40,000 people there.
I walked off the stage with rubber legs that day for sure. I
played with Pete for 3 years after that.
TQR How did the gig with Sheryl Crow happen?
We
had toured with her when I was in Pete’s band in ’96 and Jeff Trott,
the guitarist I replaced in Pete’s band, had actually left to write
and record with Sheryl. Another Atlanta friend of mine, Tim Smith, had
just joined Sheryl’s band on bass as well.
We all became good friends on that tour.
Sheryl invited me to join her band last fall and we started
rehearsing in L.A. in January.
TQR Let’s talk about gear for a bit. How has your
live setup evolved over time?
Not
much at all, really. When I
was playing with Pete I was using a Marshall half stack
A/B’d with a Super Reverb.
The gear we carried totally depended on how much bay space we had
to work with on the bus, and that’s when I found a 70’s Marshall 50W
combo with 2 12”s to take along with the Super Reverb. Those two amps
fit my space in the bay.
TQR Speakers??
I
put reissue Celestion G12H30’s in the Marshall after I blew one of the
original 25W speakers. The
G12’s sound so much better – more bottom and they’re not as mid-rangey
as the 25W speakers. I like
the 25W speakers in a 4-12” cabinet better.
TQR How about the Super Reverb?
It’s
a ’68 and I rewired it to blackface specs.
TQR You
modified it?
Yeah.
TQR What kind of speakers do you have in it?
The
Eminence ceramic magnet speakers you can get from New Sensor. They sound
great. The day I converted
the amp to blackface specs I blew the original CTS AlNiCo speakers
running an Experience fuzzbox through it. It sounded really wimpy all of
a sudden and I could see light coming through the speakers! When I
looked in the back all of the paper from three of the four speakers was
in pieces at the bottom of the cabinet (laughs.)
I really obliterated them, but the new ones are ten times better (still
laughing.)
TQR How do you set your amps?
I
run the Marshalls with all of the tone controls full out and the volume
on about “6.” Depends on the mic we’re using too. The Sennheisers
with the screen on one side are really great. The Super I set at about
“7” with midrange max, bass “4” and treble around “7.” I
keep the bright switch on too.
TQR The Super throws a little more top end than the
Marshall, doesn’t it?
Yeah,
but those ceramic magnet speakers aren’t as top-endy as the others –
a little smoother than the Celestions and you can really push them.
If I have too much high end through the sound system it gets
totally lost in the mix.
TQR
Do you personally need to hear your amp really well on stage
rather than depending on the monitors?
I
definitely have to have the sound of amp behind me – the whole
feedback relationship and everything. But we use in-ear monitors with
Sheryl, which helps a lot. Gotta
have that blast in the pantlegs though…
TQR
Let’s run down all of your guitars quickly for the record.
My
main guitars now are a new Fender TeleSonic with DeArmonds and a ’65
SG. Supposedly the DeArmonds are wound a little hotter. It’ll still
twang…I wish I had it here to show you…but it’s sort of in between
a Tele pickup and a P90 to me. Sounds great through a halfstack. Close
to that Malcolm Young sound.
TQR
And you use a few Les Pauls…
Yeah,
I’ll use whatever is out there since I have the luxury of bringing
them all out on tour. And Sheryl is pretty particular about what she
wants to hear. She’ll
say, “Why don’t you try a Tele for that or a Les Paul for this.”
And I know what kind of sound I’m looking for too, so I use about 10
different guitars in a set, some with different tunings as well. I play
a ’57 Les Paul Custom – the one with the P90’s, a new version of
the same guitar with a Bigsby, and a late 80’s Les Paul Standard that
I set up with Seymour Duncan Antiquities. I used to have an old set of
PAF’s and the Antiquities are as close as I’ve ever heard to those.
Then there’s a reissue of the Dan Armstrong plexi guitar, a G&L
F100 that we call the Fender Ferrari – oh, and a Gibson Trini Lopez
that was my main guitar when I was playing with Pete Droge.
TQR What kind of tunings are you using?
G,
E and standard – that’s about it, and of course, only E with the
palm pedal.
TQR
You play acoustic guitar quite a bit now with Sheryl, don’t
you?
Yeah.
I use a Guild D55 with rosewood back and sides and before that I
was using a Gibson that Sheryl had. And I use a National tricone.
TQR
How do you amplify them?
