Hi, I’m Josh Gardziel, I’m from Halifax West Yorkshire (UK) and I play guitar in L.O.E (Last Of Eden)
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Bandcamp: https://weareloemusic.bandcamp.com
How long have you been a musician? How did you get into it in the first place?
I have been playing guitar for 21 years. I started when I was 14 which for some is quite late to begin learning an instrument. I have grown up listening to and absorbing my Dad’s record collection, which has always been predominantly guitar led music. Bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Doors et al. Guitar and the idea of being in a band has always been something that spoke to me. I was always a shy child and teenager. Looking at album covers and seeing photos of bands and musicians that just oozed this air of style, confidence and charisma that felt like everything I wanted to be and everything I felt like I didn’t have.
I picked up my first guitar at 14 years old, around the same time I started to shape my early tastes in music. Bands like Blink 182, Rage Against The Machine and Greenday.
These bands were the perfect backdrop for my early foray in to learning this new instrument.
Who have been some of your major musical influences, past or present?
In L.O.E (Last Of Eden), our biggest influences have always been progressive / post rock bands. We are collectively huge fans of bands like Oceansize, Rage Against The Machine, Tesseract, PG Lost, Russian Circles.
On a personal level I tend not to have guitar heroes in the conventional sense but I admire players who create unusual tones and spacious soundscapes. People Like David Gilmour or Tom Morello. I’m currently a big fan of Rabea Massaad and how he creates incredible dreamy, textural soundscapes with that juxtaposition of really heavy and dark tones.
What drew you to using pedals initially? Have you been using them throughout your playing career? How have pedals helped to shape your sound, or influence the style that you’ve created?
Throughout my journey as a musician, I have always been fascinated by how guitarists were able to create different and unusual sounds. I was drawn to how players were able to make a guitar sound so ethereal and expansive. It’s a rabbit hole that opened up in front of me and swallowed me whole as I started to learn about different pedals and how to use them.
I think for most people their pedal journey starts with something like a distortion pedal. Mine certainly did at least. Not long afterwards I discovered delay and this changed my whole world. I had a brief delve in to the world of multi effects pedals when I was quite young, as it seemed like a cheap and cost effective way to have as much variety at my feet as possible. I held on to my Boss ME 50 longer than I’d care to admit. But with a little more experience behind me I started to recognise the subtle differences in effects, and that it made such a huge impact on the end tonality of the instrument.
What’s your current setup look like? Do you use different setups with different bands/projects? Take us through your rig (pedals, amps, guitars, etc. – be as in-depth as you’d like!):
My set up for L.O.E (Last Of Eden) currently looks like this:
I play a 1987 MIJ Fender Stratocaster 1987 Reissue of a 71 (Buttercream – not sure if this is the right colour but it’s a creamy yellow) or a 1996 MIJ Fender Strat (Shell Pink). The Shell Pink has become my number 1 most recently but both guitars come out on tour with me. I have a bit of a penchant for the MIJ Fujigen era Fenders. My pedal board in chain order consists of: TC Electronic Polytune Mini > Keeley Compressor Plus > Dunlop Crybaby Wah > Digitech Whammy 5 > Electro-Harmonix Micro POG > Meris Enzo > Boss SD-1 (Limited edition black and gold) > Fulltone OCD V2 > Electro-Harmonix Bass Big Muff > Strymon Riverside > Boss TR-2 > Strymon Timeline > Strymon Bigsky
All of the above runs through a Boss ES8 switcher which allows me easier functionality at my feet. This allows me to use one of the banks on the ES8 to create 8 different patches for a song. Each patch is different and, for those who are not familiar with switchers, it means I can create a patch that can switch multiple pedals on or off at the press of one switch on the ES8 as opposed to a tap dance. The Strymon Timeline, Bigsky, Riverside and Meris Enzo are all running MIDI, so I can switch to different banks and presets on those pedals with my ES8.
All of this runs mono through a Fender 59 LTD Bassman.
Some of my favourite / go to pedal settings:
I use the SD-1 as a clean boost with very light gain. It pushes the amp just a little and adds a nice treble and slight hair to the guitar when I need it to cut through just a bit more. On The Timeline I am using the tape delay setting quite a lot. I tend to have a long delay tail and a short delay tail setting. On the long delay tail I have an unreasonable amount of repeats and good amount of wet mix where as the shorter delay I have the repeats turned down and less of the wet signal.
The Bigsky is that always on pedal for me. There isn’t a single sound in our set that doesn’t have the Bigsky on it. I have a variety of tighter hall and room reverb setting but I use a lot of the cloud mode and have a long decay of between 8-12 seconds with the mix quite high for a lot of the really ambient and large sounds I’m getting. On the large cloud mode sounds I tend to roll the tone down and have the pre-delay quite high so that it creates quite a dark ambient washy pad behind the guitar and tends not to overwhelm things too much.
The Riverside is for all of my high gain stuff and has quite a mid forward tone for most of the songs but has a really mid scooped patch for some of the heavier sections that I often couple with the Micro POG for that octave down really heavy sort of sound. If the Riverside is engaged it is always with the SD1 in front of it as I really like how these two pair together. The SD1 just adds that top end sizzle and extra treble boost. The Whammy 5 is always set to the 1 octave up setting and almost exclusively used with my high gain tones. Paired with the Bigsky and the Timeline it creates an ethereal and almost orchestral soundscape.
Lastly, my board contains a pedal of a slightly different nature. A USB foot switch which runs to a MacBook Pro that’s on stage with me. The MacBook Pro sits on top of a rack unit which contains a Focusrite Audio Interface and a DI rack. The audio interface and DI rack feed our samples and synths to the FOH engineer and our click track to our drummer. The software we use for our shows on the laptop allows me to trigger all our audio and visual elements of our set with the press of the USB foot switch.
Favorite type of pedal (drive, delay, fuzz, etc. – more than one answer is always acceptable!):
For me, a pedal I couldn’t live without is reverb! Although it’s a hotly debated topic I lean on the side of Strymon and have no shame in admitting I'm a huge fan of their work. Before owning the Bigsky I had a Bluesky and I’m already looking at how can I scrape some money together for the new Cloudburst. I’m addicted. I realise they’re not everyones favourite but for me and the style I play, they lend themselves perfectly to those huge and expansive guitar parts that get lost in a sea of reverb.
Give me reverb all day long please.
You’re stranded on a desert island – name 3 (of each) instruments, amps and pedals you couldn’t live without:
Instruments: MIJ Fender Strat x3
Amps: Fender Bassman, Hi-Watt Custom 50, Dumble
Pedals: Strymon Bigsky, Strymon Timeline, Strymon Riverside
The Klon hype: Love it or Hate it?
I will be perfectly honest (and shamefully embarrassed to admit) I have never played a Klon. I have yet to succumb to the hype.
Any last comments, promos or anything you’d like to talk about?
Thank you so much for letting me talk through guitars, pedals and gear with you. It’s a pleasure to share my rig with everyone. I’m unashamedly a gear nerd and I know that here, I am in great company.
L.O.E are currently out on our Sunset Silhouette Tour (UK) and have 3 shows left:
Feb 11 – Trades Club, Hebden Bridge
Feb 28 – The Parish, Huddersfield (w/. Hubris)
Mar 1 – The Black Heart, London (w/. Hubris)
We also release our Sunset Silhouette EP March 3, which is available on Hopeful Tragedy Records as limited edition hand cut Vinyl and CD.
Thanks so much for having me!
Thanks so much to Josh for taking the time to answer some questions! Make sure to go check out their Facebook page to see when they’re headed to a town near you! Cheers!
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