FRANK MARINO
Tony: Can you give us a pedalboard rundown of what you used back in the day? Now remember we are all gear-tech heads here, use as much space as you need! Guys will eat it up.
Frank: Oh, that pedal board was huge! 6 Feet long, 3 feet deep, and two tiers high at one end. I had over 22 pedals on it. And those were the days of solid analogue stuff... no digital there. That's how I learned electronics... screwing around with that board. You have to understand that, in those days, having the pedals that I had was considered a "bad thing" by almost everybody around me in the business. They used to say, "Oh, he can't play without his pedals", and snicker and stuff like that. But I was pretty insistent that, one day, alot of guitarists would begin to use them. Now, they do... and now I use far less, if any at all (although they're on the board, I don't always turn them on). Isn't that ironic? Anyway, I had a Vox wah wah, a Cry Baby wah wah, two or three different fuzz boxes (Electro Harmonix, Fuzz Face, etc., but all modified... nothing stock). I had Octave Dividers (2), Volume Pedals (2), Echo Plexes (2), Eventide Flangers and Eventide Phasers, Reverb units (even a spring!)... it just kept changing and getting bigger and bigger.
Tony: What effects are you using or really like now?
Frank: Now, it's getting smaller and smaller... I might use a fuzz for one tune or two (my main distortion is from my pre-amps, which I build), maybe an octave once in awhile, but always reverb. Delay? One or two tunes. I still use the volume pedal alot because I've perfected a "backwards guitar" technique that sounds astonishingly realistic (you'll hear alot of it on Eye OIf The Storm, and on the new RealLive). I also have a technique where I use my tremolo bar to imitate slide guitar, and it also sounds quite real. That, too, can be heard (on those records) whenever you hear me playing what you think is slide... it's not. I have a rack with a Lexicon reverb, but I only use it for the reverb. My delays are digital now, and I don't like that, but I use them so little that it's just not worth it to take out the Echo Plexes and deal with the tape hassles and the hum and stuff.
Tony : What effects have you seen around that have you gassing ? <Gear Aquisition Syndrome>
Frank : Nothing, really. I just build what I want now. Every effect is really just an offshoot of something else. The best Flanger out there comes from Dave Fox at Foxrox electronics. It's called a TZF Flanger (Through Zero Flanger), and it's analog sound and real "through-zero" effect really sounds like the tape machine flanging of old. I haven't used it on a gig yet, but I hope to soon. Dave is making me a special rack mounted stereo one, and I await it as I speak.
CGPA - OK...back to something a bit less philosophical and a lot more materialistic! How many guitars do you own?
Frank - I'd have to count them but...I have probably 13 or 14 of which many are SG's or derivatives. Straight SGs, customized SGs, rebuilt SGs, I've got a hollow SG, you know, which is pretty unbelievable because the guitar's so thin, most of them are SGs, I've got a couple of Strats, an old '61 and a newer model, an old Telecaster, my SGs are mostly pre 1962, a couple of pre '61 1/2 Les Paul SGs, which were my main guitars for many years, but now I took two of those other guitars and I modified them with DiMarzio pickups and I use those as my main guitars. I've got an SG that was made for me by a guy by the name of Jim Glen. That's the purple guitar on the cover of Eye of the Storm.
CGPA - Can you tell us about your stage setup?
Frank - I build everything! I build my preamps, I build my pedals, I build my racks, I do it all myself. The preamp that is my sound is basically a cross between a Twin Reverb and a Mesa Boogie. It's a 5 tube preamp with a loop send/return. It has 2 overdrive channels and very much like the Twin Reverb when it's in the clean mode. I've built many of them but I've got 2 that run right now. Right now, I'm using a Crown power amp with it. I have an Ashley also. I use 15 inch speakers. From day one, I've used 15 inch speakers. I've never used 12 and consequently, 15's are very hard to make sustain. You have to have more gain in the preamp because the speaker's just got too much mass. - I build all my own effects. I have the largest collection of old effects from the 60's cause that's what I've always used. Everything I use, if I can help it is analogue. I have a Vox Crybaby Wawa slightly modified so it has a little bit more low end response when you turn it on. From there, I use the Electroharmonics pedal. It's the basis for what I'm using. I take these pedals and I basically go through the circuit with a scope and find out why they have the EQ that they have or the sound that they have and I modify them until they sound a little bit smoother. The key here is that what you want to look for is the pedals that accentuate the stuff like 1K and 2K in the frequency response and you want to cut that out. Generally manufacturers have something like that built into the system because it makes something louder to the ear. When you cut it out, it becomes a little more hi-fi but then you need more power to make it as loud. It's the same idea as what you find in a Discothèque. If you look at the graphic eq's on the wall, they're always in a smile. The center's all cut out of them, because as you increase the level of the music, the Fletcher Munson curve in your head makes you hear the 1k louder than everything else. So your head balances out the missing frequencies. It's always better to cut the 1k center than to boost the lows and highs, because then you're going to be relying on amplifiers that inject noise. I use a Big Fuzz and an old Neutron Micro...I managed to get all my pedals into one pedal board about two and a half feet long and I still have all the functionality that I had before. I use a volume pedal and there are 2 Boss pedals on the board, but they're only there as back-up. I only turn them on if the delays in my rack aren't working. Then I've got the MPX1 Lexicon Reverb/Delay as well as an LXP15. If you look at my rack, you'll see two of everything and there's this big switchbox in the middle. It's all done with relays so if one system quits, the other one takes over. This reflects the 'fear of something breaking' I guess...My system is so elaborate in the switching that you'd flip if you saw it. I'd love to take you through it, it's got backups to backups to backups. It's all on a DC system so that if the power goes out I an keep going. Everything's on hard bypass. The one thing that I'm proud of most of all with my system is that it is really, really quiet! But I do not use any gates. It is quiet because the grounding is done properly. So if you're standing in front of my dual fifteens, you don't know they're on. But if you don't know they're on and you're standing there and I play a chord, it's 120db of just clean power that comes out of nowhere.
CGPA - Ok, those are your guitars and your setup...what do you like in strings?
Frank - I use the lightest strings in existence. I use a .015 for my D string. So I use an .008, a .009, a .012, a .015, a .026 and a .038. The only string I'll usually break is an E string, but I continue the song with or without it. I don't switch guitars through the middle of the tune, I just play with 5 strings. With strings that thin, I only have 2 wound strings. I think the FireWire strings from Canada are really good. A guy in Windsor makes them.
CGPA - Picks?
Frank - Extra heavy, standard shape! The heavier the better. If it's a rock, that's even better. I don't want any bend, any flex whatsoever. They do have stone picks, but they cost way too much money and I'm constantly losing picks.
Frank - I also use a wireless with a belt pack. Did you know I had the first wireless in existence? I had the first Schaeffer Vega Wireless system for guitar. Before anybody had them, Ken Schaeffer, who designed it, gave me one to try. And then later on Angus Young got one, Ted and a bunch of other guys. What a contraption it was too. I used to tape it to the front of my guitar so that people wouldn't think I was playing to a tape. And then this whole story started "Frank Marino is this crazy dude man, he tapes his cigarettes to his guitar", cause it looked like a pack of cigarettes.
