Guitars
I use several guitars depending on the song. From left to right as pictured below.....
An Epiphone Les Paul Modern with a beautiful magma sunburst flamed
maple top covers a lot of the classic hard rock songs such as All Right
Now. A semi-hollow Paul Reed Smith SE Custom
22 is a good all rounder with a push/pull coil split pot to jump
between single coil, softer guitar sounds used on songs such as Hotel
California and Stairway to Heaven, while retaining a harder edge in
humbucking mode for rockier songs such as Smoke on the Water and others.
Another PRS SE, this one a Torero is for the heaviest of the songs I perform, It's a lovely guitar
to play. Solid Mahogany body with a flamed maple top, a straight
through-the-body neck giving unfettered access to all 24 frets and
great sustain. Sounds fantastic as well courtesy of a pair EMG pickups.
A Floyd Rose locking tremelo keeps tuning under control for those wilder "dive bomb" moments.
Next up is a Fender Stratocaster in arctic
white. This is a "Made in Japan" Fender that I bought new in 1988. It's
used on the songs that need that "Strat" sound such as Comfortably
Numb. This really feels like home when I'm playing it, probabkly
because I've had it for so long. Useless fact......I also have another
MIJ Fender "Squier" a ST-335 in black, double humbuckers and a short
scale 22 fret neck. Both are now becoming collectors items due to the
high
quality, back in the day Dan Smith the then Director of Marketing for
Fender
USA said about the Japanese made Fenders "Everybody
came up to inspect them and the guys almost cried,
because the Japanese product was so good - it was what we were having a
hell of a time trying to do." The result is they are now
worth much more than I paid for them 30+ years ago!!
Finally for the odd acoustic song "Wherever you may go" springs to mind
is a Nineboys Jumbo. Sounds great and plays well, all I need from a
guitar.
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Guitars run through a Line 6 Relay G75 wireless system into a
BOSS GT-100 effects unit which provides all of the guitar sounds I use, typically around 30 different sounds
over the course of a gig. One feature this has, is the ability to
record a phrase and play it back on a loop. In many songs I'll record
song sections and then play them back as needed. One notable use is on
"Come as you are" which I find extremely difficult to play the main
riff while singing.
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The wireless guitar systems are switched using a foot switch to speed up guitar changes and I use the "four cable
connection" method to connect the GT-100 to my backline amp, a Marshall JCM600 head with the matching
Marshall C410A cabinet.
The connection from head to cabinet is via a Kock dummyload (or powersoak) box that
allows the head to run cranked up at the master volume without the associated ear-splitting volume level which
would be way too loud for most places. From the Koch I take an output with vintage speaker emulation to feed
a channel on the main mixer for guitars in the front of house mix.
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PA
The PA mixer is a Peavey XR800F, this is actually a powered mixer but
the power amp is unused, unless the main power amps fail. The mixer
outs go to a pair of channels on a Behringer
MDX4400
compressor and then on to a Behringer CX2310 Crossover unit. Bass
signal goes to a Warrior SB600 power amp, while the mids and highs are sent to an Alto Mac 2.3
stereo
power amp cabaple of 1000 Watts RMS per side.
Bass amp outputs to a pair of EV SB122 sub-woofers and the higher frequencies run to a pair of Wharedale Titan
12s. Vocals
run
from a Shure SM58 into an ART Studio V3 preamp, through compressor then into the desk which
feeds a
Digitech Studio Quad 4 multi effects unit, returning effected sound via
a channel on the XRF. Monitoring is a Torque powered
wedge monitor. |
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| Backing
Band
My
'backing band' is a Roland Sonic Cell, a 128 voice hardware
synthesizer capable of MIDI file playback from a USB stick.
Songs are prearranged into set lists
ordered as required. It’s
possible to have up to 99 songs per stick arranged into as many sets as
I wish
and each song can be in multiple sets if desired. If 99 songs
isn’t enough then
I have to change USB sticks!!
The
MIDI files are all pre-programmed with sysx information that sets up
the processors at the beginning of each songs, settings such as song
tempo so the delays are in time, as well as the correct input level for
the guitar being used.
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There are pros
and cons of playing to MIDI files. The
biggest drawback is the fact that the song structure is rigid. If I
miss coming in
with vocals or come in too early there’s no changing anything
on the fly as
there is with a band, the chorus is coming in on bar 12 or wherever
regardless
of what I’m doing.
This makes
things like extra audience sing-a-long choruses
impossible to put in on the fly but it can be done with some
prearrangement. I
have several versions of some songs with various additional choruses
and lead
sections so I can pick which version I perform depending on how the gig
is
going.
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The
main
‘pro’ of using the MIDI files is the ability to
make full use of MIDI. Both the GT-100 and the Quad 4
are MIDI’ed into the Sonic
Cell so that I can start and stop songs via a footswitch but better
still I can
program patch changes for both processors when I want them. No more
dancing on
foot pedals for me. In fact except for when I manually operate the
wah-wah I
don’t touch my guitar effects processor at all, and I use
somewhere in the
region of 30 different patches during a gig. Some songs have 4 or 5 sounds
that are
changed up to 14 or 15 times. All via MIDI and exactly when I need them. |
The
Quad 4 is set up for MIDI control in much the same way - I can add
delays,
reverbs, choruses, and other effects as I need them again without
manually switching
anything. For example in Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb'
I pick
out the words that need repeats and add a delay which I then turn off
for the next line. All without touching a button, pedal or dial. That
makes a huge difference to the overall sound which without MIDI
would be impossible unless I had a sound engineer to switch them for
me.
I
hope that
gives you a little insight into my set-up.
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©
Karl Rose, 2009
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