The Tone Mob Podcast

My buddy Philip Carter from the 40 Watt Podcast is back, and this one started the way a lot of our conversations do... We were talking about guitars before hitting record and eventually realized we should probably be recording this nonsense. It all starts with a surprisingly complicated question: What actually makes a guitar vintage? Is it age? Rarity? Desirability? Or have we all just gotten old...

Shelby Pollard of Black Bobbin is back on the show, and apparently we had some things to work through. This conversation starts with burnout, work/life balance, phone addiction, and the strange exhaustion that comes from being constantly connected. From there, Blake and Shelby wander into the attention economy, social media’s ability to make everyone else’s life look suspiciously perfect, and why...

Zoe’s path into guitar building is a pretty fascinating one. She grew up surrounded by artists, started out as a drummer, dove deep into piano and composition, and at one point thought she might pursue film scoring. Eventually, though, she realized she missed actually making physical things with her hands. A random guitar-building job listing sent her down the rabbit hole, which eventually led to...

My buddy Jason Verlinde of The Fretboard Journal is back on the show, and this time we’re fresh off the Fretboard Summit in Chicago. I finally made it to the Summit this year, so Jason and I dig into what actually goes into putting on an event like this, why it feels so different from a traditional guitar show, and how they’ve managed to create something that feels less like a convention and more...

On this episode of The Tone Mob Podcast, I’m hanging out with Jeff Leavitt of Tone Ranger Guitars and Ben Matin of RestoWraps, two guys who have gone impressively deep into the worlds of guitar building, vintage gear restoration, and keeping perfectly good stuff out of the landfill. Jeff builds Western-inspired guitars using locally sourced urban lumber from Los Angeles, turning trees that might o...

Liz Kamlet, better known online as Liz The Music Manager, has spent most of her life somewhere behind the curtain of the music business. She started shooting tour photography as a teenager, worked around artists like James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Kenny Loggins, somehow became the person Guitar Center called when a famous musician wanted to buy a vintage guitar, and eventually found herself mana...

What if, instead of asking a musician to adapt to their guitar, you built the guitar to adapt to the musician? On this episode of The Tone Mob Podcast, I’m hanging out with Renee and Tristan from NVision Guitars, a mother-and-son team building some seriously cool instruments with an even cooler purpose behind them. NVision makes handcrafted guitars for players who may face physical or visual barri...

It has been way too long since Dylan McKerchie of Dylan Talks Tone has been on the show, and quite a bit has changed since our last conversation. Dylan has a home base, his daughter is working full time winding pickups with him, the business is cranking, and somehow he is producing an absolutely unreasonable amount of guitar content every week. We get into what happens when the thing you love also...

This week I’m hanging out with Randy King of King Electric Guitars, and what starts as a conversation about old cars takes approximately four minutes to wander off the road and into something much bigger. Randy has been obsessed with making things for most of his life. He bought his first car at ten years old, spent his youth tearing into old hot rods, served in the Air Force, played music, and ev...

Scott Mellinger of Zao returns to The Tone Mob for a long-overdue hang, and apparently age comes for us all in different ways. Some people take up golf. Zao seems to be getting slower, heavier, and sludgier. Scott digs into Pillars, Zao’s new collection paying tribute to the overlooked bands from their local scene that helped create the blueprint for what they eventually became. That leads into th...

This week on The Tone Mob, Blake sits down with Frank Gross, founder of Thunder Road Guitars Seattle, for a conversation about music, retail, risk, reinvention, and the strange magic of simply refusing to disappear. Frank tells the story of leaving the band life behind, moving back to Seattle, and slowly turning Craigslist flips, pawn shop finds, and a tiny workspace into one of the most respected...

Trevor Boone basically grew up inside a guitar shop. His dad started Emerald City Guitars in Seattle back in the mid-90s with a shoestring business plan, a small loan, and a whole lot of secondhand guitar-store dream dust. Trevor was the kid at the counter, surrounded by musicians, weird old guitars, shop talk, and the kind of musical obsession that tends to permanently rewire a person. In this ep...

Yvette Young is back on the podcast, which means we are legally required to talk about beautiful guitar parts, creative chaos, and the strange little circus act of trying to be a functioning artist in the modern world. This time around, Yvette digs into her work on the new Superman soundtrack, including what it was like getting mysterious NDA phone calls, turning around guitar cues on tight deadli...

