SXSW Artist Spotlight: Gus Baldwin & The Sketch
For this SXSW Artist Spotlight, we sat down with singer/songwriter/guitarist Gus Baldwin, frontman of the Austin-based garage/punk band Gus Baldwin & The Sketch. The four-piece released their debut LP, The Sketch, in January, and last month, they made the cover of the local alternative weekly, The Austin Chronicle.
Gus Baldwin & The Sketch will be performing a SXSW showcase at the 13th Floor on March 10 at 11 p.m. In this interview, Baldwin talks about cutting their record in an analog studio, how he gets that raw guitar tone, and what to expect from their live shows.
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview.
360°Sound: Please start by giving our readers a little introduction to you and your music. I understand you’ve been playing music for a while, but your band, The Sketch, is relatively new.
Gus Baldwin: The Sketch came out of my old band, a group called Acid Carousel, a psych rock thing that we started in Dallas when I was in high school. I left that group in 2021 after over six years in the band, and we moved down to Austin from Denton, Texas, where we were living at the time. Everyone who I started The Sketch with was in that band at some point or another.
I think it came from me wanting to make a different type of music. I kind of lost interest in the psych rock thing. I felt like I was being forced to perform a character in a way, instead of just being myself and writing about what I wanted to write about in the style I wanted to. I think that this kind of music, whatever you want to call it, punk or garage or just rock and roll, is more in line with what we all listened to growing up.
I’ve been playing music since I was 9 or 10. I got my first guitar when I was 6 and tried out a bunch of stuff as kids do. And this was the only thing that ever stuck or stayed around, playing guitar and drums. And then eventually got into songwriting when I was 17 or so, which I never thought I would do. I always just wanted to be a guy in a band. I’m still doing it here 10 years later.
Your debut album, The Sketch, was recorded in just one day. I would think that a quick recording session like that probably helped to capture your live sound.
It was really fun and easy to make. We were rehearsed. We had played all these songs a bunch over the past year or so. We just wanted to document the sound of the band, because I’ve been making solo recordings with me playing all the instruments, but the live band needed to be documented. We knew we wanted to do it in an analog studio because it’s just an aesthetic that we enjoy. But the workflow of putting a tape on the reel and rolling it, you do a take, and if it’s good, you keep it. If it’s bad, you redo it. It’s not like a digital recording where you can go in and mess with every little imperfection before you get to the final product.
We had a tour that I had booked, and there was one day that I couldn’t fill around L.A. I was trying to do multiple L.A. shows, but I couldn’t fill the day. I think we recorded in May. The Osees had come through, and I was working at Hotel Vegas [a venue in Austin]. I was talking to Tomas [Dolas] from the Osees because I knew he had this little tape studio in L.A. And I was like, “Hey, I got this day off in L.A. Would it be cool if we came and recorded?” He was down. We could afford it, so we booked the day.
We were on tour at the time, and he’s just not responding to any texts or emails. I check the Osees schedule and they’re in Japan playing shows, so we hit up our buddy Joey Walker, who used to live in Austin and did sound at Hotel Vegas, where we all hang out. He works at the same studio. We were in a minivan, and we just set up our gear and we played. It was about 11 hours, the first half of the day. We just did takes of each song, and then went to lunch, came back, and then I just started doing all the vocals and tracked all that.
There was actually one song, “Sympathy for Sunday,” that wasn’t all recorded in one day. I had to do the vocals to it when we got home from tour in Austin, because we didn’t think we were going to get all that done. We had just learned and arranged “Sympathy for Sunday” the week before we were leaving for tour, and I didn’t have words for it yet, so I had to write lyrics on the way home. And then we got to Austin, I went to King Electric studio to overdub that one vocal. And that was it.
None of us have ever made a record like that before, where you just go in and play with the band and you record that. I feel like we all grew up in the Pro Tools and Garageband era of making records in your bedroom with one microphone one piece at a time. It’s like back in the day when you throw good musicians together in a room, they know the songs, or maybe they don’t, and just see what happens. And it’s like, whatever the tape records either keep it or throw it away, and we decided to keep it all and just chose the best takes. And the best takes that we chose were usually not even the ones that we played the best on. Like the takes on the record have so many mistakes on them. We’re a big believer that mistakes add character.
You have a great heavy, distorted guitar tone on the record. How did you get that sound?
I’ve been using my same guitar for a long time. It’s just a Gibson SG with P 90s. I’ve had it since the eighth grade. I have a Fender quad reverb, which I just crank the preamp all the way. And then a fuzz pedal. It’s really simple. It’s mostly just the amp and the guitar. And then on the loud parts, I throw on the Fuzz War for chords and stuff. I have a Death By Audio Interstellar Overdriver that I use for single-note lead stuff. It’s mostly just the guitar and the amp for the sound, and it sounds cleaner live than it does recorded. I feel like when I record the amp, whether at home or at studios, it blends in a nice, saturated way with other instruments recorded and live. It’s honestly not that dirty.
We just love that old garage rock influence. We like old silver face Fender amps, not necessarily designed to be for distorted guitars and punk rock. But you make it work for that, even though it’s something it doesn’t want to do. So the amps are just fighting you the whole way. And I love that sound. Instead of just using like, a Marshall or an Orange, which is designed to do that type of thing.
What can SXSW attendees expect from a The Sketch gig?
There’s not a lot of talking. There’s not a lot of time in between the songs. We’ll usually just go bam, bam, bam, bam, for like 30 minutes. And then occasionally we’ll joke around with each other, but not really with the audience. We’ll always say thank you. I always have to say something to the audience, which is usually just, “Thank you for coming out.”
I’m terrible at stage banter because I’m a nervous wreck. I’m up at gigs, and I’m just like, I don’t know what to tell these people. I’m not like, funny or anything, so I will just do our inside jokes with each other on stage. And I don’t know. It’s just we try our darnedest to entertain the crowd, but we do our thing. Just play rock and roll – nice and loud, but not too loud or too fast, and hopefully they are entertained.
Gus & the Sketch will perform at SXSW on March 10 at 13th Floor.
