“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?’”
Fast forward to the 2000s, and the green Strat was pretty much retired.
“The neck was hanging on a nail in the basement, and I thought, I should resurrect this thing,” Schenkman says.
“And then I recalled the power pot, and thought, Well, if it’s a Strat, it should sound like a Strat. So I called up Thomas Nilsen of Cream T Pickups and asked him to wind me three Stratocaster pickups. I put them in the guitar and just loved the way it sounded.”
Despite that, something about the electronics wasn’t quite right.
“It had this weird ‘broken’ thing going on, which I couldn’t really explain,” Schenkman says. “The tone knob didn’t affect the bridge pick up at all. It only kind of affected the middle pickup, and it worked on the neck pick like you would expect. And I basically live on the neck pickup.”
To make matters more interesting, Schenkman says the out-of-phase position between the neck and the middle pickup is “super weird.”
“It’s extremely out of phase, so much so that when you get up onto about the 14th fret it, actually imitates the sound of an Octavia effect pedal, even at a low volume, like a notched wah pedal. The out-of-phase position is so crazy unique that I wasn’t going let anybody fix it. I just left the electronics broken.”
When it came time for the group to record their new album, Schenkman decided to bring the resurrected green Strat along to the sessions.
“I pretty much always play a SG onstage with the Spin Doctors, but this new record really has a lot in common with Kryptonite,” he explains. “It just seemed like a no-brainer to me to bring the Strat.
“In preparation, I got the guitar set up, with the instructions that, ‘Whatever you do, just set up the guitar but don’t fix it. Leave it so that middle position stays like that, so it stays broken!’ Most of the basic tracks on Face Full of Cake were cut on the green Strat, either on the neck pickup or on that out-of-phase setting.”
While Schenkman’s approach to his guitar tone is unique in itself, he says he was taken aback recently when he discovered the same strategy being employed by guitarist Dweezil Zappa.
“I played a guest spot at Massey Hall in Toronto on the Experience Hendrix tour, and Dweezil was guesting on the same bill,” he says. “We started talking about guitars, and I was telling him how glad I was that I had brought my green Strat for the show because of its weird electronics.
“And to my complete surprise, he explained that his guitar does the very same thing — only it’s on purpose! And he added that, on his guitar the same exact thing happens on the 14th fret too.
“So I don’t know if it’s physics or whatever, but it completely shocked me and freaked me out that this was something somebody actually built into Dweezil’s guitar. And he’s got them in all his Stratocasters.”
Schenkman is also a fan of the “less is more” mindset, something he gleaned from Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page’s use of small amps in the studio.
“One of the things I love about Led Zeppelin records is that the guitar sounds huge, but when you listen to it, it’s actually not,” he says. “It’s sort of this weird kind of alchemy illusion. And one of the things that I’m pretty happy with about Face Full a Cake is that my guitar has this nice compact sound too, so the rhythm section sounds really big. In some ways, this is my version of that Zeppelin sound.”
Adding further weight to Schenkman’s minimalist approach has been an experience he had working with legendary Jimi Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer, a man who knows a thing or two about guitar tone. Back in 1993, Spin Doctors were invited to participate in a tribute album to the late great Strat-wielding guitarist titled Stone Free: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrixalongside other guitar greats like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Kramer was at the helm engineering and producing the Spin Doctors’ take on “Spanish Castle Magic”.
During the sessions, Schenkman picked Kramer’s brain for any valuable tone tips.
“Upon meeting Kramer, the very first thing that I asked him was, How did you record Hendrix?” he recalls. “And Eddie said that it was basically a 4×12 and a Marshall JTM head with a mic on it. That was it!
“He added that Jimi was such a wonderful player, that he knew how to manipulate all of those positions of the Stratocaster. And combine that with his songwriting and the prowess, Jimi was just a little bit better than everybody else.”
This summer the Spin Doctors head out on a U.S. tour as part of a triple bill that sees them sharing the stage with two other 1990s acts: Gin Blossoms and Blues Traveler. Schenkman can’t wait to get back out on the road.
“The band’s really never been as good as it is now,” he says. “It’s really never been better. I mean, the original ’90s Spin Doctors was a thing, but the 2025 Spin Doctors is just as much of a thing too. And everybody’s playing is really good.”
