In recent years, Irish rockers Fontaines D.C. have gone from hardy, post-punk upstarts playing clubs to festival headliners, enjoying huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. In a fresh rig rundown, guitarist Carlos O'Connell has revealed how an unassuming spring reverb is his secret weapon throughout that life-changing period.
There are plenty of notable names on his pedalboard, including an MXR Micro Amp for “pushing the amp a little bit,” a Strymon Volante tape delay, and an Eventide H9 Harmonizer.
But it's the pedal free of any swish design features and eye-catching branding that steals the show. It has a lineage with The Who’s Pete Townshend, but it was Radiohead’s strange-gear-loving Ed O’Brien that turned him on to it.
“It's called the Type 636P and it's made by this company called Soundgas,” he tells Premier Guitar.
Based out of Derbyshire, England, the firm is run by a group of vintage gear enthusiasts with a strong focus on vintage synths, tape echoes, and studio effects, but isn’t averse to the odd foray into new builds. The preamp is one such example of that. But they’re made in limited batches, and their £600 (approx. $812) price tag compounds their exclusivity.
As O’Connell explains, the pedal lifts the spring reverb tank from a Grampian 636 reverb unit. The studio rack was used by Townshend as a boost distortion on a score of The Who records.
“He figured that the gain in it was unbelievable,” O’Connell relays. “So [Soundgas] started refurbing a load of these spring tanks when they realized this thing was crazy, and they made these units. It’s a preamp, but it’s got the biggest distortion I’ve ever heard.
“It’s insanely expensive, but I saw Ed O’Brien on YouTube was showing his new ’board, he played through it and I was like ‘Wow,’” he continues. “Soundgas put it through drum machines and everything; it distorts stuff in an incredible way. I thought, ‘I need to hear it myself!’”
The sound he gets from it is akin to gravel in a cement mixer; it's disgustingly gritty, and it's very easy to see why he condemned his piggy bank to smithereens to get one. He cleans up extraneous noise with an MXR Smart Gate, and the Micro Amp keeps its animalistic nature but puts it in a more fitting suit to meet your mother in.
“This thing sounds incredible on like everything, you know?” he enthuses. “I've been using it in the studio when I produce albums [for other artists]. I have it in a chain out of the 'board and you can feed anything into it.”
Elsewhere in his interview, O'Connell also showcased how dynamic it can be, playing gently with the humbucker and single coil pickups of his Fender Mustang to usher out a fairly crystalline clean tone. On the other end, he shows how it can go “quite mad” with the dials cranked and its teeth bared.
Handily, because the pedal's face is so clean, he or a roadie has scrawled the relevant track names it's used for on it – Big Shot, Favourite, and I Love You are among the bunch.
“If you want it to be super dirty like I do with the Mellotron quite a lot, you just push the front end. It starts distorting a lot more; it squashes the sound a lot.” The sound here is well into germanium fuzz territory. “That works especially well in the studio.”
Despite not being an outright fan of his fellow Irish guitar hero, O'Connell's main studio axe is a copy of Rory Gallagher's Strat. That led to him playing the original, heavily relic’d guitar last year, and it left him in awe.
Visit Soundgas for more info on the pedal. A new batch is expected in the fall.
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