Blue Amber Photography
[ Spence ] And what was so cool about the Vibroverb . When I really started digging deep into guitar tone the internet was in the early stages , but there were some guitar forums and you could still communicate with a lot of these builders at the time . Like César Diaz , who teched for Stevie forever . And I got a chance to talk to some of those guys and César would say , " Yeah , man , we replaced the old Vibroverb transformers ". He said , “ They had these little 35-watt bandmaster types and we put Bassman transformers in them ”. César just let us in on all this information at the time .
I remember César explaining that Stevie is known for the Tube Screamer . César said he had one , but he didn ' t like it because he thought it was too ratty . And the Fuzz Face was a total myth . He said , " I used Fuzz Face enclosures and put my guts inside of them . And I had a bunch of them in different colors because he said Stevie swore the lights on stage ( those old par cans ) would heat those boxes up ”. He said , " So we were always changing them out . But he liked my Fuzz Face style because he could roll the volume down and get that real clean belllike tone on the top end . But it would break up . And the low-end was real bell-like ”. He would talk about all that , I sucked every bit of that information up that I could .
[ WM ] Right on . Okay , so the year 2000 you got to play with Phil Keaggy . How ' d that come about ?
[ Spence ] Well , I grew up in church and people in my church were fans of Phil Keaggy . I saw a video of him playing “ County Down ” on acoustic and it blew my mind , the whole looping aspect of what he did drew me in back to the acoustic guitar . I was seeing acoustic sort of as a rhythm instrument , but also a lead instrument with one person . And I really liked that concept . And so that got me into looping and really studying how Phil approached the acoustic guitar .
And so I became a fan of his and when I graduated in 2000 , my Dad and I were sitting back in his office at his car dealership . I was homeschooled . I was in and out of private school and was homeschooled up towards the end .
And Dad said , " You know , the bad thing about being homeschooled , Spence , there ' s no kind of graduation party or anything ," and he said , " I wonder if we could book Phil Keaggy to come do a concert ?" And I said , " I don ' t know . Let ' s check and see ." With some help from some friends , it was worked out . And Dad and I were like , " Oh my gosh , what do we do now ?"
So we had Phil come in , I believe that was July of 2000 . And it was for my birthday / graduation . But we invited a bunch of people , friends of