Swati’s Alvarez Yairi setup is as unconventional as her playing.

“I chose a 12-string because I wanted a bigger, more swelling sound than you get with the usual 6-string,” explains Swati. “However, I also wanted an even beefier low end, so I took off the octave strings and just kept string pairs for the B and high E, because I like the chorus-y, orchestral element they add.”

Swati typically tunes everything a half-step down to make her sound even richer and deeper. She also employs ten open tunings that she’s memorized and intuitively finds through her own string-to-string comparison tuning process (she’s unsure of the specific notes). At the center of her sonic storm is a Boss DD-5 Digital Delay pedal that she often combines with other pedals, including a Boss DS-2 Turbo Distortion, a Boss OC-2 Octave, and a Fulltone Clyde Standard Wah.

“When I was a kid, my father got me an overly complex DigiTech rack delay system that I used with my first guitar,” says Swati. “The action on the guitar was so high that there was no possibility of being able to play it properly, so I just hit the strings percussively as if I was playing a piano or a drum. I felt the way the delay unit screamed back at me worked hand in hand with that rhythmic approach, and it played a major role in developing my sound on the instrument.

Delay also became one of her key arranging tools.

“When I start to play and the invisible delay action starts happening, it initiates a subconscious reaction that helps me see where I want to go with a song,” explains Swati. For instance, on ‘New Me,’ I play four chords in the main verse, but with the delay they kept bouncing back at me and filled in all of the spaces as I was putting the song together. The delay created a flow that guided me into each successive part, including the choruses.”

That sort of serendipity is vital to Swati’s process when sowing the seeds of her songs.

“I’ve never once sat down with the intention of writing a song, and I don’t play scales or practice chords or anything like that,” she says. “Writing is a kind of mediation for me. I find that music and words come together in my head at the same time, and hopefully I remember everything long enough to get to my guitar and make it happen. I avoid writing things down because I feel if the music and lyrics are meaningful they’ll stick in my head. Also, I find if I write things down, I sound as if I’m singing from something written. So, what I do is take what I hear in my head and find a rhythm to settle into that reflects mind, body, spirit, and guitar. I’ll keep going with that rhythm for between five and 30 minutes, using my delay, and hopefully ideas will emerge. It’s also a therapeutic experience. I find that if I’m sick, my throat will often clear up at the end of one of those sessions. It’s pretty cool."