GW You play a cool slide part on that track. Did you use a special guitar for that?
RODRIGO No, that was my main guitar, a nylon-string built by [Belfast, Ireland, luthier] Frank Tate, who makes a lot of our guitars. We tried a few different kinds of guitars for that part, including an Ovation, but in the end we went with my usual guitar. I told [producer] John Leckie, “You’re going to have to bear with me on this, because we’ll need to record the melody line by line.” It took ages to record; I was totally obsessed with getting it right. But I love the way it sounds.
GW So the Frank Tate guitars are still your main stage and studio instruments?
RODRIGO Yeah, and he keeps building more of them for us. We’ve been given a few other guitars to try, but we’re not convinced by them. Frank understands perfectly where we come from. We do use some Yamahas for backup, and they’re good to travel with. The real difficulty for us is dealing with the electronics inside the guitars. At the beginning, it wasn’t that hard because the venues we played weren’t that big, but now that we’re playing festivals to tens of thousands of people, it can be a real nightmare to try and make two acoustic guitars sound like a fuckin’ rock band. Also, we hit the guitars a lot and the pickups suffer from that. Sometimes it seems like they break down every three days. So Rick Turner’s been working on a new pickup system for us. It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s getting there, and I think it’ll help a lot.
GW Do you use any effects?
RODRIGO We’ve only started doing that recently. Both Gabriela and I have Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedals, and I also use a DigiTech Whammy Pedal. We don’t use them that much; just enough to keep things fun for us. Music should be fun. We’re not serious musicians. We like to have a laugh.
GW You’ve been touring an incredible amount recently. Have you had a chance to work on any new material?
GABRIELA Actually, I had to cancel some dates on the last tour because I was exhausted. So I came back home and that really made me think about the question you just asked. For me and Rod, music is what we do. I’m not keen on living a rock-star life. We’re just an instrumental act that’s been lucky to play all these big rock festivals, but once you start to do that, all this machinery starts up behind you and it’s hard to say no, until you reach the point where your body can’t respond any more. I realized that we need to focus on the next album and give ourselves enough time to get creative between the tours. And that’s what we’re doing now, taking more days off between shows. We’ve been working at this for five years, and as exciting as it is to see more and more people discovering us, at the same time I know those people will love to hear something new from us, too.
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