Xan McCurdy

"I play through a Rat Distortion Pedal that I keep on top of the amp and I don’t use on and off, I just dial it in and leave it like that. I like the Rat Pedal and I don’t know how to explain in distortion terms but the rate of the buzz, I like to have a lot of that. There’s something about the Rat is that it seems to make your tone very cold. So on the Blues DeVille amp I have the Bass set to 12 and the Treble is on 1. So the sound doesn’t come out particularly bass-y after going thru that pedal."

"The guitar is a Gibson Chet Atkins Tennessean. It’s a guitar that I first liked the look of because it looks like your favorite British band’s first guitar – the big shitty mid-60’s hollowbody things."

"For an amp I have a Fender Blues Deville and I bought that in 1998. I had used Fender Twins and Bassmans prior to that. I really thought it would be a nice amp that I could beat up a bit on the road and I think it’s turned out to be much more than that. Sometimes we rent backline and I would pick a Fender amp with a similar sounding name and the Blues Deville is far and away much better than all of them."

"I keep my Chet Atkins in storage when I’m not touring so for this record I mostly used a Guild X170 Manhattan which is slightly more particular in its sound."

We recently added a personal favorite of mine to the list of guitarists using Source Audio pedals, Xan McCurdy of the genre defying Sacramento, California band CAKE. For the most part, Xan uses effects very sparingly, but he found some great tones inside the Soundblox Classic and Multiwave Distortions. With the gain eased back a bit, the Classic Distortion gave him an incredibly fat and warm sound while the Multi band Octave on the Multiwave provided a sweet octave up option.

We recently added a personal favorite of mine to the list of guitarists using Source Audio pedals, Xan McCurdy of the genre defying Sacramento, California band CAKE. For the most part, Xan uses effects very sparingly, but he found some great tones inside the Soundblox Classic and Multiwave Distortions. With the gain eased back a bit, the Classic Distortion gave him an incredibly fat and warm sound while the Multi band Octave on the Multiwave provided a sweet octave up option.