Some background on myself. My name is Rory Mohon and Iām a gear and music addict. I wasnāt always this way. It all started out innocently enough when I asked my mother for a guitar before the start of my freshmen year of high school. I had just moved back to Wisconsin from Mississippi and knew that I would need a hobby to get into for the upcoming winter months. Much to my surprise, she said yes. I was surprised because my Dad has been a musician his whole life and his path has been filled with struggles and also because we never spent much money on anything besides groceries. My wonderfully supportive Mother took me to a guitar shop that very day and I got the Squier starter pack that laid the bedrock for many musiciansā careers. It was $120 for a black Strat, a cable and a Fender Frontman. I was over the moon.
I wasnāt very good at first, nor was I very good after six months, but boy did I love playing guitar. I practiced six hours everyday. Iād get home from school and play until I had to go to bed. I actually kept this practice up for the first six years. A couple of years in and my Dad got me a Roland Blues Cube. It was a 2X12 and heavy as sin but it was certainly an upgrade from my previous amp. This led me to wanting more things. I realized the difference a new amp could make but what about pedals? I didnāt have a pedal to my name and hadnāt thought of it before. The first pedal I saved for was an Ibanez Soundtank. It was a distortion pedal that was recently named one of the worst line of guitar pedals ever made. Iād have to agree with that. I later saved up for a Danelectro flanger. Why? I have no idea, maybe because I could afford it. Iāve not used a flanger pedal since. I made strange noises in my bedroom every day for hours (get your mind out of the gutter) and my poor Mother never complained once even though I know now that I was making noise and nothing that resembled music. I was happy.
By the time I was 16 I started playing in high school bands. Weād form and practice for a month or two, play a show and disband like emotional high schoolers do. Lather, rinse and repeat. When I was 19 I started playing in more serious bands and I was splitting my time between guitar and bass. At some point I fell in love with the low end and sold everything guitar-related that I owned to buy nicer bass gear. I played in metal bands for quite a few years which taught me much about music. It taught me harmonies, practicing to a click, paying attention to the picking hand, carving out frequencies to cut through a mix instead of turning up the volume, and many other things that Iām still mindful of to this day.
By the time I was 26 I was getting burnt on playing exclusively loud, heavy music and bass. I loved bass but I started to lose the ability to write a song that wasnāt metal and above 175 bpm, so I decided to sell everything again and get back into the world of guitar.
I hadnāt been doing any research on amps, guitars or pedals so I blindly entered back into the world of guitar after six years as a bassist. I bought a Fender Hot Rod Deville. Theyāre heavy amps but I was used to a 6X10 Ampeg cab so it was lightweight in comparison. I, for some reason, cannot remember the first electric I bought with that money but I do remember my Dad, once again, gifting me a guitar. It was a Brownsville Choir Boy. It was a cheap guitar but it played well and had unique pickups that sounded wonderful. It was also hollow-body so I could crank my amp and play around with feedback which is fun when you have neighbors that somehow put up with your shit. I played this setup for a year as I was happy to just have a clean tone drenched in reverb. I desired nothing for awhile until I moved two blocks down from a great used music store in Portland, OR. called Trade Up Music. This was my undoing. Iād walk over there during the extremely long and drizzly months just to get out of the house and too often Iād walk out of the store with a new pedal or toy of sorts. The problem was, the good problem, was that everything was priced cheap. You could pick up a Boss DD-7 for $60, which I did. I donāt know if I remember seeing a pedal for more than $120 which nowadays seems next to impossible. My pedal chain slowly grew and my desires for new tones grew with it. One day I got fed up with the stock speakers in the Deville and decided I hated the amp altogether. I traded it in and walked out with a Mesa Stiletto Ace Head and a 4X12 Orange amp. I actually named my price on this because both these items came in the door as I was shopping around and offered $700 for the two before the store had even priced them. Iām sure they had a relative idea of the value of these two items but keep in mind, this was when Ebay was the only way to price the value of used gear and that was if you could find the exact item on it.
This combo was great because it was loud, which was still something that I thought of as being most important in your sound, but in all honesty the Mesa head sounded muddy and like dog shit. It seemed that every time I jammed with other guitar players, I always had the muddiest sound. This was the first and last time I let a name brand hold power over what my ears told me. I would always trust that if it sounded good then it was good. Who cares about the name brand or price tag, if it sounds bad it is.
About two years later I impulsively sold everything and bought an acoustic guitar and with the extra money I moved to Maui with Lisa (Copperfoxās vocalist) to get away from it all, become a better songwriter and to soak up some sun, seriously there is no sun in Portland. I struggled greatly playing songs at a slow tempo and articulating each strum with a gentle attack. I was still used to playing hard and fast. I had to undo a lot of what I learned, not because it was bad practice but some of it just doesnāt apply to acoustic guitar. I couldnāt write a song to save my life for about two months. Everything I wrote felt very uninspired and I was wondering if my days as a guitarist were over. After days of playing like I used to, 6 hours or more a day, I finally wrote my first passable song. It was pretty and filled me with a purpose again. It also opened up the floodgates to many more songs.
The first song I wrote was Lovers which appeared on our first Copperfox EP made with Rian Lewis as producer and multi-instrumentalist. In the same time span I wrote James off of that same EP and it remains as our most popular song amongst fans. I practiced these songs constantly as my technique was changing and I was sloppier than Iād liked to be. Because of this practicing for hours, Lisa would start to mindlessly hum over the tunes and it was beautiful. It was leagues better than my voice which I was reluctantly preparing to sing over these tunes. For months I begged Lisa to start a band with me as I felt what I was doing was nothing without her vocals. One drunken day when we had moved back to the mainland, Lisa recorded the vocals to Lovers in her fatherās studio by herself. She sent it to me, apologizing that it wasnāt very good, and the song punched me in the chest. I realized what I had been shooting for when making these demos and my purpose as a guitar player once again became clear.
I bought a better acoustic, a Guild, a better electric guitar, a G&L Tele, and I obsessed over the sounds of pedal steel. I wanted to make a spooky alt-country album with pedal steel adding the eerie ambience. One weekend in summer we did just that and with every record you make, you learn. I learned that some of the gear I had was sub-par for recording purposes. I canāt remember the amp I had at the time because I didnāt use it on the recording and quickly sold it. We ended up using a Fender Blues Jr. This was the first time I broke the spell that louder was better. This tiny and light amp sounded great in the room and recorded even better. The spring reverb was great and it could actually turn up loud enough to play with a full band. I knew I needed something like this. As an apartment dweller, having a 4X10 cab took up too much room but a Blues Jr. could fit in the closet. Seeing as how I never want to do what everyone else is doing I decided to find something similar in sound but I wanted something unique. This led me to years of researching guitar amps, tubes, watts, speakers, etc. and what it all means. I detail this in another post so I wonāt get into it now.
From this point on I believe that my guitar tone has been superb even when I change up gear, in fact, Iām told this often when playing out. I finally have the guitar tone Iād been subconsciously searching for since I started. Whatās so amazing about finding this fabled dream-land is that you feel that your instrument is speaking directly for your voice and nothing is lost in translation. Itās a spiritual feeling. Sometimes just turning on your amp and striking but one chord can feel relaxing and de-stressing. My guitar practice keeps me grounded and also elevates me. Iām connected to life because of it because without it, nothing seems very exciting. This is how I communicate to the world. This is how I feel the world is in communication through me. What I hope to detail in this blog is my constant journey through music and learning. Mistakes are fine because you will always learn from them if youāre open. If you keep learning you are successful. Life is changing and so too can your quest for gear and what you seek to express yourself.
