“We’ve found that it just gives us what we were missing not having an amp and a cab…. an amazing invention for something we missed quite heavily in the guitar game.”

– Guitar Tech Carl Lewis on using the Victory PowerValve 200 with the Kemper Profiler on the Bruno Mars Romantic Tour.

If you’ve been lucky enough to catch one of Bruno Mars incredible live shows in the last couple of weeks at Wembley Stadium on The Romantic Tour,  you’ll have heard the PowerValve 200 and Victory speaker cabinets at work!

Bruno’s guitarists Chris Payton and Jaron Regan are both using Victory Duchess 2×12 cabs for their onstage sound, and Jaron has taken it one step further by implementing two PowerValve 200’s into his rig for a more authentic valve tone he needs from his Kempers via his Victory speaker cabinets.

Q: How did you get started as a guitar tech, and what’s the road that led you to where you are now?

A:I got into guitar teching by pure accident. I was working in my local venue, The Mars Bar in Worcester, and I met a guy called Mark Decloedt who was the drummer out of EMF. He called me one day and offered me a gig working for Robert Plant as a drum tech. I went along, did the interview with Robert, and got the job – it was actually back line tech: drums, spare, and guitar. I did that for a moment and realised I actually quite wanted to carry on my own playing career, so I ditched it.

After I’d had a bit of a career touring with my old band, Lukash, the drummer was doing really well with his band called Pegasus Bridge — they were doing some support tours and some Academy type shows – and they asked me to go out and look after them. That kind of got the ball rolling. From there I met a guy called Matt Johnson, and he got me some bigger gigs. I ended up doing The Joy Formidable, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, from Sophie Ellis-Bextor I jumped onto Lana Del Rey. It really jumped quickly, my career. I almost missed the “toilet tours.  I then jumped straight from that type of thing into arena touring & I was with Lana Del Rey for eight years.

Q: You’ve worked with some seriously big names – how did the Bruno Mars gig & looking after Jaron come about?

A: I was working for Dua Lipa in between working for Lana and a few others – Biffy Clyro and a few others. We did the support tour on the East Coast of America with Bruno, and I just made friends with his drum tech, Jaybird, and Andy Menon, the guitar tech. When they needed cover, they ended up calling me, and I went in on two separate occasions and looked after drums and guitars. There was an eight-year gap where every year I’ve sent that production manager a Merry Christmas, and he just remembered I was kicking about. When the conversation came up about adding a second or third guitar tech, my name was the first one out of the hat, apparently.

Q:Is there an artist or tour that stands out as a real turning point in your career?

A: I guess it was Lana. She was right at the top of her career, just released the “Born to Die” video in 2012, and that was a real big one. I did a lot of learning on Lana – like I said, we jumped from Academies with Pegasus Bridge, then Sophie, we did a bunch of festivals and whatnot, then I jumped straight into arena touring and stayed there for eight years, until I jumped onto the Dua stuff. But I’d have to say it was Lana – everything big happened after that point.

Q:You’ve recently added the PowerValve 200 into Jaron’s rig for the Bruno Mars tour – what was missing from the setup that made you look for something new?

A: Jaron wanted to move to amps and pedals, and of course pop doesn’t really lend itself to amps and pedals – it’s a digital world now, and I get why he wanted to do it, I really do. But I’d already spoken to (Victory A&R) Aislinn about putting a PowerValve 200 into Jaron’s rig, and I knew that it was going to do what he was missing. So I took a few along just in case, when the amp and pedals didn’t work out, it was the next go-to thing. Instantly it was giving him the thing he was missing – which I believe was a valve and a speaker. When we got him on a stereo rig, coming left and right out of the Kemper into a left and right power valve – so two PowerValves that are then both feeding a single 65-watt Creamback — we’re using it as a layering thing. It’s not a tone at all, we’re putting the Kempers through it – the Kempers were all dialled, the delays, the stereo (that’s why we had to do a stereo rig, because a lot of the delays and reverbs are stereo). So it’s a layering thing, really, mainly for his ears more than anything – that’s where it was missing the most. He really missed that kind of valve feel that he’s used to on other gigs he’s played.

Q:Away from tech life, you’ve got your own music going on – what can you tell us about it?

A: I have a music project called Black Cats and Crows. It’s fun more than anything — it was a complete accident. I started writing some Americana, country-style music and it kind of ran away with itself over the last couple of years. I’ve just put four singles out, I think, but I completely and utterly forgot to push it — completely forgot to tell anybody the music was coming out. So it kind of just does its own little thing. Nothing crazy, but I’ve got one headline show coming up this year in my hometown.