Khn de Poitrine's Guitars, Amps & Gear List

Khn de Poitrine of the band Angine de Poitrine plays a unique, entirely handmade double-neck guitar. It features a microtonal bass neck on the bottom and a microtonal guitar neck on top. The guitar was crafted by Canadian luthier Raphaël Le Breton, owner of Lutherie Le Breton in Alma, Quebec.

The guitar features a Stratocaster-style body on top, joined with a Precision Bass body on the bottom. These operate as completely separate instruments, as they both have their own separate output jacks, and they are connected purely for convenience, since Khn de Poitrine plays both the bass and the guitar live.

The guitar part of the instrument has three pickups, a fixed non-tremolo bridge, and a custom-made microtonal neck. The bass part of the guitar has a Fender Precision Bass layout and also features a microtonal neck. According to Raphaël Le Breton, the materials used to make the guitar were maple (body, necks) and ebony (fretboards). [On a parlé au luthier qui a fabriqué la guitare à deux manches d’Angine de poitrine]

Khn de Poitrine uses a Hartke HA2500 amp head for his bass guitar, connected to an Acoustic B-410 cabinet. His guitar has separate outputs for the bass and guitar sections, and the guitar signal goes into a Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus.

The Hartke HA2500 is a 250-watt bass amplifier head housed in a 2U rackmountable chassis (Khn has it just sitting on the ground). The front panel features dedicated inputs for active and passive instruments and a dual-preamp design with independent, blendable solid-state and tube-emulation gain controls.

The amplifier also includes a built-in adjustable compressor, and the rear panel connections include two 1/4-inch speaker outputs, 1/4-inch effects loop send and return jacks, and a balanced XLR direct output equipped with a ground lift and a pre/post EQ switch.

Khn’s main guitar amp with Angine de Poitrine is the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus combo. He uses this amp specifically for the guitar, while he plugs his bass separately into a bass amp.

The Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus, introduced in 1975, is a 120-watt solid-state combo guitar amplifier featuring two independent channels (Normal and Effect), each equipped with High and Low inputs, a 3-band EQ, and a Bright switch. It utilizes a dual-amplifier design that delivers 60 watts per channel to two 12-inch Roland silver-cone speakers.

The amplifier includes built-in spring reverb, distortion, vibrato, and a “Dimensional Space Chorus” effect on the Effect channel. However, it’s unlikely that Khn uses any of the built-in effects, as he has everything he needs on his pedalboard.

The Boss RC-600 Loop Station is Khn’s main loop unit, the thing that allows him to play the way he does. He uses it to record and layer tracks while playing live, making it sound like he’s playing multiple instruments at once.

The way this pedal works is it essentially has 6 different tracks to record on. Khn uses 3 for guitar, 3 for bass, and one as a click track. All of these tracks can be overdubbed, deleted, paused, and played at any time.

Although a lot of this is guesswork based on photos and performances, we’ll try to explain how everything works in Khn’s signal chain as it relates to the RC-600. Separate pages will cover what each specific pedal does.

In Khn’s rig, the ProCo RAT sits in the guitar signal chain after the MXR Bass Octave Deluxe and before the DD-6 Digital Delay. It provides the primary dirt in his guitar tone – used for distorted sections where the guitar needs aggression, sustain, and more midrange rather than the softer overdrive provided by the Mad Professor Supreme later in the chain (his second distortion/overdrive pedal).

The Boss DD-8 sits in Khn de Poitrine’s guitar signal chain right after the ProCo RAT and provides all of the delay/echo effects in Angine de Poitrine songs.

Among other things, Khn uses this pedal to create those weird electrical sound “stops” – momentary signal interruptions that sound like the guitar is being cut or shorted out – like the one in Mata Zyklek at around 1:39 in the official release on YouTube. You can also see him doing this during Mata Zyklek in KEXP session at the 8:03 mark.

The DD-8 is a digital delay pedal released by Boss in 2019 as the successor to the DD-7. It offers up to 10 seconds of delay time and includes four controls: E.Level (effect level), Feedback (number of repeats), Time (delay time), and an 11-position Mode selector – the top knob of which Khn appears to have removed.

The Engager Boost sits late in the guitar chain on Khn’s pedalboard and does what boost pedals do – pushes the signal level up without really changing the tone. Khn uses it to hit the pedals in front of it harder (which makes the RAT and Supreme sound thicker and more saturated) and for solo-type sections where he needs to cut through the mix without changing his whole sound.

Engager Boost is a clean boost pedal made by Mythos Pedals, designed to add volume and a bit of sparkle without adding noticeable distortion on its own. Simple layout – just a single volume/level knob and a footswitch.

The Mad Professor Supreme is Khn’s second distortion pedal, sitting after the DD-8 delay in the guitar chain. It’s got a smoother, warmer sound than the RAT (Khn’s other distortion pedal) – less aggressive midrange, more open and sustained. He uses it for heavier sections, and sometimes stacks it with the RAT for extra gain.

Mad Professor Supreme is a dual-channel distortion with separate Red and Green modes, switchable by footswitch. The Red side is higher-gain and more saturated, good for leads and thick rhythm parts. The Green side is lower-gain and cleaner, more like a regular overdrive. Each channel has its own gain and tone controls, plus a shared volume knob for the overall output.

The Boss TU-3 Tuner sits on Khn’s pedalboard very early in the chain. Basically, his guitar signal goes into the Boss FV-5H volume pedal, and from there to the TU-3. From the TU-3, the signal goes into the Warm Audio RingerBringer.

Khn uses a Boss FV-50H Volume Pedal at the very start of his guitar signal chain to mute and unmute the guitar as needed. The guitar plugs straight into it, and after that, the signal appears to go into a Boss TU-3 tuner.

This pedal was custom-made for Khn by Infect FX/Francis Malo, based in Québec, Canada. According to Francis Malo from Infect FX, who was kind enough to get in touch via email, the pedal is an overdrive (our own guess was at first wrong, in case you’re confused with the url of this page).

Most notably, it appears that Khn uses it during “Fabienk,” around the 19:08 mark in the Live on KEXP video. According to Malo, Khn is often using it as the overdrive solo sound or as the “crunchiest” overdrive loop layer of a riff.

In Khn’s rig, the RingerBringer sits in the guitar chain and is controlled live via four dedicated expression pedals (model M-AUDIO EX-P) plugged into its CV inputs. Each expression pedal controls one parameter in real time, which means he can simultaneously morph the mix, frequency, modulation rate, and LFO depth with his feet while playing.

This is the source of the most unusual textures in his sound. For example, in Fabienk, that whole intro riff on the guitar is played with this pedal.

The RingerBringer is an all-analog recreation of the Moog Moogerfooger MF-102 ring modulator. Ring modulation multiplies the input signal against an internal carrier oscillator, producing inharmonic overtones that range from subtle tremolo at low carrier frequencies to fully atonal, metallic textures at higher ones. The pedal offers four main controls (Mix, Frequency, Rate, LFO Amount), a sine/square LFO waveform switch, a Hi/Lo frequency range switch, and an input Drive control for analog saturation. CV inputs for all four primary parameters allow real-time external control from expression pedals or modular synth gear.

In Khn’s rig, the MXR Bass Octave Deluxe sits in the guitar signal chain (not the bass path, despite the name) after the Ringerbringer. Used on guitar, it adds sub-octave content that thickens the signal and gives it bass-like weight, which suits the dense, layered textures he builds with the RC-600 when no actual bass is playing.

For example, the MXR Bass Octave Deluxe is used in the main riff the song Yor Zarad, where you can literally hear the guitar being doubled as bass.