Samantha Fish is at the top of her game – and, as the blues guitarist herself admits, there are a couple of tone tricks, or “cheats”, up her sleeve that she's learned after logging thousands upon thousands of miles on the road.
“If I'm being honest, I do fiddle a lot with the [tone] knobs, but I try to limit it. I generally play with them open, just wide open, but if it's still not sounding right, then I'll tweak it a little bit,” she tells Guitarist.
“So I do play with tone controls here and there, but I generally try to rely on pickups, volume switches, and then pedals, [because they] are easier to hit with your foot while you're trying to play guitar.”
As for her use of the volume pedal, she adds a disclaimer, “Look, I'm probably gonna get 150 guitarists telling me how I'm doing this wrong, but this is just what works for me, and it's a hot mess, but it's been working for a long time.
“So I generally go into my volume pedal first, and I use that – I kind of cheat – [for] volume swells.” Fish then goes to explain that she leverages her volume pedal to try to emulate the quintessential pedal steel sound.
“I'll do that in solos – and I see a lot of guitar players do that with their volume control. But it's kind of far away from me on this guitar [her Gibson SG]; [and] most guitars. So I haven't found a comfortable way to do that and pull it off effortlessly, so that's a good way to cheat it.”
Last year, Fish released her latest album, Paper Doll, which was recorded on the road. At the time of its release, she revealed to Guitar World that North Hill Country Delta blues in particular served as a bottomless well of inspiration for the album.
