What piece of equipment do you have to show us today?
We wanted to show you guys a piece of gear that we use constantly throughout our writing/recording process, which is a Roland JC-40 Amplifier.
How did you come across this particular item?
Our vocalist (Arran) was writing in our studio and decided to go check out some local pawn shops to try and find some new gear to mess around with, and found this at the first store. Apparently it had been sitting in the shop for quite some time and the owners saw how excited Arran was to find this in a small Darwin store, so they cut us a pretty good deal on it!
What is it that you like about it so much?
It’s such an immediately noticeable sound, Roland JC amps have this amazing warm clean tone and a built in chorus/reverb that’s reminiscent of the ’80s new wave and post-punk and especially in the current indie scene. All sounds that we love, it was a sound we’d been trying to recreate and work into our own music.
How do you use it and how has it shaped the way you write music?
We mostly use it for clean guitar tracks and underlays when it comes to our recording process, a lot of our leads have another track of this amp running a chorus to add some ‘jangle’ to the leads. It really gets its use through the writing process, sitting in a room with an amp like this and getting to mess about with it is a huge part of getting the basis of an idea down.
The JC-40 certainly helped us to get into using some older influences in our music, writing with a heavier focus on building ambience through our guitar work. It adds a whole new dimension to our sound.
Tell us a bit about what you have coming up?
We’ve just released another single titled ‘Misspent’, which is off our upcoming EP titled When I Went Away, which is due out on Friday May 19! Given the current situation we’re getting straight back into writing and working on *hopefully* doing some shows interstate and in our hometown towards the end of the year.
Listen to Draftday’s new single ‘Misspent’ here.