Jeff Schroeder des Smashing Pumpkins
For the most part, Billy plays Stratocasters live. What kinds of guitars do you like to use to complement his sound?
"Especially for the old material, and we're getting out of that paradigm, but it's the combination of the Strat and Les Paul. It's hard to get away from that to play those songs. Before I joined the band, I never played a Gibson. I always played Fender Strats, Jazzmasters, Teles – never a Gibson. When I joined, I had to play Les Pauls and SGs, and to be honest, I wasn't liking them. Their feel is so different from Fenders, and at the time, they seemed so one-dimensional.
"Over the last year or so, I've picked up some Les Pauls that I really like, and so now I get it. You get the right Les Paul, and it'll be able to do things that a Strat or a Tele never can, which is great. Two completely different voices – Fender and Gibson. I've got a Les Paul from the Custom Shop with an iced tea flame top – it kind of looks like the Jimmy Page/Zeppelin guitar. It's got such a vibe. Oh my, I love that guitar! [Laughs]
"I play that Les Paul on a lot of the new stuff, and I think I'll be playing it a lot more in the future. I also have a '50s goldtop reissue that I really like and am using. Those two guitars cover a lot of ground. Oh, and I have a white Les Paul Custom – I use it on some of the heavier stuff.
"For the new material that's more atmospheric, I use Fender Jazzmasters and Jaguars, which I was very used to playing before the Pumpkins. On the old stuff, like on Thirty-Three, I'll use a Jazzmaster. I just love the sound of those two guitars, the Jaguar and Jazzmaster."
"We do value what we do, and we realize that it could go away, so we enjoy it while it's here," says Schroeder, second left, with Nicole Fiorentino, Corgan and Byrne.
I imagine with your move to more Gibsons you had to rethink your amps on stage.
"Right now for the stage I'm using two Orange 4 x 12 cabinets with Celestion Vintage 30s – amazing. For amps, I'm using modified versions of Randall's MTS Series, which are modular, so they have interchangeable preamps. The preamp section allows you to put in four different preamp modules – it's a design that Bruce Egnator did, and Randall licensed it.
"About a year ago, I got an e-mail from this company, Salvation Mods, in the Czech Republic, and they wanted to send me some mods for the Randalls. Their stuff just blew my mind. Amazing, amazing work. They made me four different modules that I'm using. What we've come up with is the Matchbox – a Vox AC30/Matchless-style preamp. I use that for clean.
"For low-level distortion, I use a Vox with a Fender EQ section – that's probably my favorite preamp. I have a Marshall that gets into the high-gain, and also for high-gain stuff I have a copy of an Orange Rockerverb. Those are the preamp sections that emulate amps. Lately, I've also been using the Orange Rockerverb 100 and a cabinet. We played Jay Leno, and that's what I used."
What kind of pedalboard do you have?
"Ahh, that's crazy, too! [Laughs] I have a Fractal MIDI controller with 15 loops. On the ground I have a bunch of pedals: the BCM Brian May, a whiteface Rat reissue, a Menatone Blue Collar overdrive, a Fulltone Plimsoul, a Line 6 M9, a Fulltone Clyde wah, a Boss RC-30 looper and the TC Flashback delay – but that's the one you can buy only through Pro Guitar Shop.com. They call it the Alter Ego. I also have the Strymon El Capistan tape echo.
"In the effects loop of the preamp, I have the Eventide Time Factor, and I also have and an old Alesis MidiVerb 2, which I only use on preset 45, which is called the 'Bloom' setting. It's a reverse reverb kind of thing, and it's very beautiful."
