Diamond Rowe is charting an unprecedented path with Jackson guitars
When she got her first guitar at age 12, Diamond Rowe played it everywhere. Everywhere. “It was a Tele knockoff, $70 guitar,” she remembers today. “I played that thing into the ground for like a year. I took it to the bathroom, took it to the dinner table. I never put it down.”
READ MORE: Heriot on doing heavy their own way: “This is a fresh take on the genre that we all love”
A lot has changed since those days. Rowe is now the lead guitarist of Tetrarch, a band at the vanguard of the nu-metal revival. She’s toured the world, released two records, and become lauded in the guitar community for bringing athletic shredding to a previously solo-phobic subgenre. She’s also come a long way since that $70 Telecaster ripoff, welcoming a brand-new signature model from Jackson: full name the Pro Series Signature Diamond Rowe DR12MG EVTN6. But, as she designed her first-ever Jackson axe, Rowe wanted to create something that even that 12-year-old riffing on the crapper would be able to understand.
“I’m very much a creature of habit, especially when it comes to gear,” the guitarist says. She’s speaking to Guitar.com from her home in Los Angeles, her pet cat obliviously (and adorably) mincing about in the background during our video call. “I still play a lot of gear in a lot of the same ways as I did when I was 12. It’s so much about comfort for me. With this guitar, first and foremost, it was very important for it to be something that felt very familiar to me, like something I’ve been playing my entire life.”
As a result, simplicity is the core tenet of Rowe’s new signature. It’s got a single-cut body, a shape she’s been holding since her parents threw her crappy first guitar away and bought her a bona fide Gibson when she was 13. But in the years since, her tastes have expanded far beyond the classic Les Paul spec. Fitted into the black and dark magenta body are EMG pickups, a three-way toggle switch and two control knobs, and that’s it. No unnecessary crap.
EMG pickups on Diamond Rowe’s signature Jackson guitar
Name That Evertune
The new model also comes fitted with an Evertune bridge, the mechanical marvel that ensures your guitar stays in tune no matter what. The technology remains polarising however, Rowe admits she’s received some shit for using Evertunes in the past but, again, that spirit of giving her inner tween whatever’s best for her makes it more than worthwhile.
“When we [in Tetrarch] started playing Evertune, it was because of the guitars that the company I was with [which was ESP at the time] were sending me,” she explains. “The ones that I liked the look of, they had Evertune on them, and we loved them. We became advocates for it, but we did hear a lot of newer engineers, producers and musicians say, ‘I hate the Evertune! You can hear the difference it makes to the tone!’ I’m like, ‘Dude, a 13-year-old kid watching you play is not gonna hear the difference when you hit a chord with an Evertune or without one.’”
Given how low Tetrarch tune their guitars for concerts, an Evertune is basically a must anyway. “We tune to drop A, so you already know that the tuning stability is pretty terrible. I play pretty light strings so, in drop A without Evertune, it’s constantly getting knocked out of tune.”
With that hellishly low tuning and her place in the nu-metal revival (which has also thrust the likes of Loathe, Tallah, Wargasm and Bloodywood to scene celebrity status), Rowe’s playing is most often likened to Brian “Head” Welch and James “Munky” Shaffer: the guitar tandem in original subgenre pioneers Korn. It’s easy to hear where the comparisons come from. Stick on Tetrarch’s biggest song – I’m Not Right, from the band’s latest album Unstable (2021) – and you’ll hear the tense rhythm riffs and whirring, alien lead lines the duo specialise in, recreated for a new generation. But, as other career standouts like Negative Noise declare, Rowe is unafraid to solo in a way no nu metal have dared to before. That’s because Korn, surprisingly, weren’t her original influence. Metallica were.
“Metallica are my all-time favourite band in the world,” she states. “When I started getting into Metallica, that’s around the same time I started playing guitar. I kind of learned how to play guitar to the Master of Puppets record. I had the tab book and I played that every day, for hours. As bad as I probably was, that was my teacher.”