Buddy Blues joins The Tone Mob for a long-overdue conversation about guitar, YouTube, blues, pedals, and the strange little internet ecosystem where all of those things collide. Buddy shares his story, from growing up in Beirut playing classical piano, discovering electric guitar through blues and Pink Floyd, moving to Florida as a teenager, gigging heavily, touring with John Mayall, and eventuall...

Jesse Honig of 29 Pedals finally joins The Tone Mob, and we are digging all the way into the beautifully nerdy machinery of his story. Before launching 29 Pedals, Jesse spent years inside studios, tape machines, consoles, repair benches, and the general glowing underworld of professional audio. He worked as a roadie as a teenager, became a studio assistant in Philadelphia, built a life as a sessio...

Ron Jackson has one of those jobs that sounds suspiciously like something a music nerd invented while staring at the ceiling. As the host and producer of Musora’s Covers On The Spot, Ron brings bands into the studio, hands them an iconic song from somewhere outside their natural habitat, and gives them only a few hours to rebuild it in their own image. The results have included Emily Wolfe draggin...

Sal Mignano has never been particularly interested in making the bass behave itself. As a founding member of The Sleeping and one-third of the thunderous new project Held, Sal writes riffs from the bottom up, stacks distortion pedals into increasingly hostile little ecosystems, and believes the bass should do considerably more than quietly hold everyone’s coat. Sal joins Blake to tell the wonderfu...

Barton McGuire doesn’t believe a guitar pedal should politely prevent you from making a bad sound. Where’s the adventure in that? In this episode, Blake sits down with the founder of Cosmodio Instruments to talk about accidental self-oscillation, homemade noise contraptions, imposter syndrome, and the long road from stuffing circuits into RadioShack boxes to running a growing pedal company. Barton...

Will York of Thunder Road Guitars PDX joins us to tell the real story behind one of the West Coast's favorite guitar shops. Before Thunder Road Portland became a destination for vintage guitar weirdos, touring players, local lifers, and anyone who enjoys staring at old offsets under flattering lighting, Will was a Gainesville, Florida kid chasing music any way he could. That road eventually led hi...

This week on The Tone Mob Podcast, Blake hangs with Shea Sterner of thisheavyearth, a Portland-based builder making heavy pedals, brutal solid-state amps, and gear that looks like it crawled directly out of a fantasy-metal record sleeve. Shea shares his path from punk and metal scenes in Pennsylvania, to recording experiments in Texas, to learning repairs and circuit design in Salt Lake City, and...

Douglas Robinson is best known as the voice of The Sleeping, but with his new project Held, he’s stepping into a whole new role: guitar player, riff writer, and newly minted Gibson SG obsessive. On this episode of The Tone Mob Podcast, Doug joins Blake to talk about Held’s new record Grey, rediscovering the guitar after years of primarily being a vocalist, and the strange joy of realizing people a...

Mark Morton joins the show today, and we somehow manage to talk about the gravitational pull of the electric guitar, the operational realities of a world-class metal band, parenting, vintage Gibsons, noise gates, and New York pizza without anyone needing a liability waiver. Mark gets into the early magic of the guitar, back when the instrument didn’t just look cool, it felt like a secret door. A w...

Joey Bradford of The Used is back on The Tone Mob, and this one wanders through the good stuff: touring, dad life, studio rabbit holes, guitar rigs, loud amps, weird pedals, and the eternal human illness known as “maybe I need one more piece of gear.” Blake and Joey talk about what it’s like to spend a massive chunk of the year on the road, then come home and try to be a normal dad like you didn’t...

Ryan “Fluff” Bruce is back, and this time it’s less about chasing tones and more about chasing sanity. After more than a decade in the YouTube trenches, Fluff joins Blake to talk about what happens when the thing you built starts to feel like a treadmill set to “forever.” Social media burnout, algorithm roulette, and the strange reality of being “internet famous” without it always translating to r...

This week I'm serving up something a bit different! There is another podcast I do called Tape Spaghetti with my good buddy Scott Marquart. On that podcast, we explore strange musical stories, and I'm giving you a sample of it here. Let's get into it! OG show notes: You already know the chorus. In fact, you've probably scream-sung it at a bar. But, what do you know about the band behind Tubthumping...