KEVIN BIVONA SHARES WHAT HE LEARNED FROM SUBLIME — AND THE SECRET TO HIS SKA-CORE TONE
By Jim Beaugez
AFTER SPENDING HIS youth recording friends’ bands, and then a decade working in the studio and on stage with Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, Kevin Bivona of SoCal ska punks the Interrupters knows the recipe for the perfect ska guitar tone.
“I’m a big fan of the bridge pickup,” he says, “but the thing is, if you’re on a clean tone on a bridge pickup, it doesn’t have a lot of body.” To balance, he runs his main guitar, a Fender Telecaster, through a Fender Blues Deluxe with the drive set at 4. “That way it’s got some body coming from the gain, but it still has this bright top. It doesn’t break up too much.”
Bivona landed on his skankin’ good tone by experimenting with gain stages on his guitars and amps before he could get pedals to do the heavy lifting. It’s still the core of his sound — with some added reverb and delay here and there — and he used it all over the latest release by the Interrupters, In the Wild.
Loaded with bouncy ska-driven songs like “In the Mirror” and pop-punk singalongs like the leadoff “Anything Was Better,” In the Wild captures the band at the height of their powers. Their penchant for earworm hooks is a product of Bivona cutting his teeth on the Beatles and the Beach Boys, but for guitar tips he studied how Roddy Radiation of secon
