Bosnian Rainbows Leader Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Details His New Guitar Rig

Former At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López recently gave a candid interview with Total Guitar, in which he spills the details about his current guitar rig for his new project, Bosnian Rainbows.

For Bosnian Rainbows, Rodríguez-López is primarily using a custom Ibanez double-cut electric guitar, featuring a bolt-on neck and a single humbucking pickup. He's mostly used single coil-equipped guitars in the past, but he was after a fatter sound with this particular band.

He also specified that he wanted a bigger neck, saying, "Most necks are thinner, and I wanted it to feel like half of a baseball bat." Rodríguez-López is known for playing a lot of his parts high up on the neck, but with Bosnian Rainbows, he's playing the majority of his notes on the neck's lower registers -- so a fatter neck gives his fretting hand more material to hang onto when digging into those thicker notes. The guitar's sparse control set consists of only single volume and tone knobs, and he has it set up with a flatwound 56-13 set of strings.

Rodríguez-López's pedal board is loaded with a Boss TU-2 Chromatic Tuner, an Empress Super Delay and Fuzz, a Blackout Effects Phaser (which he sometimes sets up to have a vibrato effect), a Catalinbread Semaphore Tremolo and Calisto Chorus/Vibrato, a Boss DD-5 Digital Delay, an Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Reverb, and an Earthquaker Devices Rainbow Machine, which he uses for strange, pitch-shifted tones and textures. Rodríguez-López also uses a Boss SL-20 Slicer, which "cuts up" the parts that he plays into preset rhythmic patters. The guitarist claims that, "They're all amazing. I like them all, and you should check them out."

Be sure to catch Rodríguez-López with Bosnian Rainbows on their 2013 US tour, which began recently on July 10th and will wrap up at the end of October.