The
Guild came with a Fishman installed under the bridge and the National
I’m still fighting with. I probably should have bought one with a
single resonator rather than the tricone. If I can’t find some way to
get the sound right soon I’ll probably sell it and buy a single
resonator. Micing is best, like with recording, it sounds great, but you
just can’t get enough level using a mic live.
TQR
You’re quite a tasty slide player.
Thank
you. It’s become my
favorite thing again after having pretty much dropped it in the 80’s.
I think the two things that weren’t happening in the 80’s
were slide and Wah Wahs.
TQR
Who were your biggest influences for slide playing?
Mick Taylor comes to mind…
Mick
Taylor is definitely one of my favorites along with Duane Allman.
There was a lot of great slide playing going on when I was
growing up – Ronnie Wood, Johnny Winter, Billy Gibbons, Jimmy Page on
“In My Time of Dying.” Rick
Richards of The Georgia Satellites really got me fired up over slide
again after hearing him when I first moved to Atlanta. “Can’t Stand the Pain” on their first album is a ripper.
TQR
What’s your favorite guitar for slide work?
Lately
it’s been the SG. It’s
really smooth. The TeleSonic is a little bright for slide. And I like
this Ferrari Red G&L F100 that I bought for $30. It was in a fire
and the whole thing had gotten kind of crispy – all of the pickups had
melted out of it. I’m sure the owner of the store that burned down
thought he was getting one over on me even at $30.
I
had a friend of mine refinish it and it’s a great guitar – still has
a little sunburst thing going on around the top of the headstock where
it had actually caught on fire – we left that there.
I put Seymour Duncan Seth Lover humbuckers in it most recently
– it’s been through a lot of changes.
It also has a Bigsby palm pedal on it and it’s a terrific slide
guitar.
TQR
How’s the Bigsby work?
It
bends the 2nd and 3rd strings. Second string is a
whole step, 3rd string is a half step and it operates with 2
pedals – one for each string. I have it tuned to open E and when you
push the pedals in you can jump up to a 4 chord, if you hold them down
and you play a 1 chord it will drop down to a 5, and you can catch 9’s
and 6’s too.
TQR
Did you study steel at all or how did the idea for the palm pedal
come about?
I
found it at Ecchevaria’s shop here in Atlanta. He had tons of used
parts and I had it laying around for a year or so while I was getting
into that whole pig-pickin’ thing, so I thought that the pedal would
be cool and I put it on the G&L and just figured some things out.
TQR You’re a big fan of Leslie’s too aren’t you?
Yeah,
I decided that I had a good reason to buy a Leslie to use on the road
since we’d used a VibroTone on Spacey
and Shakin’ with Pete Droge. So I just got on a big quest to find
one. I found a Leslie 45 in
a pawn shop that I was hoping to take that out with Sheryl, but the
techs kinda frowned on that due to it’s size, and that’s when
Sheryl’s guitar tech Vegas brought in the Hughes and Kettner pedal. It
sounds great and that was fine with me. But in the studio I still love
Leslie’s.
TQR
Are you familiar with Jeff Bakos? (a highly regarded Atlanta amp
tech.)
Yeah
– he’s a great friend of mine and he’s the guy who taught me how
to work on amps. Once I got on the road with Dreams
So Real these old Marshalls I was playing became problematic like
all old amps do, and I was just getting reamed
by repairmen out on the road. I’d
be in one city, have an amp repaired and it would work fine for half a
set and then need more work after I’d paid $80 to have it fixed. But I would never have the time to take it back to the same
guy before we left town. So I finally decided that I could fix them, and
when I’d take an amp to Jeff he’d show me a few things. I remember
being on the road with Melissa Etheridge and we were constantly pulling
amps out of a cold truck in the dead of winter and plugging them right
in and heating them up every night.
I blew a transformer from that cold/hot routine and when I took
the amp to Jeff he pulled a transformer from an old Motorola home
entertainment console in the corner and said, “Hey, this thing had
EL34 tubes in it – let’s try this
transformer.” So he does a quick wire up on the bench and it sounds great.
A little less power than before, but it had a terrific crunch, so he
wired it in kind of cockeyed and off I went. I was really into that
stuff at the time, buying old amps and fixing them up. I’m sort of
over it now, though.
TQR
I brought along something for you to play with while we’re
rolling tape.