Diamond Rowe holding a pair of her signature Jackson guitars
Three-chord Tricks
Rowe was turned on to heavy music by the older kids at her private school, which was in her original hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. The hobby quickly blossomed into an obsession, to the point her parents were willing to fork out for her first Les Paul. Around the same time, Rowe started hanging out with her future co-guitarist in Tetrarch, Josh Fore, who’s also the outfit’s lead singer.
“Josh and I met in the seventh grade,” she remembers. “We just started jamming together and it progressively became Tetrarch. We started playing covers at first: a lot of Green Day and easy, three-chord stuff.”
As Rowe and Fore grew as players, the covers got heavier and more technical. “We did Turn the Page, Metallica’s version, and we did Crazy Train. Then, after a while, we were like, ‘Let’s try to write a song.’”
Tetrarch’s clear nu metal sound, Rowe claims, was somewhat accidental. That aforementioned first song was a full-throttle thrash number, and the band stuck with that sound up until the preparation for their self-released debut album, Freak (2017). Late in the writing sessions, Rowe began fiddling with lower tunings, which added an angsty darkness to their material.
“I sent Josh a demo that I was working on, a song called Spit,” she says. “He was like, ‘This is really cool!’ We started writing in a kind of way where I ran into what I call ‘the Freak tone’. It’s that very Korn, modulated sound, with a creepy guitar effect, and it ended up on multiple songs. It was the first time in a long time where we felt like, ‘Holy shit, this sounds like Tetrarch.’ We wrote it without trying to be anyone else.”
Rowe and Fore have now been a musical partnership for more than half their lives. It’s not a tandem that the lead player initially would have expected, however, given Fore’s initial resistance to playing with Rowe. “Josh said he didn’t want a girl in the band,” she reflects now with a laugh. “I was crushed. I remember telling my dad. But Tyler [Wesley, Tetrarch’s first drummer] convinced him to let me jam with them one day. At that moment, it clicked for him.”
As Tetrarch flourished, inking a deal with Napalm Records and receiving glowing endorsements from members of Fear Factory and Hatebreed, Rowe became a Black woman in the white male-dominated world of heavy metal guitar playing. She denies ever feeling like an outcast in the genre because of her identity, though. If anything, she thinks the way she looks was a “blessing in disguise”. Nevertheless, it’s notable that Rowe is not only Jackson’s first female signature artist, but she’s the first Black woman in heavy rock to be a signature artist for any guitar company.
“Instead of a lot of pushback or criticism, it was like, a lot of people were so intrigued that they were super welcoming,” she says. “They were so stoked to even have me around. The room at local shows would be full of people going, ‘Oh my god, this Black chick’s onstage, shredding!’ We were kids then, we were 16, and they couldn’t believe it. I feel like, because I’ve got so much positive from it, anything negative kind of just got washed away by the positive.”
With a lot of notice and goodwill early in her career, Rowe was quickly swept up into a deal with ESP. Jackson approached the up-and-comer a mere six months after that endorsement was sorted out, and it wasn’t until now that Rowe could do something with the guitar giant.
Diamond Rowe’s signature Jackson guitar
“I was happy with ESP,” she says. “I loved those guys, they were family and I’d been playing ESPs for a long time. Jackson had been talking to me about coming over and I was very much fine where I was, but then we had a discussion about wanting to do a signature. That’s something that was really important to me, because I’ve always been a big presence in my band. You have Slash, you have Dimebag and I wanted to be a guitar player like that, who had a signature.”
With her new model, Rowe has essentially come full circle, building something with the specifications, simplicity and comfort that she’d have loved when she first picked a guitar up. It couldn’t have come at a better time, either, as the player ends our conversation by excitedly looking forward to Tetrarch’s third, as-yet-unannounced album.
“It’s awesome!” she gleams when discussing the upcoming material. “It’s very dark and nu metal-ish, but it still has some of the sickest guitar solos I’ve ever done. We have a lot of very catchy choruses, not in a cheesy way but in a memorable way. It’s big, hooky choruses mixed with dark, nu metal, creepy stuff. We’re really excited to get it out – it should be a good ride.”
The post Diamond Rowe is charting an unprecedented path with Jackson guitars appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
