Minimal Rig Tone

I finally got a chance to try out my minimal rig setup at practice the other night. The Pedaltrain Mini that I use has the Egnater footswitch, an MXR 10-band EQ pedal, and a TC Electronic Polytune tuner.

Leaving the EQ on all the time, I just used the Egnater Renegade combo footswitch to go between channels 1 and 2 for clean and distortion, respectively. The EQ is set so that the mids are boosted, and it gave a nice gritty tone while in front of the clean channel. Rolling the volume knob on my PRS Customer 24 back slightly cleaned it up fairly easily too.

The EQ in front of channel 2 gave the distortion some nice beefy saturation without being too muddy or harsh. There was just enough input gain on the channel to give it some chunk, while rolling back on the volume knob easily went to solid rock distortion which was good for 6-string strumming.

The room had a lot of natural reverb due to the angled walls in the house we were playing in, so I had the reverb set to zero on the Egnater for both channels. There was nothing in the effects loop, and I occasionally used the Master 2 volume switch for leads. I was the only guitar player that night so it wasn't always necessary, but it's handy when there are two guitarists and you need to cut through a little bit during leads.

Tilting the Egnater combo back against the wall and a single guitar stand finished the setup for practice. The best part is that all of it only required two trips to the car when loading in or out. One for the combo amp itself, and the other for the guitar, folded up guitar stand, Pedaltrain bag, and my regular backpack with instrument cables and small accessories. Sometimes simple is better.

Updated Rig Setup

I've had a Shure PSM200 personal in-ear monitor system for a while and it works well for protecting my hearing and hearing myself better. The only downside was trying to find a way to have a feel for the room sound as well. I've experimented with using one earphone or an ambient mic hooked up to my guitar strap, but when you start sweating the earphone tends to slip out, and it becomes distracting when you're in the middle of playing a song.

In my constant process of trying new things, I decided to forgo the in-ear monitor for a little while and try an elevated and tiltback combo stand. My rig ended up looking like this:

I can certainly hear myself fairly well, although it can actually get a bit too loud since we rely on our amps to help fill the room along with some mixing going through the PA. I was able to figure out that my four-unit rack fits vertically under the amp, and the floor dolly allows me to easily wheel it around to gain access to the cables and knobs in the back. The yellow studio monitor in the picture is just for me to practice along with music.

This is pretty different than what I had before where the amp sat on its side flat on the floor with the rack case sitting on top, but I couldn't hear myself very well in that configuration even though it's an easy setup, hence the attempt with in-ears.

I couldn't use this tiltback setup with a head and 2x12 cab, but with the Egnater combo it seems to be working fairly well so far. We'll see if I run into any trouble down the road during more live situations.

"Minimal" Rig Update

After experimenting with the Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster in my recently purchased Pedalboard Mini, I've found that it does a good job of beefing up the tone of the single coil pickups in my standard Fender Telecaster straight into my Egnater Renegade 2x12 combo, but it tends to muddy things up when playing either of my PRS guitars with humbucking pickups.

"Minimal" Rig Setup

My main rig currently consists of an Egnater Renegade 2x12 combo, an SKB 4U shallow rack case containing a Furman power supply, TC Electronic G-System, Shure in-ear monitor transmitter, and analog pedals that go into the G-System loops. Thankfully, it's a fairly compact setup and it doesn't take very long to set up or tear down, but there are times when I would like a more bare bones setup for impromptu jams or whatnot.

Live Show Gutiar Tone

The 80's rock band that I play in, Motorboat Charlie, has had a couple gigs recently and they were a lot of fun. In both cases, the stage volumes were fairly loud and the wedge monitors offered by both venues were chock full of vocals but not much else that I could tell.

Study in Monitors, Part 3

In my previous post, I talked about setting up an ambient mic in the room would be good for picking up the drums and any other non-mic'ed instruments to feed into my Shure PSM 200 wireless in-ear monitoring system. It worked well, but when we play out, I can't assume I'll have a line feed from the PA and an ambient mic available for my own monitoring purposes.

G-System and Channel Volumes

framuscobra on YouTube asks:

"I'm having a hard time avoiding clipping, i guess the channel volumes affect the loop send levels right? I like the channel vol at max, it gets a nicer tight tone, but it clips the g system inputs like crazy, how do you have your levels set up within the G and the channel volumes? I'm wondering if using a 2 cable method versus a 4 would be better, i know i'd lose the front end part but i might get better signal/noise ratios"

Compressor Experiments

I've been enjoying the new Egnater Renegade 2x12 combo for a couple of months now (see my review). I run most of the dirty sounds with an equalizer pedal in front and the TC Electronic G-System equalizer in the effects loop with the mids boosted on both ends. The eq in front drives the amp for a little extra saturated distortion while the eq in the effects loop allows me to cut through the mix better.

