MY RIG Jay Watson of GUM

Many fans first became acquainted with Jay Watson through his earlier work with the now megalithic-ally famous Tame Impala. However, if you haven’t heard the wonderfully scuzzed out pop-psychedelia of his solo project GUM – you’re severely missing out. Ahead of the release of his forthcoming album Saturnia, Jay sat down with Mixdown for a chat about everything from his live rig to his go-to studio gear picks.

Talk to me about your studio space?

There’s a lot of stuff packed in here! It’s 3 metres x 5 and a half metres, it’s really crammed in here. It’s good though, more than I’ve ever had before.

I feel like you have such a signature drum sound across your records. What’s your mic/ plugin setup for recording drums?

For this one, I used an SM57 on the snare. I’ve got this AKGD12, that classic Beatles kick drum mic. It’s an 80s one though, so it was cheaper. It’s great, although I can’t tell if it sounds really good or if I just think it sounds really good because it’s the one that everyone used. It sounds like a finished kick drum, I just do a tiny bit of EQ and don’t compress the kick drum really.

I’m not really good at phase stuff, I usually just use some kind of Ribbon mic, like above it all. Then I’ll put a mic close to the rack toms. I like close rack tom sounds and having a Ribbon mic as an overhead. They have a natural squish / compression / softness in 1-5k. I don’t have to scoop out the harshness of cymbals, I can leave it bright. I’m not a big condenser guy, I own one but I don’t really use it. I like Ribbons and dynamic mics.

I feel like you have such good tom moments in your previous single ‘Race To The Air’. Oh cheers, that’s all a bit over compressed, not because of compression just cos I put that through a tape machine. It’s like a TEAC, not hi fi, just a quarter inch. Medium FI. If it was any nicer sounding I wouldn’t bother. It’s crusty enough that you’ve gotta send it in treblier to get it back out normal. Basically that really flattened it but I liked the overall texture. What would you say is your fave piece of gear at the moment?

I’ve got a problem. It’s not like I hoard stuff, I buy and sell at almost the same rate. If I don’t use it in a year I sell it. I’ve got this old rack thing, which are two old 70s CARLSBRO pedals, one was a delay echo and one was a ADT (Artificial Double Track). They sound really good but they were super bulky and needed an adapter. So I went to sell them but realised they weren’t worth that much and thought they were too good to sell for cheap. So I got this real good tech here in Perth to put them into a rack setup and put in a bypass switch for each unit and a link so I can join between the two and a mix knob! It’s kinda amazing that I’ve met this guy, it means I can buy gear that’s kinda broken and I know there’s a fairly good chance he’ll be able to fix it.

…I’m a bit gross with music gear, I’m like what some people are like with clothes. I mean you don’t need any of this shit, you can sit there with your Macbook. For me, it’s kinda like the fun and inspiration of it. On the other hand too, if you use a tape echo and make it go all fun and squiggly, you can do that with a plugin, but it would take you ages and be weird. For some things it seems redundant but for things like that, I couldn’t be bothered using Ableton Echo and drawing in the waves.

I’ve got heaps of stuff that’s broken, like this old Volume Wah pedal, neither section works properly but the distortion on it is really cool.

Me and Gin (From Pond) do remixes together and run stems through it, it’s really cool. It kinda sounds like a Big Muff Pedal.

What’s your live setup for this upcoming solo tour?

It’s Drums with SPD SX, Bass and Keys on a KORG Kronos which I’vem making all the patches for now. They’re really cool because they have six outputs which you can split to make it sound massive on stage. I’ll just play guitar and sing.

Cool thing about that KRONOS is, say you have three different sounding patches in your right hand, you can send them out as separate lines to the FOH person and suddenly you’ve got 6 keys sounds on separate stems. My idea is that it sounds quite big but there’s only three people with minimal backing track. The less people you are the easier it is to improvise too. My music hasn’t been very improvisational for a while but when there’s only 3 people you can make stuff up on the spot, we’ve been making live versions of the tracks.

I’m just tryna make it as stress free as possible. You know, use what I’ve learnt from touring over the years. You just get all these grand ideas about all this crap you’ll bring and set up on stage. Half of it doesn’t work haha. I’m just tryna make it fool proof and easy. People don’t actually care what gear you’ve brought, just how it sounds.

BY WINTER MCQUINN