The Tone Mob Podcast

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...

What do you get when you mix a family legacy, a near business collapse, and a piece of gear most people treat like an afterthought? Something that refuses to disappear. This week, I’m talking with Danny Songhurst, the man behind The Rock Slide, a company that didn’t just survive but quietly carved out its own lane in the guitar world. We get into how a simple idea, fixing the sloppy feel of tradit...

In this episode, Dan Tremonti shares the full story behind FRET12, from its early days creating The Sound and the Story to building a full-blown music culture brand rooted in community, storytelling, and craftsmanship. Along the way, he breaks down how working with artists evolved into building a loyal fanbase, launching original products, and eventually opening a one-of-a-kind retail space inside...

Jordan Buckley is back for Part 2, and this time the conversation heads somewhere unexpectedly hopeful. After years of noise, pressure, and carrying things that don’t travel light, Jordan talks about what it actually feels like to start setting some of that down. The recent Better Lovers shift becomes less about endings and more about perspective. About realizing not everything is meant to last fo...

Jordan Buckley is back for round two, and what starts as a classic Tone Mob conversation slowly reveals a little more weight under the hood. In this episode, Blake catches up with Jordan about life in Better Lovers, finally taking guitar more seriously, learning from the absurd level of talent around him, and why picking the instrument back up with fresh eyes has changed everything. They also wand...

This week, we’re digging way, way back into the vault for a proper Tone Mob reissue. While I was in Nashville helping move the Stringjoy shop, I needed something special for this week’s episode and decided it was finally time to revisit one of the oldest artifacts in the archive: episode two. Yep, the second episode ever. In this early conversation, I’m joined by my good buddy Chris Benson of Bens...

This week on The Tone Mob Podcast, Blake hangs out with Colt Westbrook of Walrus Audio for a conversation that wanders through guitar pedals, business experiments, digital rigs, tube amps, customer service philosophy, and the delicate art of telling your friends they can’t just show up at the factory and hang out all day. Colt walks through how Walrus has evolved over the years, from the early day...

Steve Sladkowski of PUP joins Blake for a conversation about the strange business of building a life out of noise. This one wanders into the good stuff. The human stuff. The part nobody puts on the laminate. Imposter syndrome. Burnout. Getting older. Learning that rest is not the same thing as quitting, even if your brain, like an underqualified middle manager, keeps sending panic memos in all cap...

RJM’s Ron Menelli: The MIDI Wizard Behind the Pros’ Pedalboards Description Ron Menelli from RJM Music joins Blake Wyland to tell the long, nerdy, wildly practical story behind one of the most essential “behind the curtain” brands in modern guitar rigs. Ron walks through his early days building circuits from Radio Shack notebooks, studying electrical engineering and computer science, and eventuall...

Kris Crummett is on the show, and this one rips. Kris has been in music for basically his entire life and has worked on records by Issues, Sleeping With Sirens, Dance Gavin Dance, Alesana, Jonny Craig, Emarosa, Night Verses, and a whole lot more! If you’ve ever wondered why one record punches you in the chest and another one sounds like it got sat on, Kris explains exactly why. We go deep on his p...

Ian Martin Allison is back, and this episode is a full-on gear-nerd thunderstorm with actual life lessons hiding in the lightning. Blake and Ian go deep on signature basses, the Walrus Mantle DI drama, and the eternal internet question: “Why is this thing expensive if it only has a few knobs?” Turns out, transformers cost money. Craft costs money. Not cutting corners costs money. And sometimes the...

Episode 500, baby. And we brought in Henri Cash (Starcrawler, Plague Vendor, Cash & Skye) to celebrate the only way this show knows how: by diving headfirst into glorious guitar chaos. This episode has everything. Vintage amp obsession. Touring war stories. Studio nerdery. Gretsch evangelism. Voltage drama. Tape machine romance. Mild existential crises about digital modelers. It is a full buffet o...

Steve Rowe from 60 Cycle Hum returns to the show after an eight-year gap, and we immediately time-travel back to the era of wired earbuds, headphone jacks, and recording next to a wall outlet like it’s a survival game. From there, it’s a full spiral through the modern guitar media landscape: audio vs video, why interviews work when “can I talk to you for an hour?” absolutely shouldn’t, and how NAM...

My dude Jason Mays is back, and we get into the real stuff on this one! We talk about wearing 12 different hats (PlayJason, Working Class Music, writing gigs, Orange, a band, and whatever else gets stapled to his name this week), and what happens when “hustle” turns into straight-up burnout. Jason breaks down the behind-the-scenes evolution of Working Class Music, why he started PlayJason as a cre...

Here’s a vintage reissue that refuses to stay buried. This throwback episode with Yvette Young started life as a Patreon bonus… until enough people yelled “this is too good to keep secret” and it hit the main feed, where it promptly became one of the most-listened-to episodes of the whole show. So if you’re new around here, congrats: you just found a greatest hit. If you’ve heard it before, it’s a...