Review: Egnater Renegade 65W 212 Combo

Despite all the effort I put into getting good guitar tone, I hardly ever buy amps. I've owned my 100-Watt Framus Cobra for almost seven years now after hearing it on Killswitch Engage's End of Heartache album, and it's worked well and sounded good. As inevitably happens, though, your tastes and requirements change over time and I felt like I needed to try other amps in music stores to see if there might be something that could give me more versatility.

Rhythm vs. Lead Levels and Tone

I play in a band with some friends doing 80's rock covers for fun. The other guitarist and I share leads between different songs, so we need to have our rhythm and lead volume levels and tone situation sorted out so that we can hear ourselves and our audience of friends can distinguish between our two sounds and not sound like a wall of mush. I've learned that levels and tone frequency equally play important roles to achieve this balance. Here's how.

Framus Cobra + Cabinet Matching

P0Psyckle on YouTube asks:

How does the Cobra sound on the Mesa cab? How is it compared to the original Framus cab or others if you have tried?

Sound Clips, Finally

Many people have asked me over the last few months to post some sound clips after I posted a couple of impromptu videos walking through my rig setup. But for the longest time I didn't want to just record the sound clips with just the tiny pinhole mic that is on my point-and-shoot digital camera that I used to make those videos. The audio quality just isn't there and I've had numerous negative comments about it on YouTube.

G-System, Framus Cobra and MIDI

OtiumSlash on YouTube asks:

Your videos "My Guitar Rig #1 & #2" made me excited over buying a G-System since that is the way I want to control my Bogner XTC 101B. Although it hasn't got MIDI implemented in the amp head, it can be operated via MIDI switching.

Single Coil Tele + Metal Amp = Rock Crunching Goodness

I've noticed lately that playing 80's rock tunes with my current band using my PRS Custom 24 or Mira into my Framus Cobra amp, I was having a hard time distinguishing my sound from the other guitarist's sound consisting of a Les Paul through a Marshal VintageModern. The main conclusion I came to was that our sounds were too similar. We both were playing mahogany-bodied guitars through high-gain amps, and that made it harder for each of us to carve out our own frequency slice amongst the whole band in order to cut through and stand out.

Study in Monitors, Part 2

In my last post about hearing myself and the band better when I jam with friends, I said that I would try setting up a mic in the room to pick up ambient sound and mix it with my mic'ed guitar speaker cabinet for in-ear monitoring. It worked pretty well. Here is how it was set up.

Study in Monitors, Part 1

When I jam with friends, we typically run around 105 dB of sound pressure level. Our singer has a PA which is used to power the vocal mics and he runs them through a pair of Fender main speakers. The rest of the instruments fill the room acoustically or by their respective speaker cabinets.

G-System: Switching the Switches

As I've been jamming with friends more often lately, I've noticed that there are certain switches on the G-System that I rarely or never use: the compressor, the pitch shifter, and the reverb. So in thinking about what other functions I could use to replace them with, I came up with the following:

Volume Levels

I've been jamming with some friends nearly every weekend lately and I've had some interesting experiences with levels. There's usually another guitarist playing a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall DSL-50 or Marshall Vintage Modern. We usually share my brother-in-law's stereo Mesa/Boogie 4x12 straight cabinet with Celestion Vintage 30's in it or I'll bring my Mesa/Boogie 2x12 cab with V30's as well. Sometimes there's a third guitarist playing a Taylor 400-series acoustic into a Fender combo.

EQ Experimentation

In my last post, I had removed the BBE Sonic Stomp for bad crackling noise that I couldn't resolve and a BBE Sonic Maximizer that scooped my tone too much such that I couldn't dial my way out of it. This is not to say the products are bad. They work, but I just didn't like how it affected my sound. It's completely subjective.

Rig Changes, Part 2 of 2

In my last post, I talked about adding an MXR Phase-90 and BBE Sonic Maximizer to my rig. After spending some time both at home and while jamming with friends I've come to the conclusion that the Sonic Maximizer "scoops" my sound too much. It's good at getting low and high frequencies to be in sync coming out of the speakers, but then I lost too much midrange and I had trouble hearing myself without punching up the volume too much. I just couldn't dial in a fix. I ended up playing with it off more often than not, so I returned the Sonic Maximizer.