@jules.rourke

Toronto-based, plays in a four-piece called Margins; engineer by day. The 330 is a 2017, the AC30 a Reissue Top Boost from 2014. Runs everything through a Lehle stereo splitter into two amps. Refuses to play through a single amp at any volume he can hear over the drummer.

The Ricky came after fifteen years of Strats. The AC30 is the second he's owned; the first sold for rent money in 2018, a decision he still regrets.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1981; moved to Toronto for an audio-engineering program at Seneca and never left. Works as a mastering engineer at a small post-house in the Junction, mostly podcasts and the occasional indie record. Lives in a rented top-floor unit in Bloordale with his partner and a stubborn rescue cat called Buck. The cat is named after Peter, which Jules will deny if asked directly. Plays Wednesdays in the Margins rehearsal space above a Portuguese bakery on Dundas West; the room smells like custard tarts until about ten p.m. Forty-three this year, paying off a HELOC, no kids, no plans.

Got a Squier Bullet Strat for his fourteenth birthday and learned every R.E.M. b-side off a Napster folder his older cousin burned to a CD-R. Took six months of lessons from a jazz player in Hamilton who refused to teach him chords with names like Dadd9 and made him learn the Real Book instead, which he resented and later credited. First real band was a college four-piece called Telegraph that opened for Constantines at Lee's Palace in 2004 and broke up six months later over a girlfriend. Did session work through his late twenties — mostly country demos he won't name — before joining Margins in 2016 as a favor to the drummer. The stereo rig started as an accident: he brought a second amp to a rehearsal because the first was acting up, ran both, and never went back.