The 29-year-old got his first taste of fame at age 15, while attending a Crowded House concert. Neil Finn asked for an audience member to join the band on stage, and after singing “Into Temptation,” Yoav received a rousing ovation—an experience that led him to begin writing and performing his own songs. Several years later, after relocating to New York City, Yoav ingested some magic mushrooms and spent a summer solstice afternoon in Central Park playing his guitar. At one point he ceased strumming and began banging out drum & bass-style beats on his acoustic, which attracted a crowd of kids who began dancing around him wildly. Suddenly, he realized how he might fuse the role of singer-songwriter with that of dance music DJ.

When it comes to performing his multitracked guitar compositions in concert, Yoav sometimes plays multiple parts simultaneously, but more often he employs a Boss RC-20XL Loop Station and a Boss DD-20 Giga Delay to recreate them layer-by-layer. “What I really want is to have two loop pedals in sync, just like a DJ would have turntables,” says Yoav. “But I’m trying to keep my live setup simple because I’ve always been a songwriter and a singer, and it’s all about the songs, not how fast I can be with my feet.”

Describe the recording process for Charmed & Strange.
There wasn’t really one set process. But taking “Wake Up” as an example, first I laid down the beats and got the groove right. My engineer/producer, Ian Davenport, is great at establishing a feel, which is actually about imperfection rather than perfection, and that is great because I’m a perfectionist, and if it were up to me, the grooves would all be perfect and electronic sounding. Sometimes I play to a click track, but in this case we felt the song should have a really human feel, though it was a headache mapping the parts out because of all the stops and starts.

There’s one song, “Club Thing,” that I wrote to a loop. We recorded the loop over and over and then reinforced the kick drum with a sound from another place on the guitar. A lot of making the record was just experimenting with mics placed all around the room, and beating the guitar in different ways. For example, there’s a place on the guitar where I can get a Roland TB-303 Bass Synth sound. I also sang into the internal guitar mic to get this old field recording kind of vocal sound on a couple of songs.

What guitars and strings do you use?
I have three Lowdens—one O-size and two F-size models—with Fishman Ellipse Matrix Blend systems that combine a pickup with a small microphone. The mic can squeal in live situations, so I use a Boss EQ-20 to pull out certain frequencies. The guitars are strung with the heaviest-gauge Elixirs available.

Do you play in standard tuning?
I tune my guitar down a whole step, but otherwise it’s in standard tuning.

Do you play through an amp?
Yes, an AER Domino. It’s the best acoustic amp I’ve ever heard, and its cool looking, too, though I use it primarily as an onstage monitor.

I understand that you studied Indian tabla drumming. How did that affect your approach to the guitar?
I studied tabla for a year, though it was all theory and I never touched a drum. I did learn that there are 25 distinct sounds you can get by hitting the drums in various spots and in various ways, and I’ve taken that approach to identifying the different sounds I could get from different places on the guitar.

How you get your kick and snare sounds?
There are spots all over the guitar where you can get those sounds. For example, for a filtered kick sound I hit the strings on the bridge with the fleshy part of my middle finger, and then I sometimes add a bigger kick sound by hitting the strings just below where they meet the bridge. Similarly, what I’ll often do for a snare is flick the wood hard with my nail to get a percussive click, and then hit the strings on the top of the fretboard to get a snare-y kind of sound. You can do a lot of really cool things by combining sounds.

Describe how you get some of your other sounds.
For the drum & bass-style intro on “Live,” I use the front of my left hand to hit the kick and the back of it to hit the strings to make a hi-hat sound—which took a long time to coordinate—while my right hand plays snare sounds on the body of the guitar and scratches the strings for fills. While palm-muting with delays on “Beautiful Lie,” which is a trance kind of breakdown, I occasionally let certain notes ring out really hard so they echo over the top of the other delays and it sounds like two guitars playing at the same time. On “One by One,” I strum the chords and play the beats simultaneously using a half-strum/half-hit with my thumb, and then likewise with my nails. To get a Nine Inch Nails keyboard-type riff, I hammer on between the frets with the side of my thumb to get a rolling delay sound, and then flick the string with my nail. I also get trance-y filter sounds by gradually moving my right hand toward the bridge and back while picking, to make the sound more or less trebly, and I get synth-pad-like sounds by letting the lower strings ring behind chords to create sub-harmonics.

What’s the coolest new sound you’ve discovered?
I’ve just begun covering Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” and hitting the side of my guitar really hard with my little fingernail sounds almost exactly like the weird snare sound on that song. Then I get the synth sound by playing the chord progression from the end to the beginning with volume swells and long delay, looping it, and hitting the Reverse button on the RC-20 to get it to play from the beginning to the end with these crazy reversed sounds. With every song I think, “That’s it, I’m not going to find anything else that I can do with the guitar,” and then something else will happen. There really are infinite possibilities.

www.yoavmusic.com