Scene: Carlos French – Battledoge
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What’s up
Spiralcaster’s Textures, Tones, and Endless Possibilities
Spiralcaster has spent years creating guitar-driven soundscapes and showcasing unique pedals. We caught up with him to talk about his new Spiral Loops and Chords packs, creative pedal techniques, and the sounds that continue to inspire his work.
To start, could you tell us a bit about your new packs and the ideas behind them?
Definitely. I cut the Spiral Loops from selected segments of original songs and compositions I’ve made while demoing pedals over the last 7 years on my YouTube channel.
Since I record fresh material for each demo…and I usually work with composition in quantized, repeatable phrases. The tracks I make lend themselves well to being chopped up and looped.  Isolated on their own, they could potentially make cool song starters or could be chopped up, sampled, and turned into something completely original. I think people will find a lot of fun textures and progressions in there since I am forced to drench everything in effects for the sake of showcasing all the unique boutique pedals I work with.
The Chords pack is the result of my brainstorming what would be super essential for someone who needs a clean, mellow guitar sound to program with— and wants extreme versatility and control over the chord progressions or patterns they want to build. I double tracked with lightly brushed strums just about every chord type, dyad, and shell chord I could think of…in both staccato and legato styles, and in a variety of octaves— on the neck pickup of my modded Vintera Tele Deluxe. The hand-wired, wide-range pickups I have are perfect for mellow yet articulate chord work. I often see chord packs very limited to triads and simple extensions like dominant 7s—so I wanted to plug that gap and give the user a full palette of colors to paint with!
Spiral has a really unique character and some unexpected textures. How do you imagine people using these samples in their own music?
I could see someone looping a phrase and building a whole new track out of it. I have done the same with unique loop packs I’ve stumbled on from time to time for various media projects…just having fun splicing them up and layering my own bass lines and harmonies underneath and around them. I usually try to ‘affect’ cool loop progressions I come across with my favorite plugins to make them more my own in those situations. I could see others doing the same with mine. I have sent loops to friends in the community before, however, who have hardware samplers like you guys make and transform my audio bytes into completely unrecognizable grooves!
For someone just getting into guitar pedals, what’s the first piece of advice you’d give them? Is there anything you wish you had understood earlier when you were starting out?
It would be hard to not turn this into a crazy long response, so I’ll just highlight a few things I’d say jump to my mind:
- Don’t skimp on getting a good isolated power supply. There is really no point in dropping cash down on a bunch of pedals if you aren’t powering them cleanly and fully. If you’re wondering why your amp is buzzing all the time (assuming your guitar is shielded and your house is grounded well) it’s probably because you’re running a daisy chain.
- The knobs on most pedal interfaces are super interactive…it’s worth it to take the time and really explore your pedal and learn what it does well (and what it doesn’t). Oh— and READ THE MANUAL!Â
- When it comes to reverbs, delays, and other experimental ambient-type pedals…simple playing often goes a long way to making the most out of them. I often see people trying everything out with blues licks, and then get frustrated or confused why it isn’t making them sound better.
- If you can’t get your dirt pedals to sound good, it’s often most likely an issue of gain-staging (assuming your rig is solid of course). It’s easy to forget that every pit stop from your fingers to the speaker in your amp is a signal feeding and pushing another node or transistor, and each platform takes on a different character dependent on what it’s being fed. This can make all the difference in whether your tone is clean vs noisy, sparkly and articulate vs dark and muddy, or weak vs rich and sustained…
What musical projects or experiments are you currently working on?
I’m actually launching, funny enough, not an original band at the moment…but a dedicated Radiohead tribute group. OK IMPOSTER. We’ve been rehearsing heavily for almost a year and will kick off in July, booking shows around the southeastern part of the country. We’re just getting into the social media side of things, so not much to point at right this second. But I have been designing this crazy pedalboard build over this entire year to try and replicate most of Jonny (as well as some of Ed and Thom’s tones), and I’ve been filming the process for a video on my channel coming up.
I’ve been in original bands my whole life up until when I started demoing pedals in 2019, and I publish original music almost every week on my channel – so I’m trying to get my performance itch scratched without having to deal with all the uphill battles of an original band trying to break into the scene!
