Your tone starts with your fingers and your guitar. Think about all differences that tonewood choices and pickups make to how a guitar sounds.
Now ask yourself: If you had to make a choice, would you choose a cheap guitar with an expensive amp, or an expensive guitar with a cheap amp?
For Yvette Young, the math-rock guitarist for Covet, the answer is clear. As she tells Guitarist, she sees “no point” playing a high-end instrument if the amp it goes through isn’t cut out for the job.
“It’s like ruining a really nice audio file with… I don’t know… something that’s going to degrade it a lot,” she says. “There’s no point, right? I’d rather go for the expensive amp.
Besides, she adds, "‘Cheap guitar’ doesn’t mean bad guitar. I have plenty of guitars that are cheap, but I feel like they still sound really impressive for the price point.”
Young's own setup includes a boutique Silktone amp and her P90-loaded Ibanez Talman. The electric guitar is set to get a new Ibanez signature release, which will mark her third guitar with the Japanese luthier.
“I usually play [Vox] AC30s, but I kind of love how I can get something out of the Silktone without losing definition and clarity,” she says.
“It’s so balanced. [Silktone owner] Charles Henry is the best — I’ll hype him forever; he’s an outstanding person. Those amps really sound so smooth, and I feel like they make me play better.”
As for how she recommends players choose a guitar, Young has a few tips.
“You need to make sure you try the guitar in your own rig,” she says. “Sometimes, if you’re playing out of another amp, it might be brighter than you’re used to. Try to simulate the environment that you’re going to be using the guitar in as accurately as you can.”
Young recently celebrated the release of her first soundscape-conjuring signature stompbox, the Walrus Audio Qi Etherealizer, a feature-packed modulation pedal. The guitarist, who helped design the effect over an exhaustive two-year period, tells Guitar World that she wants it to be a stompbox that sparks new ideas.
“I used to be an art teacher, so the way I talk about music is very visual,” Young explains. “The hardest part in creating, I think, is starting. We have a lot of anxiety; we put a lot of emphasis on how that first mark has to be perfect, but I know with painting that, once I have a big wash of color, that anxiety disappears because I took away that sterile white canvas.
“So for the Qi Ethereal, I wanted it to be an ambient machine and an idea generator, and I wanted you to be able to play guitar with yourself and sound really full. And hopefully make your guitar not sound very much like a guitar!”
The pedal represents the latest addition to the peculiar tone-shaping tools on Young's pedalboard. They include a DigitTech Whammy Ricochet and a Hologram Electronics Microcosm, which is a looper, granular sampler, delay, reverb, pitch modulator, and filter all in one. She says that the Swiss Army pedal is “absolutely essential for me”.
Beyond that, her setup includes two EarthQuaker Devices pedals — the Warden optical compressor and the Avalanche Run delay — which sit alongside a Meris MercuryX for chorus, vibrato and reverb, and an Electronic Audio Experiments Longsword overdrive.
Young is among the cast of next-generation talents with whom Steve Vai is “fascinated" and has featured in several editions of his yearly tuition camp, Vai Academy. She and the shredder locked horns in 2022 with a colorful 80s-inspired jam. It was a moment she described as “a gift."
Vai was clearly impressed as well.
“Yvette is just a wildly artistic person from head to toe,” he had said of her. “Her guitar playing and the things she comes up with is one aspect. It’s a particular color in her palette. She has this creative perspective that I just find so refreshing. She’s an artist, she paints, and I just really love the energy and the atmosphere that she manifests.”
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