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After what feels like no less than a decade of delays, the inaugural Full Tilt festival will make its debut in Brisbane on Saturday, April 23rd.
In the meantime, Australian Guitar is catching up with some of the legendary shredders set to tear it up at the show. In this edition, we chat to Scott Simpson of Alpha Wolf.
What can the legion of moshlords out there expect to see when you take the stage at Full Tilt? We’ll be playing a bunch of songs off our latest album a quiet place to die. While it isn’t exactly “new” anymore, it’ll be the first time getting to play them live outside of our home state since the pandemic so that’ll be really special for us.
You’re obviously sharing the Full Tilt lineup with some fucking killer acts. Who’s set are you personally most keen to see, and why? It’s never a bad time to be sharing the stage with our close friends in Justice For The Damned. We’ve been playing shows with those guys since we started out to rooms with no more than 15 people in them, so to be playing festival stages with them is huge. As well as Thy Art and Northlane, they’re always killer bands to catch live.
What does your live rig look like at the moment? What guitars are you shredding out on, and what are your pedalboard must-haves? My 2 mains at the moment are my ESP LTD 401B, and my ESP LTD M-7HT. Important features on both of these guitars is there baritone scale length, which with us playing in drop G is important. As well as that both have been retrofitted with an Evertune bridge and fishman pickups. Both crucial to the Alpha Wolf sound, the Evertune is something that we just cannot play live without, it is as important as the guitar itself to me.
As for pedals, we run Kempers live and use a lot of their on board stomp fx. I have 2 pitch shifting pedals on my board, at the moment the Digitech Whammy and the Electro-Harmonix Pitch Fork +. Apart from that I just have a few fun pedals that make lots of gross noise that I switch out all the time. As convenient as the kemper is, especially now as we midi patch change, it’s still important to me to have some fun live and get to use some pedals here and there.
What would you say is the cornerstone of your live sound? I’d say our whammy sections, nothing like a screeching whammy sound coming out of the speakers and watching peoples eyes go to your feet like “what is that guy doing?”. Apart from that, we play some heavy ass breakdowns and we pride ourselves on doing that as well as, if not better then on record.
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What makes your festival set a unique experience when compared to a standard venue set? In most cases there would be a lot more room on a festival stage, so it’s all about occupying the space and engaging with the crowd. We like to give an energetic live show, so the more room you give us the more we’re going to run around and have some fun, and hopefully the people in the crowd see that and give us the same energy back. In saying that we’ve literally never played a proper festival stage in Aus, so let’s see how it goes!
What are your festival essentials, and why should everybody have them? Portable battery and lots of water. The rest will figure itself out, long days on your feet gotta keep hydrated!
What’s your favourite festival memory of all time? Soundwave 2012, or for that matter any of the Soundwave’s around that era. As a fresh 18 year old that time of the year was something so special and unique for me, it was like a second Christmas to heavy music fans. Walking into the gates there was this crazy energy that got you so excited to see live music, and those shows were PACKED with people. Being in my first bands at that age as well made me think it would be so cool to get to play a festival like that one day. So to think Full Tilt could be that for new age music fans, that are just going to their first festival is pretty crazy.
Ellie Robinson is an Australian writer, editor and dog enthusiast with a keen ear for pop-rock and a keen tongue for actual Pop Rocks. Her bylines include music rag staples like NME, BLUNT, Mixdown and, of course, Australian Guitar (where she also serves as Editor-at-Large), but also less expected fare like TV Soap and Snowboarding Australia. Her go-to guitar is a Fender Player Tele, which, controversially, she only picked up after she'd joined the team at Australian Guitar. Before then, Ellie was a keyboardist – thankfully, the AG crew helped her see the light…
