I feel like I play guitar like a cavewoman or something, you know? Like, I'm just like [makes windmill motion] and sometimes it works." In this episode, Ernie Ball artist Lindsey Troy of Deap Vally discusses her influences, her history with playing guitar, and her Ernie Ball strings.

String Theory

Lindsey Troy

Deap Vally

Featured Strings

Beefy Slinky Nickel Wound 11-54 Gauge

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Transcript

Lindsey Troy:
Guitar playing to me is something that has been in my life since I was very young. I come from a very musical family. And I never really got interested in guitar playing until I saw girls playing guitar, and then I was, "Oh, that's cool. That's something I can do."

Lindsey Troy:
I feel like I play guitar like a cave woman or something. I'm just, "Bah," and sometimes it works.

Lindsey Troy:
I played acoustic guitar for all my adolescent through teenage years, and I have this theory that the way girls are raised, we're taught to be kind of polite and not piss too many people off, so I don't know. I just never thought about having an amp in my room and turning up super loud and pissing off the neighbors. I first started really playing electric guitar when I met my band mate Julie, which was about five years ago. When I met Julie we just really instantly clicked, and we're kind of opposites in a lot of ways, but really similar in other ways and there's just this sort of inexplicable alchemy between us.

Lindsey Troy:
The first time I played Ernie Ball strings I probably wasn't even aware I was playing them to be honest, because like I said, I grew up in a musical family, so there was just always guitars around. And I can recall random packets of strings floating about and I certainly have recollections of seeing Ernie Ball packets as a kid. In the more recent years, I've been playing loads of Ernie Ball strings. I really love thicker strings, I usually play 11s, as long as they're at least 11s I'll kind of experiment within that.

Lindsey Troy:
Julie and me, we really work well together. I have a lot of ideas, but they're kind of a mess, that's just kind of how my life is, and she helps me to sort of organize things. But we also just share this very rebellious spirit. We always wanted to do music that really said something and makes a difference.

Lindsey Troy:
A rule we came up with very early on as Deap Vally was no apologizing at all for your playing. Our band's a hot mess. We like the chaos, we never want it to be too easy. We like that sort of unexpected magic that happens in a live show. Sometimes when we mess up, that's when the cool stuff happens when you're covering your ass at a show, and you're messing around with pedals and shit's just going haywire. Then you get off stage and people are, "That was so cool, what was that?" And you're, "That was me totally messing up and forgetting the song."

Lindsey Troy:
We try to get that to come across in all of our recordings. So that was early on as a band. I feel like a challenge, if you're really a live band who really feeds into that energy and chaos of a live performance, then the recording process can be a little tricky because it's sometimes hard to capture that. For us, it was really just about keeping a lot of the idiosyncrasies, and some of the happy accidents and mistakes that would happen on the record and not quantifying and perfecting things.

Lindsey Troy:
When you're playing songs you know, that's super meditative. When you're being spontaneous with it, that's just really magical and exciting. When I look at a guitar from afar I can have some sort of weird relationship with it where it's taunting me or something. Be, "You should practice more." But when I'm actually in the moment, playing guitar, it's the fucking coolest thing ever.