Fresh off final rehearsals in a humid Florida airplane hangar, Trivium’s guitar-playing powerhouse and lead vocalist Matt Heafy takes a moment to catch his breath before packing his bags for an Australian tour.
“Sorry I'm driving during this, but don't worry, it’s hands-free,” he jokes. But with the band gearing up to release their 11th studio album, and Heafy revamping his entire guitar arsenal ahead of a massive global tour, we’ll forgive the frontman for multitasking.
For nearly two decades, Heafy has long been associated with Gibson and Epiphone models – the Les Paul to be specific. A loyal advocate of traditional body shapes and long-term relationships, Heafy picked up a Gibson when he was just 11 years old, and has had several signature models to date, with the most recent being his Origins, a guitar that appears to have been quietly discontinued by Epiphone.
I like to keep things longterm, but there was something that was just calling to me
Astute fans recently noticed a seismic shift in his guitar choices during his Twitch streams, with Heafy now seen mainly playing the Jackson Kelly, starting the rumor mill racing that he was parting ways with Gibson. He’s now confirmed that this is, in fact, true.
“I’ve loved my time with Gibson and Epiphone. I’ve been a Gibson player since I was 11-and-a-half years old, which is an insane amount of time,” he reflects. “I’m usually someone that sticks with very, very longterm things. Like Trivium, I’ve been in the band since I was 12-and-a-half years old. I like to keep things longterm, but there was something that was just calling to me,” he says. “It’s like, let’s see what’s going on. Let’s see what else is out there.”
Of course, Heafy has played other guitars in the past apart from Gibson and Epiphone, having a brief brush with Dean back in 2006, and he has used Aristides guitars extensively, too.
“I’ve obviously been a fan of a lot of brands. I think it’s important to try everything. When you’re a guitar player, it’s fun to love gear. It’s fun to be obsessed with gear. I think that’s one of the best parts of being a guitar player.”
Heafy candidly explains that part of the decision to work with Jackson stemmed from a desire to collaborate more closely with a company where he could help lead the charge.
“When it came down to Gibson, there are so many legends on Gibson. It’s not an ego thing, but I knew that I wanted to be somewhere where I could be one of the main guys on a roster – because that’s the way we are everywhere else,” he continues.
I got to say that the relic’d gold top Jackson Kelly USA Custom Shop is one of the best guitars I've ever played in my life
Among the fleet of Jackson guitars he has been testing, including his bandmate Corey Beaulieu's USA Custom Shop King V and a white Kelly, one instrument in particular has captured his heart.
“I got to say that the relic’d gold top Jackson Kelly USA Custom Shop is one of the best guitars I’ve ever played in my life,” he says.
“I’ve always loved the Kelly body. I loved it on Marty Friedman, and I’m a huge Jeff Loomis fan, too. Everyone knows how partial I am to the Explorer. Like, Hetfield’s the reason why I play guitar. But I was like, ‘Man, do the Kellys look even better than the Explorer to me now?’”
Moving over to Jackson has also been an eye-opening experiment for Heafy in more ways than one, as he found himself falling in love with a bridge setup he'd previously ditched.
“I swore off Floyd Roses a long time ago,” he admits. “I know I had a Floyd in my Dean [Razorback], but I just couldn’t stand them. But recently, I started noticing that it was actually easier to play on a Floyd Rose guitar than a non-Floyd Rose. I feel like I can dig in more, and I feel like I play even more like myself – for both leads and rhythm.”
For fans speculating on what a potential signature model might look like, Heafy hints that the aggressive, sharp lines of the Kelly shape are the leading contender, and he’s tempted to bring back the colorway of his previous Dean model.
“I have been playing with hypothetical color schemes in mind for future guitars, and one of the ones that I mocked up was actually an all-white guitar with all gold hardware – it looks pretty cool,” reveals Heafy.
One thing we can safely say is that whatever the Trivium frontman decides to put out, it will be budget-friendly.
“It’s very important for me to have my guitar at an affordable level. I’m hoping in that $1,200 to $1,600 price point, where anyone could buy it anywhere. I want to be able to spec something out just like I did with my Epiphone line. That was one of the best-selling Epiphones they’ve ever had, between my Origin and its predecessor.”
It’s very important for me to have my guitar at an affordable level
It’s also likely to feature Heafy’s brand-new Fishman pickups, slated for release very soon. This new version of his signature pickups, while not fully passive because they feature a 9V battery, is voiced to sound like a true passive pup.
