“The house and studio burned to the ground. When we got there, Pink was sitting in the driveway. She gave me a Gibson guitar case with a bow on it”: How Butch Walker’s ear for killer tone took him on a journey from obscurity to in-demand producer
From Taylor Swift to Green Day, he’s worked with the world’s biggest stars, and still managed to make 16 of his own records – and, now, his own signature amp with Divided by 13
Amp Week 2026: After a false start as a teenage hair metaller, Butch Walker formed power-pop outfit The Marvelous 3, enjoying a hit with 1998’s Freak of the Weak. His 2002 debut solo album, Left of Self-Centered, wasn’t a commercial smash – but it found a fan in Avril Lavigne, who employed Walker as a producer for hits like My Happy Ending and When You’re Gone.
From there he’s developed an extensive resumé in pop (Pink, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift), pop-punk (Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Weezer), and a diverse spread of other artists including Jewel, Frank Turner and The Wallflowers. In 2025 he became the new guitarist with platinum-selling rockers Train.
As a singer-songwriter, Walker is known for never making two albums in the same style, although his love of Elvis Costello and Cheap Trick is rarely far from the surface.
Decades of recording guitars have given him strong ideas about what an amp should sound like and his new ÷13 BW1969 signature model represents the best bits of all his favourite products.
Its novel power amp section can switch between EL84 and 6L6 tubes for midrange sweetness or low-end thump. The front end has a six levels of input gain for that magical always-on boost without a pedal.
What was the thinking behind your ÷13 BW1969 amp?
My three favorite amps are a Fender Bassman, a top-boost AC30 and a Marshall JMP. I’d like to have an amp that’s the best of all three. So what we came up with was two 6L6s, which is what's in a Bassman, and then an EL84 section as well, which is your classic British AC30.
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You can combine the EL84s and 6L6s together, which is unique. At the same time, it's just a good classic rock sound. I like an amp that lets you roll your guitar volume down halfway and get a great clear clean sound. I don't like to channel switch. I like to be expressive with one guitar and one volume knob, so it’s very simple.
A lot of classic Marshalls had EL34s. Did you try a prototype with an EL34 power stage?
No – I love the sound of an EL34’s midrange, but I’m getting that with the EL84 power section. To me they’d be too similar. The bottom end of a 6L6 gives it the oomph that EL34s might be lacking, but making up for in midrange.
Because these are very mid-forward amps anyway, I feel like a 6L6 marries best with the tone stack. When I switch to the EL84 it’s very much a different sounding amp, and that's what you want.
Are there particular amps you always use in the studio?
I have my go-tos. I've gotten to the point where, if somebody comes in and they have a certain style I immediately go, “This is straight-up Princeton with a Tele,” or, “This is straight-up JCM800.” There’s not a lot of guesswork, because of years of being an analog recordist, and knowing how to get good sounds and mic things up.
And sometimes it’s not even real amps or cabinets. I do a lot of direct stuff with my Fractal rig; I do a lot of recording with real amps going into IRs, and then I also have cabinets mic’ed up all over my studio.
How did you get into EL84 amps?
I went straight to hard rock and metal when I was a teenager in the 80s. I gravitated towards tons of gain, hot rod amps. After our band, Southgang, broke up in like ’91 or ’92, the music all over the radio had bluesier guitar tones that I was really craving to dive into. My playing was getting better, and I was relying less on distortion.
I remember playing at a gig once with somebody’s old AC30. I played so much better that night – I was way more expressive. Of course, I had to turn the amp round to the wall because I had it at least halfway up. That EL84 sound, that class of amp really started to resonate through me.
How did you get the tones on the Marvelous 3’s breakthrough Hey! Album?
I was broke as a joke when I made that record, before we got signed. I had one mic and preamp, a $200 Rolls tube mic preamp and an Audio Technica 4033. I had a little EL84 amp, a Trace Elliott Velocette 15, and a 60s Hagstrom hollow body Viking.
That Hagstrom was given to me by my old guitar tech, who went on to be more successful than I was! It was given to him by Tom Petersson from Cheap Trick. I can’t believe I don't have that guitar anymore, because now I’m friends with Tom.
There was something about that EL84 driven sound. The Viking had like Filter’trons or Gold Foil-type pickups: very open and microphonic and expressive. That was just a great combo.
Your first international hit as a producer was Girl All The Bad Guys Want by Bowling for Soup. What was the recording chain for that?
It was a Bogner triple Ecstasy. I wasn’t into the Triple Rectifier thing that everybody was using – I was more into the Marshall, Bogner, Soldano kind of midrange thing. I had a ’66 335, a ’78 hardtail Strat, a Les Paul of some sort, and then lots of PRS. This was before the fire in ’07 that wiped my entire guitar collection out, and everything else.
On Green Day records and stuff, the rhythms would be quadrupled. I was pretty purist. I did usually two rhythm guitars paying left and right – I liked that sound. I’d put the rhythms hard left and hard right, then up the middle in the choruses.
I’d double the rhythms with something completely unique, like a baritone guitar through a distorted amp, through like a high gain amp, and that would just lift the image of the chorus to the to another level.
