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Gear & Setup


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.


Les Paul

PRS Custom
Torero
Strat
Nineboys

Boss GT-100

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.

MarshallRig

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.


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.
Flightcase
Power Amp

Sonic Cell

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.



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.


Mixer


PA Speakers

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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Document made with Nvu © Karl Rose, 2009