Oh,
yeah. (plugs in a ’54 Telecaster with JB’s and a Klon Centaur.) You
know, the thing I’ve found about using non-master heads is that
there’s a lot less trouble with the single-coil noise factor compared
to when you’re using a preamp with master volume. With a master
volume, the preamp boost totally kicks up the noise, and with a
non-master head it seems to be about 50% quieter, unless you happen to
be in a really noisy room.
TQR
What kind of effects are you using?
I
use a Prescription Electronics FaceLift that has the high Hendrix-type
octave divider on it that you can switch in and out, and it has that
cool germanium transistor fuzz. I like it a lot. I also use a Hughes and
Kettner Rotosphere and a CryBaby WahWah. I still have an original
CryBaby that I bought when I was a kid but it couldn’t be fixed
anymore. They even rebuilt it at Dunlop for me but it finally just wore
out. The Deluxe Memory Man Reissue is also one of my favorite pedals. At
the time I bought it I was considering buying an Echoplex, and figured
I’d rewire that to make it quieter. I didn’t want to use something
that sounded as hard as a digital delay. But I really like The Memory
Man. I also use a Boss compressor and a volume pedal. That’s about it.
TQR
What’s up with these tubes of GHS Fast Fret I see on your
table?
That’s
great stuff. It lubricates
the strings and helps keep them clean. I use it all the time. I don’t really have a problem with sweat, but especially
when I was on the road and changing my own strings, that stuff really
helped them last longer so I didn’t have to change them as much. Our guitar tech in the band, Vegas, also uses some kind of
Teflon in a tube on all of the string contact points on our guitars –
the nut grooves and saddles. It works really well.
TQR
You’ve been playing some awesome gigs lately.
Dave Boze told me to ask you about BB King.
Oh,
yeah. We were in L.A. to do
the Grammies and we got to the hotel about 3 a.m. the night before
rehearsals, which were at 9 a.m. That morning I was warming up with my
guitar, walked into the green room at rehearsals and BB King was sitting
there and Eric Clapton was at the other end of the room.
First time I had ever met either of them. BB says, “Oh, I see
it’s time for my guitar lesson.” Put his hand right out and said,
“Hello, I’m BB.” A very nice man. I had to squeeze by Eric to get
where I was going, so I just stuck my hand out and said, “Hi, I’m
Peter and I’m playing with Sheryl now.” Wow.
TQR
You rehearsed with Eric and Keith among others for the Sheryl
Crowe and Friends Special didn’t you?
They
came in the night before the broadcast for the final rehearsal in
Central Park, but we (the band) had been rehearsing for nearly the
entire week. Just the anticipation of all that was pretty cool.
TQR Keith more or less turned the beat around on Happy didn’t he?
Well,
the song as it’s recorded is kind of tricky. It’s 5 measures I
think, on that first lead. So when Keith came to rehearsal I asked him
if he was going to play the leads and he said, “Naw, you play all the
leads.” And I asked, “Well, how long do you play that block of time
in the break,” and Keith said, “I think we do it the way it is on
the record, but whatever, you play it the way you want.” He was so
into being there just to rock, and
as a result, I have so much more respect for him aside from him being
one of my guitar idols. To see how he was in person is…well, all
Keith. He was just there to have a good time. Yeah, we were all laughin’
at the changes in that song during the show, but it turned out great.
TQR
With all of your experience with equipment and guitars, do you
still find yourself looking
for a better mousetrap?
More
with effects – pedal effects. I’m about done with guitars. I went
through a whole period of seeking out guitars that I liked and there are
still guitars I’d like to play, but as far as knowing what I like
I’m pretty much there.
TQR
How long did that process take?
Oh,
man, about 20 years.
TQR
And is the search over for amps?
Yeah,
I know what I like – Marshalls and Fenders have always worked for me.
Now I’m sort of getting interested in hearing other amps and
experimenting a little, though. It seems like I go through periods every
3-5 years where I want to change the sound. When I was first playing I
didn’t want to use Marshalls because that’s what everybody else was
using. I had a Galien Krueger 150W head with a 4 12” cabinet with 25W
Celestions that was a really cool sounding amp, but I got tired of that
eventually. Then I bought one of the Fender Dual Showman heads with the
red knobs and I thought that was really nice, but the problem that I
always had with that amp was being heard in the mix. I’d always have
that nice fat low and high end and the mids were nice and even, but by
time it got to the sound system it was gone. Especially with a Strat –
it was just too bright and there were no mids coming through. But it
seemed as if every time I’d plug into someone’s Marshall when I
jammed I was really being heard. It was right
there. And when I’d go hear a band I would always hear the
Marshall player over every thing else. But it wasn’t because the amp
was louder – it was the tone –
the midrange. I found that with every other amp I was constantly going
back and tweaking the knobs. I’d get real persnickety because I was
always back there tweaking and thinking about it, whereas with the
Marshalls, it was simply a matter of turn it on and go.
