Interview: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs
I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Adam and Sam from Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs ahead of their (very LOUD and very HEAVY) Glasgow show. We talked all-things guitar, guitar pedals and their rigs!
I did not know what to do with my hands…
ABL: Tell me a bit about yourselves and how the band got together.
Sam: Oh, that was over 10 years ago now…I had nothing to do with it, actually.
Adam: I'm more able to tell the story. Johnny and Matt had the name. It started with the name, and then we had a practice. Johnny and I met with another friend of ours before it was actually Pigs – just Pigs by name – casually, and then Sam came along…
Sam: I brought a camera just to take some pictures. I had no intentions of doing anything, and we ended up having a jam! We were at that stage in life, when everyone's in, like, four or five bands, getting together, and mucking around.
Adam: As soon as Ewan joined, that was when it became a fully-fledged thing.
Sam: We knew him from various things, asked if he wanted to drum, and thank god he said yes! Because stylistically, he’s a massive influence on what we are as a band.
ABL: Where does the band name come from? You probably get that one quite a lot…
Adam: You’ll never know…
Sam: Johnny, Matt and I went to school together in North Yorkshire. Between the three of us – and particularly Johnny and Matt – have been in a number of bands together. There’s a constant stream of stupid band names, and it’s less thought out than you would imagine.
Adam: It’s the best of the bad bunch…To this day, we still have lists of bad song titles to use, which sometimes make it in! About three years ago, which in hindsight was quite early, we were sat in the pub thinking, “Should we change the name?” Nah, it’s too late now.
This picture does not quite convey the ferocity and volume of the gig!
ABL: So, guitar pedals… What’s your favourite type?
Adam: We’re pretty reliant on fuzz!
Sam: There are two strands to this because one of them is, obviously, I really like fuzzes. Then on the flip side of that, because I work in a studio and I do a lot of studio engineering, I’m a massive Strymon fan for a lot of their line-in/stereo-in stuff. They do pedals which can be so versatile in terms of what they do, but also very satisfying. The Deco, for example, with its saturation, but then its wobbling and slapback in stereo. A lot of the time, you can dance on the dials as someone doing a performance, which is something you can’t do as easily with a plugin. And you are committing creatively to something, so the Strymon stuff is lush, but then both of us are big fans of good fuzz! If you took all our fuzzes away from us, it’d be embarrassing!
Adam: Dreadful. Even if we just switched out to an overdrive, it would still be really embarrassing! You get away with a lot with a fuzz! I use a lot of wah as well, too much wah!
Sam: One pedal, which I think is massively underrated, and I use it a lot in the set, is a volume pedal. I ride my volume pedal so much, and I probably underappreciate what that does. It’s really useful.
ABL: What was your first guitar pedal, and do you still have it?
Adam: Like 90% of guitarists, it was the Big Muff. It’s at Blank, which is Sam’s studio that he owns.
Sam: Probably a tuner, boringly. When I first learnt guitar when I was 15/16, maybe even younger, I remember getting a Line 6 [amp] and thinking, “It’s got everything on it! It’s got delays and chorus…” and being blown away by the fact that after I’d stepped up for my custom, with a K, Kustom combo amp and bought my first Line 6 amp and it came with all the effects you can ever want! I don’t know why I’ve moved away from that because it’s quite frightening…
[We then went on to have a conversation about Kemper profiling and modelling vs. using amps on stage, but that’s a conversation for another time.]
Sam’s pedalboard, featuring a rather familiar looking rodent-esque pedal.
ABL: What gear are you loving just now? What's on your pedal boards? Talk me through your rigs.
Adam: I got a Minotaur Audio Swamplord about a year and a half ago. I can’t remember how I came across them. I think it’s a guy in Greece. It’s fucking great, I really like it. I like to change out my fuzz every now and again, but I’ve been very much enjoying that. I got the Zakk Wylde wah when my wah pedal broke in Toronto. We went to the shop down the road and said, “Have you got any wahs?” and looked in the back, and this was like $60. “Sound. Thanks.” It’s really good, the range on it is great! It doesn’t matter where you put it in the chain, you can always hear the sweep!
Sam: I use a [Earthquaker Devices] Hoof, which is a very safe, standard fuzz. I rely on that mostly. I don’t drive my fuzz that hard, to be honest, because both my amps are hopefully really nice. Then I’ve got a BG Harding. S:P Fuzz, which is a Fuzz Face. Live, I only use it after an [EQD] Avalanche Run Delay and use it when I need to crush the delay. Everything runs into a 90s reissue of an [Orange] OR80, which is a reissue of the original Orange amps from the 70s that’s better at taking 230 volts. On top of that, I use an Orange Custom shop. It’s a really nice hand-wired head which breaks up more.
The OR80 has actually been modded, so it’s 120 watts, and it’s just got so much headroom. It’s like using a bass amp, in terms of pushing the transients, and it sounds amazing! Then I use the custom shop into a 2x12, to drive the sound more. And then, that adds a lot of the clipping at the end stage and really fills the gap that the OR80 leaves. So between those and The Hoof, in particular, that does all the heavy lifting.
A lot of loud Orange amps supply Pigsx7’s powerful stage and recorded sound.
ABL: How does your approach to recording differ from playing live, and do you have a preference?
Sam: We’re lucky because, I have a studio in Newcastle (Blank Studios) that we tend to record in, and we’ve got some lovely stuff there: I’ve got a hand-wired [Vox] AC30 head, and that’s really useful. A lot of the time we’ll track, and I’ll take the DI of our final take, and then I’ll reamp it through different heads. So for example: on Adam’s take, we'll use his Matamp, but then maybe we’ll also use the AC30 and put everything full or just shave the EQ back a bit. It sounds really nice when you run both EQs at about three o’clock and then just gain everything else up and hammer that. Or we’ll run his take through something else and then we’ll do the same with mine.
We’ll often stack a couple of amps, and go down the route of building up the tone in a complementary way. So it’s not dissimilar to what we have on stage, but we just embellish it with a bit more.
ABL: Lastly, you’ve got a pretty busy schedule for the rest of the year, with shows across the UK, the US, and Australia. Am I allowed to ask what;s next other than a well-deserved rest? And what have your musical highlights been so far?
Adam: It’s going to be more of the same, isn’t it? There’s nothing in the bag to surprise anyone.
Sam: Keep going. Turns out there are loads of cities everywhere, and we haven’t really scratched the surface. I don't think we ever could! We could be doing this forever and there’d still be loads of places to play gigs, so we'll keep doing much the same. Until people don’t care anymore, we’ll keep doing it!
Adam: Highlights? I mean, America was a pretty big highlight. It wasn’t something we ever thought we’d be doing, even a month before we went away, to be honest.
Sam: I feel very privileged to be able to take this over to Australia. While America was like…if you turned around to a 20-year-old me and say, “Do you want to tour America?” I’d be like, “Oh my god!”. But going to Australia is mental. It’s on the other side of the world for us!
Adam: We played ArcTanGent [Festival], which for me is one of the best in the UK. It’s a really great festival…Greece was pretty nice supporting The Melvins.
Sam: That was amazing, yeah! That kind of sums it up. We set out, as we were saying at the start, with a daft band that we muck around with. We never really held aspirations to do anything other than just have a bit of fun playing music with each other, and there’s been a constant stream of things that have happened. There’s been plenty of imposter syndrome, where we’ve been doing something and we’re like, “Why are we doing this?”
Adam: I still have it now, talking to you!
