How CLT DRP’s Scott Reynolds is pushing electric guitar tone to new limits via a monster 40kg pedalboard
CLT DRP – pronounced ‘Clit Drip’ for anyone too abashed to ask – are a trio of electro-punk feminists from Brighton. Since the release of their 2020 debut Without the Eyes, they’ve been turning heads and battering lugholes with their unruly blend of abrasive riffs and tonally daring ring modulation effects cooked up by Scott Reynolds.
“What we do nods to electronic sounds, but it’s got a punk attitude,” explains the guitarist, who was brought up on a melange of music drip-fed down by his older brother. Everything from Metallica and Guns N’ Roses to EDM seeped into his musical psyche.
“When I was really young, I just thought playing guitar was the coolest thing in the world, which it is,” he says. “But, when I was 10, The Prodigy came out with The Fat of the Land, and that completely blew my mind!”
From that moment, Scott has been mastering the art of making his trusty Epiphone Les Paul sound anything but traditional – forcing it to spew “wonky sounds” with the help of a stacked pedalboard that weighs over 40 kilos. Here, you’ll find Boss’s FZ-3 Fuzz and DD-7 Digital Delay pedals, as well as a Wampler Ego Compressor, Electro-Harmonix Micro POG and a well-used Morley expression pedal.
But the two mainstays most essential to his signature broken-robots-at-an-industrial-rave sound are the Boss SL-20 Slicer and Strymon Mobius Multi-modulation. He commonly frets single notes while using the Mobius’s Quadrature setting and the SL-20’s Slice patterns to open up a warped new world of synth-like textures, rhythmic pulsations and detuned wackiness.
The key to making it all sound musical, he suggests, is lots of practice and a mantra of embracing the unexpected when it comes to pitch.
“Logic goes out the window when you put a ring mod on,” he smiles. “You can be fretting notes past the 12th fret and there’s shuddering low-end, then go down to where a low note should be, and there’s no bass.”
Crucially, because the trio’s sound comes solely from guitar, drums and vocals, the entire melodic space is Scott’s to play with. “That setup really helps because I haven’t got to worry about fitting in with a bass player or a synth player,” he adds.
To complete his colossal sound, he uses Laney guitar amps and/or a Hartke bass amp, reasoning that the latter “seems to hack the pedals really well”.
Having recently signed to Venn Records, the band’s “much dancier and maybe slightly less heavy” sophomore record is tipped for release later this year.
Nothing Clever, Just Feelings is out September 8 via Venn Records.
