Eric Schenkman on the bizarre mishap that gave his guitar its signature sound on the Spin Doctors' new album

via Guitar Player

“If it's broke, don't fix it,” Eric Schenkman declares.

It's a twist on the hackneyed phrase, and one that he speaks with the voice of experience.

The founding guitarist of the 1990s alt-rock group Spin Doctors, Schenkman has a tone secret that proved essential to the group latest studio outing, Face Full of Cake. And it’s all down to the “broken” electronics within his custom-made Forest Green Stratocaster-style electric guitar.

“John Suhr built me the Strat in about 1988, and it's one of the last guitars built under the Pensa Suhr logo,” he explains of the instrument, which was made in association with New York City repairman-collector Rudy Pensa. “It wasn't fancy, but it was meant to replace my ’65 sunburst Strat, which at the time was my only guitar.”

The green Strat copy was originally outfitted with two Seymour Duncan humbuckers and a single-coil in the middle position, and it served as the main guitar on the group’s smash 1991 studio debut, Pocket Full of Kryptonite.

“When I bought the sunburst Strat back in ’78, it had this thing in it called a power pot," the Toronto native explains, "which was a tiny circuit under the volume knob and a nine-volt battery fitted underneath the flipped over input jack. I thought it was cool because it sounded like a Strat when the volume was low, but as you rolled it up, it swelled and became more humbucker sounding.

“One day I took it to a guy that used to fix everybody's guitars in Toronto, and he said to me, ‘How come you have this thing?’ I told him how it sounded at different volume levels, and he said, ‘But it's a Stratocaster, so why don't you just have it sound like a Stratocaster?’"

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