Sunk LOTO - Big Guitars On Big Picture Lies

Australian Guitar Magazine - Volume 19

Hailing from the sunny Gold Coast, Sunk Loto's music is as dark as the melbourne winter. Try thinking of a cross between Rage against the machine and silverchair and you're into the right frame of mind. Still all in their teens, Sunk Loto's debut effort, Big Picture Lies is a huge lump of sound. Australian Guitar sat down with guitarist Luke McDonald and bass player Sean Van Gennip to talk about recording. Photos by John Stanton.

At the time of this interview Sunk Loto had just finished touring the country with A Perfect Circle, which on the surface sounded like it would have been a great experience. Which it was apart from one horrendous incident in which Luke's prized Paul Reed Smith guitar was stolen. The anguish is still evident on the young guitarist's face. . .

"That guitar was sooo good, it was a 10 out of 10... you know how they mark them on the back of the headstock. I didn't even have to plug it in to know it was great. As soon as I played it the feel was so good I bought it instantly.

His voice trails off as he reflects on the loss of what was obviously a much-loved instrument.

"The one I've got now is nowhere near as good as that one."

After a few seconds of silence in the room as everyone ponders this sad fact, bass player Sean tried to inject a note of positivism into the conversation,

"It still sounds good though. The pick ups are the new Dragon IIs - they sound mighty." Luke looked slightly cheerful at this, but only slightly.

"Yeah, I guess " He sighs.

Leaving the subject of stolen guitars, we move onto the recording process of Big Picture Lies. A process which by all accounts went swimmingly well, although not without a fair amount of commuting between the home base of Gold Coast and the big smoke of Sydney.

Luke: We went down to Sydney for a month and did it in two seperate studios - half at 301 and half at Q studios. The rooms there [at 301] were huge.

Sean: And the control rooms have a really great vibe as well.

Luke: We then went  home and listened to the whole thing and decided there were four songs we didn't want on the album. So we went back for a week and recorded two new songs before we went to America to mix everything for two weeks.

Did Paul McKercher produce this album [as well as the Society Anxiety EP]?

Luke: yeah he produces all our stuff. Even the demos when we go to Brisbane to record them, well send that stuff to him to get his opinion.

Did you spend much time writing and in pre production?

Luke: A bit. We spent quite a while going through old songs and twisting riffs around or thinking of completly new ways of playing the riffs. We messed around so we could come up with  the best ten or eleven songs we could.

Sean: Some songs are a year and a half old.

Luke: Others we wrote really quickly - a matter of four or five hours sometimes. Mainly cos we ran out of Time! There was a fair bit that was quite rushed. Being in the studio is where it all came together. After we put the basic song down, we'll put down heaps of stuff over the top. We also played lots of diffeent instruments. 301 has some boxes that are full with percussion instruments so we played as many of them as we could - mainly to get all different sounds into the mix. We even recorded him [pointing at Sean] regurgitating on a little dictaphone. We sampled it then looped it and put it on one of the songs. It's in the mid section of "Sunken Eyes". You can even hear our voices in the background going , "Go Sean!" As you can tell, we love experiementing!

I guess the same goes for your tuning?

Luke: Pretty Much, I use a CGCFAE tuning - we used to tune to that, but sharp , but we started hearing that some bands were using that tuning so we thought we'd try it. We just wanted something that was going to sound as heavy as possible. Also, if songs are starting to sound too happy we'll often throw in some minor chords to make them sound darker.

What sort of gear do you use?

Sean: Most of my sounds come from a Bass Synthesizer,   but I also use a Big Muff for most of the distorted sounds. Some of the time I went through a SansAmp pre-amp as well. As for the basses, I use Warwick basses - a frettless and a fortress.

Luke: I've used Seans bass Snyth a bit, sometimes I combine it with other pedals or keyboards or a whammy pedal to get different noises.   I used a mesa boogie power amp, a rocktron pre-amp, the new GForce TC effects unit,   and live I use a AKG wireless system. The guitars I used were PRS, a Fender Jazzmaster and a Gibson Les Paul. PRS are my favourite though.

Do you ever get reactions from people outside the band about songs that you don't expect?

Sean: Yeah, it's funny you should mention that. Our first single off this album, Blumpy, we never took seriously. We were mucking around on it even when we were recording it. We had no intention of putting it on the album it was more for ourselves. You know, just a demo. But Paul said 'no, lets get it down live and see what happens. You watch, Sony will love this song' Next thing we know, Sony wanted it to be the first single!

How did you do the Tom Morello style squeals in that?

Luke: Thats just using the pitch shifter going from note-to-note. I came up with that during the last week of recording, when we were all on each others asses to make sure that what each one of us were doing was sounding cool. I guess it worked!

The Spoils of Success

One of the perks in being in a high profile band is that guitar companys start to knock on your door asking you to endorse their product. Luke is one such lucky bugger, being the reciepient of a free Gibson SG, courtesy of Gibson's Australian distributor, who seems to be offering gibsons to all and sundry lately. Just before we went to print, we managed to grab Luke and suss him out about the endorsement. So how did this come about? Well, it all comes back to the theft of Lukes PRS.

"If I still had that guitar, I'd still being playing PRS", Luke declares. "It's just that the replacement one was such bad quality that I was looking for something else. All the hardware started stripping off. I used gaff tape to secure the guitar strap when I'm on stage, and the first time I did that, when I pulled it off at the end of the show that paint on the guitar came off with it. That just shouldnt happen. And then I looked at the headstock and the 'P' had fallen off the logo! And that was a guitar that was a week old. Also the pickup selecter knob started to buckle as well. The guitar was just a complete shambles." Fearing that he had simply recieved a one-off dud, Luke tried several more PRS before deciding that the quality simply just didnt match his original model. "I've got a good mate at the Brisbane Musician's Pro Shop who said he wanted to hook me up with Gibson. So I went down to the shop and he gave me an SG and an Epiphone - an accoustic."

What made you chose an SG? I love the shape of them and they are such phat guitars sound-wise! I can't remember what model the Epiphone is - just a fairly standard sort of thing. It's a semi-accoustic and has a sub-bass control on it, so you can have heaps of bass coming through. It sometimes feeds back a little, but its not too bad.

Do you think you'll alter it much? Yeah, I'l probably stuff around with the pick up configeration, but the guitar has such a raw, authentic sound as it is. I suppose over the years I'l soup it up as I go along though. You know, change the machine heads and the bridge - just little things.