Geared Up: Post Season Lead Guitarist Canyon Gargon on His Fender Telecaster and Mesa Single Rectifier Amp

Pop-punkers Post Season are hot off their 7″ split with Such A Mess, Greetings From, released on August 28th. The 4-song EP features two new tracks from each group and the full EP was mastered by Grammy-nominated Michael Fossenkempter of Turtle Tone Studios. For the uninitiated, Post Season play guitar-driven, energetic music with catchy choruses that are nearly impossible not to sing-along to. We chatted with lead guitarist Canyon Gargon about some of his key gear.

What one piece of gear do you use to obtain your signature sound?
Gargon: My main stage and studio guitar is a Fender Telecaster and my live amp is a Mesa Single Rectifier.

What about it makes it so important to you?
Gargon: I appreciate my Telecaster because it’s such a versatile instrument. It can do everything from subtle and sparking to heavy and grinding. I love my Mesa for its unfailing reliability: I can count on it to work every single night and never have a second thought about it.

How was this gear used during the recording of your latest album?
Gargon: I used the same Telecaster that I play live to record my parts on our half of the Greetings From split. The amp I used was not my personal one but it was a very similar, very nice Mesa (a 2-Channel Dual Rectifier that belongs to our producer Paul Leavitt).

Photo credit: Dieter Unrath (www.dieterunrath.com).

How long have you had it, how do you use it, would you ever change it?
Gargon: I have played the same guitar and amp since my first show with my high school band. Any other gear I might acquire in the future would be purely on a whim. My current gear gives me anything I could ever want in terms of tone, I’m still happy after all these years every time I plug in.

Give us your best “gear goes wrong” story.
Gargon: I used a borrowed amp on one show in a venue with particularly dirty power, and during the count in for our last song the amp blew a fuse. In that moment, rather than stand there useless, I instead chose to take off my guitar, grab a mic, and do my best Rage Against The Machine-esque hype man impression. I screamed the choruses along with our singer and got in the crowd, passing the mic and crowd surfing. It just felt like the right thing to do.

Check out the song “Backroads” here.