For years, active pickups dominated modern metal rhythm tracks. However, while crafting Trivium’s new album, Crown in the Grave, Heafy and the band made a crucial discovery. They revisited passive electronics, tracking all the rhythm tracks with a custom Aristides loaded with a set of Bare Knuckle pickups.
“To me, with passives, it accentuates even more the sound of the hand of the player, whereas actives always have an active sound to it,” says Heafy. Working alongside Fishman engineer Ken Susi right inside Trivium’s Hangar, they custom-designed a new pickup set from the ground up to capture the tone of a passive humbucker.
“It is a true passive tone when you’re using voice one, but if someone’s like, ‘Oh man, I miss Matt’s active voice’, pull it up, and voice two is the active version of that passive. Then there’s a split coil for both. So there’s tons of tone options,” explains Heafy.
“They sound really wonderful. It’s not going to make someone sound like me. It’s going to make someone sound even more like themselves, which was my goal.”
On the upcoming album, Heafy reveals they kept things pretty simple in the amp department. The band plugged in a classic EVH 5150-III head paired with a Maxon OD9 overdrive pedal, and according to the frontman, it may be the best the band has sounded.
“Our new record’s guitar tone is my favorite guitar tone we've ever done,” Heafy declares. “It can go toe-to-toe with Ascendancy, with In Waves, with Shogun. Shogun was actually passive pickups, Ascendancy was passive pickups, and the new one's passive pickups.”
This new release is a massive milestone for the band, and marks the first with Alex ‘Rudi’ Rüdinger behind the kit. It’s fair to say the drummer was thrown straight into the deep end during his very first day.
“He showed up, prepared with the set. Then we said, ‘We’re not even going to run the set with you. We’re going to write new music with you. Welcome, this is your first day with us!’” Heafy laughs.
The resulting album is something Heafy finds himself repeatedly listening to anytime he gets the chance. “With Crown, I cannot stop listening to it. And I don’t know what that means. Again, it’s not an egotistical thing, but it’s that we wrote the kind of music we felt was missing for us as fans of metal.”
We didn't get credit for how technical the record actually is
Reflecting on Trivium's legacy brings up upcoming milestones, notably anniversaries surrounding their polarizing 2006 record, The Crusade, which turns 20 this year. After the astronomical, runaway success of 2005’s Ascendancy, the young band made a conscious, deliberate pivot, removing breakdowns and screaming in favor of clean thrash vocals and hyper-technical, progressive arrangements.
“We went from being the greatest band in the world that’s on all these magazine covers to that album being hailed as the worst record of all time,” Heafy remembers. “So that was a really strange time for us, for me, but it did teach me some things that Trivium doesn't work well in constraints.”
Decades later, the tide has dramatically turned. A younger generation of metal fans has embraced The Crusade, with guitar covers of Entrance to the Conflagration popping up on social media daily.
“It is nuts to see all these young players covering Entrance to the Conflagration, Detonation and Ignition, and all this stuff,” Heafy says with a smile. “It’s so cool that people finally get it.”
There are things Matt would change on the album if he could go back, admitting that he’d probably drop The World Can't Tear Us Apart, and that Contempt Breeds Contamination wasn’t really fully thought out and finished the way he would have liked, but he says,
“There are a lot of really fantastic songs where we nailed it. We didn’t get credit for how technical the record actually is, how sociopolitically and societally important the lyrics are.”
So with new gear dialed-in, a studio built, and Crown in the Grave ready to be released to the world, Trivium is gearing up for a massive global tour that'll take them from Australia to North America, Europe and the UK.
On pulling off the tones live, Heafy explains that even though they switched from amp modelers to tube amps for the Ascendancy anniversary tour last year, they’ve switched back to their trusty Fractal Axe-Fx, citing the extra production value and convenience.
“We’re back to using the Axe-Fx. I know a lot of bands don’t like it, and some fans are mixed on the idea of a band playing with click tracks, but I think that’s so important,” he explains.
“Yes, flex can happen live, but I feel like the band’s heartbeat needs to be the same heartbeat. I feel like that’s what we have. Now we can do it so our amps can change alongside the time code for the lights and the pyro, and everything can work together around this overall master heartbeat.”
- For more information on upcoming tour dates, head over to Trivium.org.
