When I was growing up, guitar was always around. My mom taught music in several schools, my uncle played in all kinds of bands, and my grandfather played 7-string jazz guitar, which was a huge influence on me later on. He had several modified Yamaha, Ibanez, and Eastwood models lying around. In all my favorite pictures of him he’s got an old Gibson ES-335, rocking out with a band at some club in Long Beach. Sometimes, those pictures are hard to look at. Not just because I miss him, but because he has the same smile on his face that I used to get when playing shows with Childspeak, Thom Simon, and Muscle Beach Petting Zoo.
But when I started making the video below, I remembered something else – he always had a ton of amps, and sometimes when he picked up a weird one from swap-meets, he would let me and my brother use it to practice. The amp, for a lot of people, is sort of a set and forget thing: they perceive the control to be in their hands and at their feet, and of course a lot of it is. So when I fired up the Mixwave Yvette Young Rig, I was overrun with emotions I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Memories came flooding back of playing old Vox and Epiphone combos as a child. I remembered how my brother and I discovered tubes and reverb tanks, how we would go through our grandfather’s pedal collection, how we eventually started collecting our own and would beg our parents for new gear every Christmas.
So why the hell am I talking about all of this? Because this plugin didn’t just have me thinking “oh yeah, this sounds like an AC30, now I can play math rock or sound like George Harrison and The Edge.” It bypassed influence and pre-existing ideas entirely. To put it bluntly, the Yvette Young Rig got me back in touch with my creative inner child, which now that I think about, is an idea I’ve been running from ever since the pandemic.
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The last few weeks have been like reuniting with a childhood bandmate I didn’t even know I had. I feel like I’m writing from this place of just enjoying the sound in front of me and letting inspiration dictate whatever parameters I change, instead of ‘searching’ for an inspiring tone. I can’t overstate the value of that.
Overall, this suite has the exact same qualities I fell in love with as a teen that spent hours a day practicing, when the only two things I needed in life were a Vox Dynamic Looper and my trusty Valvetronix practice amp. Also, the YY Rig does everything they did better, with TONS more flexibility and a lot less maintenance / replacement headaches. There’s tons of videos out there already on dialing in tones, the technical specs, and the various ins and outs of this glorious plugin, but I struggled to make one like that. In the same way the plugin had me playing from somewhere deeper than expected, I figured why not try to do that justice and just go with your gut.
I say it in the end of the video, but math rockers, I can’t wait for you all to try this thing and urge you to do so if you haven’t already. We listen to a lot of what you do and we’ve faced many of the same tonal challenges over the years, and when you think about it there’s an essentially limitless list of solutions if you’re just trying to improve your guitar tone. But this plugin’s ability to inspire authentically is what separates it from the pack. Maybe that’s the best way to summarize the plugins strengths in a single sentence – the Mixwave Yvette Young rig isn’t going to make you sound like someone else, it’s going to help you sound like an even better you.
(Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more music, check out our Bandcamp compilations here. If you like us, or possibly even love us, donations are always appreciated at the Buy Me A Coffee page here as well. Don’t let the bastards get you down!)