“It’s a five-string guitar, since I don’t use a high E string. That came from when I broke a tuning peg”: Pat Beers honed a one-handed, five-string guitar technique so he can cause more onstage chaos with The Schizophonics

The San Diego-based Schizophonics are one of those bands that, once seen, are never forgotten.

Singer/guitarist Pat Beers literally throws himself into every performance, careering around the stage, combining elements of James Brown, Wayne Kramer and Iggy Pop. To the uninitiated, it often looks like Beers isn’t even playing the guitar a lot of the time, as a huge part of his technique relies on the use of left-hand slurs and hammer-ons.

“We’ve done tours where we’ve opened for bigger bands, and audiences who don’t know us would be messaging that they couldn’t believe we’d have the audacity to use backing tapes,” Beers says.

It’s clear from listening to Beers that Jimi Hendrix must have been an influence somewhere down the line. “I had a cassette of Are You Experienced, and that was huge for me,” he says.

“Jimi’s still my favorite guitarist. His playing completely floored me. My left hand does a lot of work live, and I think that’s where you can see the Hendrix influence – in the big bends and hammer-ons. A few years later I really got into the Stooges and the MC5 – their songwriting, their riffs and the fact that they were great performers.”

Beers’ choice of guitar is as unconventional as his approach to playing. “I have a custom-made model by Bonser [Instruments] in San Diego,” he says.

“It’s really a Strat in disguise; it has a Strat neck with jumbo frets and hot pickups by Seymour Duncan. It’s a five-string guitar, since I don’t use a high E string. That came from when I broke a tuning peg, and I decided to devote a year to really working on a more linear left-hand approach.

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“I just like the sound of a fatter B string – played higher up the neck – than a normal thin E string. I plug into a Vox AC30 and a Boss Blues Driver, which I leave on all the time with a fairly low level of distortion. For the solos, I kick on a Roger Mayer Axis Fuzz.”

Given Beers’ frenetic live approach, he admits to finding it difficult to rein things in when in the studio. “I notice when I try to play ‘normal,’ I can’t get the same kind of weird bends and feel that I get when playing live, so I try to reproduce that approach in the studio, although I’m obviously pretty limited in how much I can jump around.” 

According to Beers, his wife Lety, who plays drums in the band, is unfazed by the prospect of him doing a serious injury to himself. “I think she’s so used to it by now, that if anything happened, she’d just give me a look.” [Laughs]

The Schizophonics plan to go into the studio in the near-future to begin work on their fourth album, having already tested out a number of songs live. “Who knows if they’ll make it to the album, but I always like to put new songs into the show. I like the idea of having some songs that don’t appear on a record.”

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