Sam McTrusty

¨Not long ago, I used to run four amps at the same time and we were starting to play live on TV - for example, we recently did ´Later... With Jools Holland.´ If you send four mics from four different amps that are always changing to someone in a BBC truck, they´ll think, ´F*** you - it all sounds the same!´ This makes my signal a lot easier for everyone. My main clean sound is a 1957 Fender Champ, my main fuzz profile is a 1962 Vox AC30. There are about 100 Marshalls in there, too. We even profiled The Big Cheese pedal by Audio Kitchen, which works as an amp you can run through a cab and ended up being used for 90 per cent of our albums... some things are too fragile to take on tour! (Total Guitar, January 2017)¨

¨My other main guitar. Before Gretsch, all I played was Teles - I´ve got about seven of them now. We´ll have about five different tunings in any set, so I bring one main and one spare. They´ve all got their own little sticker or idea behind them. ´Imagine´ is my favorite song of all time - I don´t think a song with more purpose has ever been written - so that´s what I chose for this. (Total Guitar, January 2017)¨

¨I´ve known about these for years, but I was never indulgent enough to fit one on my board until now! Because I´m singing as well as thinking about crowd control, pedals are a bit of an afterthought. I was listening to a lot of ´In Utero´ while we were making our new album and I wanted to recreate that swirling, sickly feedback. Whenever that comes on, it´s to add swampiness - on tracks like ´You Are The Devil´, ´Overthinking´ and ´Valhalla´. It´s one of the pedals that can´t be replicated, and when you mix it with fuzz you get instant Nirvana. (Total Guitar, January 2017)¨

¨Like the Small Clone, I used this on nearly every rhythm guitar track on the new album. It was my way of dropping it down to single notes instead of chords, so I can fatten things out more with the same weight and presence. There´s a lot of that style on there, while before it was all about power chords! I used the high octave on the chorus of ´Heart And Soul´, with long reverbs coming from the Kemper. The tracking is so good it literally sounds like someone else is there playing a baritone, rather than being too digital. (Total Guitar, January 2017)¨

In this picture of his pedal board on MR you can see the mastermind gt controller

¨This is one of the Panther prototypes, with Gretsch´s stock Filter´Tron pickups. The centre-block inside is what helps handle distortion so well... now I can play a hollowbody on full fuzz and it doesn´t feed back. Gretsch asked me if there was anything I would change about it... so I asked if I could try one without a Bigsby and locking tuners, because I hit pretty hard when we´re going for it. I also wanted a thicker inlay for when there´s a strobe flashing in my face. I honestly feel these Gretsch guitars changed the way I play a lot. I feel like I instantly got better, I started playing things I never knew I could. (Total Guitar, January 2017)¨

Sam McTrusty uses the TC Electronic Polytune Mini on his pedalboard, as featured in MusicRadar's "In pictures: 68 pro guitarists' pedalboards."