Then for clean guitar parts, depending on the song – like for arpeggiated things – I’d do a stereo double of those and have those panned medium left and right, and then try to find space in the stereo spectrum for everything.
What happens when a band says, ‘We don't want to sound like this,’ but you love the band? Do you chicken out?
On that song [Girl All The Bad Guys Want] the riff was one baritone guitar up the middle, and that became the riff that you hear by itself at the top. Then the rhythms come in when the band kicks in, hard left and hard right. Sometimes we’d reinforce the melody riff up the center with a stereo set of those as well, depending if it needed to be bigger or more pronounced.
It just depends what the song needed. Sometimes that dry guitar straight up the middle sounds really small by itself, but makes the whole thing sound really big when those choruses kick in.
After that you worked with Avril Lavigne. What gear were you using then?
It would have been the same setup. At that time I was using the same shit for every record. I mean, I was doing a lot of similar-sounding records. It wasn’t much different doing a Bowling for Soup or an Avril Lavigne production, except I was doing some keyboards and programming on the more pop stuff.
I did my first solo album, Left of Self-Centered, at home with my newly-configured studio. That sound became something that people wanted me to do for them. I did the [Baltimore band] SR-71 hit off their first record. Then Bowling for Soup, Avril, Pink and several others. I had a little bit of a sonic blueprint, I guess.
You mentioned the fire that destroyed your guitars in 2007. After that fire, Pink bought you a guitar, right?
The house and studio burned to the ground while we were in New York. When we got off the plane and went to where our home had been, Pink was sitting in the driveway. It was a very emotional moment – we’d lost everything we’d ever owned. That’s heavy when you when you take it in for the first time.
Pink insisted we come live with her. We went to her house, and she went into the next room and came back carrying a Gibson guitar case with a bow on it. It chokes me up thinking about it. It was a beautiful, VOS Custom Shop R0 tobacco sunburst Les Paul standard.
That was ironic, because it was the first Les Paul I ever saw, and it made me want to learn to play because Ace Frehley played one. Pink didn’t even know that! Funny enough, I’d never had one – and there it was sitting on the kitchen counter at her house.
My ’62 Hummingbird with the Dove tailpiece, which is obviously not correct, is the only thing I have that I owned prior to 2007. It’s in the shop getting cracks repaired. I recorded and wrote every song of the early 2000s on that guitar. I found out it was Toy Caldwell's from the Marshall Tucker Band, who was the main songwriter and guitar player. That was cool to learn.
We burned again in 2018… You stop being as sentimental when everything of sentimental value is taken away from you in one day
How was it working with Green Day on Father of All…?
I love that record, and I know they love that record. What happens when a band comes to you and says, “We don’t want to sound like this,” but you love the band? Do you chicken out and go, “I’m not touching that – I don’t want to get yelled at by your fans”? Weezer is the same way, and both of those bands came to me when they were ready to do something different. I thought that was really fun.
There are some things that people can be set on, especially guitars. Billie liked to quadruple the rhythms instead of double. We did that, but we used different kinds of amps. Almost everything was still his gear. He had a ÷13 that he loved. We even used the Dookie Marshall. It wasn’t like we changed everything up. It was just a different approach to songs and how they were recorded.
![[HD] Pink & Butch Walker - Mean @ Live In St. Petersburg. Tuborg Greenfest - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/2bJ31AY5_Mc/maxresdefault.jpg)
He was very particular about his guitar parts, because he’s the only guitar player and because he had come from producing the last handful of Green Day records. I think some guitars ended up on there that were my parts. When we demoed the songs I’d play a guitar part on top of something, and he liked a lot of it and wanted to keep it. But nine times out of ten, the guitars on those records are Billie: Billie’s gear, Billie’s guitars, Billie’s amps.
A lot of the guitars on that record were the demo guitars, because they recorded them so well. Chris Dugan, who engineered and mixed several Green Day records, he's Billie’s studio guy. So when I get their demo parts, they’re recorded as good as anybody’s ever going to record them. It’s a producer’s job to say, “If I mess with this, I'm just doing it for my ego’s sake, which is never good.”
Is it true you had the chance to buy Peter Green’s Greeny before Kirk Hammett did it?
My buddy was a guitar broker, and it started circulating that Gary Moore was going to sell. I was actually more psyched that it was Gary’s – he was one of my big influences growing up. But I just wasn't ready to spend $250,000 on a guitar at my stage in my life and my career. I highly regret not coming up with the money somehow. Obviously, that was just a lunch tab for Kirk Hammett!
Were you tempted by any of the more recent Gary Moore auctions?
I was – but I just took such a blow financially after the first fire. We burned again in 2018 in the same town, from wildfires both times. It makes going out and trying to replace all that stuff not so fun these days. I just shifted my mindset a little bit that I didn’t need trophy guitars. I just wanted guitars for functionality. You stop being as sentimental when everything of sentimental value is taken away from you in one day.
- More information on Butch Walker’s new signature amp, the BW1969, head to Divided by 13.
Jenna writes for Total Guitar and Guitar World, and is the former classic rock columnist for Guitar Techniques. She studied with Guthrie Govan at BIMM, and has taught guitar for 15 years. She's toured in 10 countries and played on a Top 10 album (in Sweden).
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