TQR
Do you prefer the 50W amps?
I
like both the 50W and the 100W Marshalls, but with Sheryl the 50W works
best. You get more crunch than the 100W, but you can still roll it back
and get that nice glassy clean tone.
TQR
The guys at Midtown Music mentioned that you have a knack for
milking tone out of Marshall amps with a few modifications of your own
design.
No
real secret about the Marshall mods, actually.
The first version Master volume models that Marshall came out
with were not very good sounding at all.
In late ‘76 or so, they changed the design to the cascaded
preamp circuit that they used from then on through the JCM series, which
sounded much better. I
would convert the early circuit to the later design, plus boost the gain
of the first stage, do a tone boost mod on the second stage, and monkey
with the presence control a little.
This is all stuff I figured out tinkering with my own amps,
studying Marshall schematics, and from mod tips by amp tech's,
especially from articles in the early issues of Vintage Guitar Magazine.
I came up with a certain combination of tweaks that sounded
pretty cool and would make these mods to other friend's amps when asked.
TQR
I understand that Sheryl pretty much sticks with Matchless?
Yeah,
she and Tim Smith both like them, which is great. The Matchless amps are
a good contrast with their Class A Vox tone that’s more compressed
with a smoother midrange. The contrasting combinations have worked
really well for us I think.
TQR
So you’re carrying how many Marshalls on the tour?
Two
– the fawn-colored 50W combo and a small-box 50W head as a spare.
TQR I bought one of those 50W combos once, but I had
some really nasty problems with RF playing downtown, and I decided it
was one of the most expensive radios ever built.
Yeah,
I had those problems too at the Masquerade.
Do you know how to fix that?
TQR
No, I traded it for a Twin Reverb after 2 gigs.
Well,
I used to read all of these fancy-shmansy articles about eliminating RF
and I was talking to Jeff Bakos about this one day and he said, “Man,
just take a paper clip and wrap it around the channel input jack of the
amp behind the mounting nut so that it touches the faceplate.
Then make sure the other end of the paper clip is touching the
metal shielding sleeve on the jack that you plug into the amp.”
I said, “Bullshit, Jeff, that’s not gonna work!” and he
said, “Trust me, it works.” I
was playing at The Masquerade
that night using a 100W and sure enough, I plugged in and I heard the
same old loud SSSSSSHHHHHH until I bent the loose end of the paper clip
until it touched the shielding, like he said, and WAPPP
-- it was gone. Dead quiet.
Those amps are loud as hell and they’re naturally kind of hissy
– it’s the signal to noise ratio – but that’s also what makes
them sound so hot.
TQR
Thanks for the tip! Our
time is just about up, Peter. Where are you headed after this break in
the tour?
We’re
playing a few more dates in the States next week and then we leave for
Japan, and it’s back home for the holidays after that. I’ll be recording with Pete Droge again in November.
He’s producing Elaine Summer’s next album, an artist named
Jerry Jospeh, and his own tunes. He’s set up a nice studio at his home outside Seattle and
it’s a wonderful place to hang out, especially in their great company.
TQR
Are you feeling like you’ve really arrived in terms of your
career now?
When
you get some place, there’s always somewhere else you want to go. But
as far as where I am now, yeah, I’m very
grateful and appreciative of all of this. There are other things I want
to do as well. I would also like to do more writing with friends and I
have the freedom to do that now – I just need to find the time!
TQR
Any advice for aspiring players?
Yeah,
don’t listen to my advice – you might no get ahead! Lessons learned maybe, but even still, it’s hard to say
what has moved me along other than just being diligent.
And not being a jerk. I
have found that no matter how good a player you might be, nobody wants
to work with a jerk. There
are a lot of great players out there, so what can be more important is
the creativity and good vibes you bring to the situation, whether it’s
in a band or the studio.
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