The world’s leading manufacturer of guitar strings and accessories is going behind the scenes with their most innovative and influential artist ambassadors as part of the new artist session series, Big Sound. The program continues today (Oct. 4) with a three-song performance from veteran California rock band Thrice.
In this raw and distinct series, each session is recorded in captivating spaces that are personal and unique to each band, and captured through premium audio and an up-close, cinematic eye. There are no gimmicks or filters here. Instead, Big Sound is solely focused on capturing the music.
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For Thrice’s session, the group chose “Summer Set Fire to the Rain” from the 2021 album Horizons / East, “Silhouette” from the 2003 classic The Artist and the Ambulance and a cover of the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” from Abbey Road. “We’ve covered a few Beatles songs in our day. We all grew up listening to them, and aside from their musical prowess in general, we’ve also always appreciated their courage to continue evolving and pushing themselves,” frontman Dustin Kensrue says. “We chose this specific song because it’s got a lot of groove, and a lot of heaviness, and we are fans of both.”
Despite being more than 20 years old, “Silhouette” is “constantly in the live rotation, and it’s probably the song from that record that most sounds like it’s still a song we would write currently,” Kensrue offers, adding that “Summer Set Fire to the Rain” has “a cool energy to it and encompasses a lot of different feels in a short period. It’s been one of our favorites from that record to play live.”
This Big Sound session benefits from having been recorded on Thrice’s home turf at their own New Grass studio. “It’s been really great to finally have somewhere where we can practice, record and store our gear all at the same place,” Kensrue says. “We should have made the investment a long time ago.” The three-song set also showcases the guitar work of Teppei Teranishi, who makes his own instruments and formed Thrice with Kensrue in the late 1990s when they were still in high school.
“I change certain things around to shape the tone to best suit each song, but I try to make my guitars and basic setup versatile enough to be able to span the breadth of tones I need without having to switch instruments or setups,” Teranishi says. “I’ll clean things up using a volume pedal, add extra juice when I need it with an overdrive pedal and color the tone using reverb and delay. I intentionally place my pickup selector on my builds where I can switch pickups on the fly without breaking stride as much as I can, as I do a lot of switching in the middle of songs.”
Asked how Thrice approaches structuring their shows after 25-plus years in the game, Kensrue admits “building set lists is quite a task when you have close to 140 original songs in your catalog, and a bunch of different tunings on top of that. We try to include a song or two from most of the records and a mix of songs that it seems are crowd favorites, while also trying to keep things fresh. It’s a lot. As far as playing the songs live, we usually don’t think too much about it and try to let the songs breathe and shift in a natural way.”
Thrice will begin a North American tour with Manchester Orchestra on Nov. 7 in Seattle — a full-circle moment in that they originally recorded “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” on a split single with Manchester Orchestra back in 2013. “While the sound of music we write is always shifting and evolving, I think our underlying approach has always been the same,” Kensrue says. “We want to write music that is interesting, fun and challenging for us, and not worry about what people will think about it.”
Ernie Ball was created in 1962 by the eponymous musician and guitar teacher, and has since become the brand of choice for countless industry legends such as Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Angus Young and Metallica. Their instrument accessories are available in more than 6,000 stores in the United States.
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