Guitar Recommendations?

are those pedals mounted on a repurposed cutting board? if so, hats off to you! badass.

Nah, though I'd probablt resort to one if I needed to. Remember when Intold you I was going to the Hollywood Guitar Centre to look at guitars? I hadn't found anything, but there was that $40 pedalboard? That's the one. The case is slowly falling apart (more superglue and ductape!) but this board has to be the sturdiest slab of thin metal ever, I love. I could toss this thing around if I wanted to.

As in a chopping board? Nah, a £5 slab of wood from B + Q

So the Boss RC-3 is here, I've halted buying anything because I pretty much went insane buying all this stuff. Guitar is STILL shipping (somewhere in Wisconsin now...). I have an even less idea of how to use such a complicated piece of machinery that is a looper, but I'm starting to understand the delay a bit more.

On a side note, I just had a thought: Instead of some expensive Tube-Amp DI box or other, why not simply plug in at the end of the chain a 44 Magnum preamp? I figure that's plenty of volume for all the speakers we use and I'm not doing too much tone tweaking.

okay, dude, the 44 magnum is an AMP not a PRE-amp. Its meant to drive a speaker cab with 44 watts of mosfet power. If you run it into a guitar amp or a mixer your will fry the input of whatever you are feeding. Your sound guy will kill you when his sound board blows up. it would still need to be DIed and padded down to feed the PA directly. You really need a DI to give your pedalboard signal at proper impedance and voltage levels to a mixing board. There is not a way around it unless you wanna invest in a basic tube preamp like an Alembic FB-2 or Tube Works Blue Tube maybe. I think they both send line level and are good, bare bones Fender style preamps with NO power amplification.

I would seriously just get a Radial DI. The Stage Bug is cheap. I'm sure it sounds just as good as its big brothers. A quality DI will get your pedalboard into the mixer in a really uncolored way and then the sound guy can shape your highs and lows to sit in the mix at the channel strip. They didn't invent the DI box for guitar for no reason. The impedance matching is critical.

Noted, which of course makes me think of preamps in a pedal, but of course while this discussion is good and all, I seriously cannot be buying anything else or I will go more broke than broke.

On DI's, we do use the Radial ProDI for all the instruments (except the piano, of course, we use the ProD2). So, we do have proper direct boxes, but apparently we do suffer from volume problems. At least, that was before. Now, the level for my acoustic usually varies on the sound guy's mood (in comparison to every other instrument), but it can reach very loud levels now. I've been suggested to get a boost for it though.

Also, an electric guitar is too quite so besides using the headphone out jack... well, our lead guitarist had the idea of getting a Spider and using the POD out as a line out. Honestly, it sounds pretty good (and I'm sure you're cringing right now), but the sound gets too trebly once it hits the sound board.

I really should start doing research on how all of this works. I keep forgetting to write down those electronic books you suggested.

On a side note, the guitar is in Sylmar in California. Cam yesterday morning, so I assume they'll deliver it Monday morning. As for the looper, holy crap it's so much fun and also confusing. It's like Christmas! :)

impedance is critical.... proper impedance loads effect the response of your pickup, effects and amp. with your guitar and effects an impedance mismatch will just adversely effect your tone, but with an amp (even a solid state amp) running outside the impedance parameters outlined by the designer will blow the amp up.

If your guitarist is using a line 6 amp now why doesn't he just use his actual amp then? Oh wait, you said hes using it as a DI, This is all just madness. He has a tube amp. He should grow a pair and play through it. Jesus loves guys with brass balls. Look at Simon Peter. He would never plug in direct when he had an amp and if you said he was too loud he would deny it.

I think your sound guy is playing games with you young guys to see how high he can make you jump. Hes probably laughing his ass off before bed every night abut all the shit hes making the electric guitarist do. Hes busting your balls changing your levels in the mix every day for sure.

I did live sound to supplement my income for the better part of a decade and I can tell you that no matter how many instruments there are, if the electric guitarist, bassist and drummer will just get balanced with eachother in the room and you get the cabinets in line with the kick drum, then you can use most of your PA power on vocals and acoustic instruments and just push a guitar mic, bass DI, kick and snare mic up enough to reinforce these already loud sources. I did church music. The key is to work with the amps and the kit, not fight it. The PA doesn't need to do all the heavy lifting in smaller rooms like this. They used to call live mixing "sound reinforcement" because apart from very quiet sources the PA is just REINFORCING sounds that are already pretty good in the room and just need a little help to reach the back rows with the vocals. I know from my uncles' church escpades that pretty much all church sound guys who are church members and not contractors like me are basically morons who like to control everything and push musicians around even though they aren't good enough musicians themselves to get up in front of a congregation to play or sing. Your bad should have a pow=wow (at least the rhythm section) and confront the dictator in a diplomatic way.

We don't have an actual tube amp... You know what we do have is two old power amplifiers, one of them made by Fender. It's hidden away on a rack just above the other electronic that controls the headphone monitors. But I don't think that would work either.

Alright, let me get this straight, you're suggesting having the PA focus on such things as vocals, pianos, etc, but mic'ing the amplifiers for guitar and simply having it just loud enough to push the volume further to reach farther back, eh?

I am not suggesting it. I am straight up saying it. Thats how you do live sound for a band with drums guitar and electric bass in any venue less than 4 or 500 seats. Even in big venues they didn'talways put a ton of my plexi and showman thru the pa everyvenue. My buddy at the troc here in philly liked me to play without attenuation so both amps were ripping loud anywhere in front of mix position. Then when the venue would fill up it would absorb some of the massive Volume and treble so he would push my mics up thru the pa to compensate during the first song. And thats a big venue, dude. Got a balcony.

Put a guitar and bass amp on the floor. Line the speakers up with the front of the kick drum to get everything physically phase aligned if possible. Mic the guitar amp but mute the channel unless needed, get a di signal off the bass and eliminate the top end at the channel. Compress it. Get your lows kicking there around 80hz. Mic kick and snare. Give the kick some boost at 100hz. The rest of your pa power is vocals, acoustic guitar and whatever else. Horns or castinets or whatever god has available at your church

Wait. I thought your guitarist had a tube amp?

The rhythm guitarist has a solid-state Kustom head and cabinet. The other has a Spider IV. if any of us could get a tube amp, it would be me because I'm the only one not paying rent (thank you community college).

Our drums are mice'd, though because they're behind some plexin glassin a little cavething, but he's quite visible. Anyways, as to why something as simple as this hasn't been implemented is the question I'll ask today, but I have a few theories.

One of them might just be that the keyboard players would complain about the amp levels... And now that I think about it, we have played in a slightly smaller venue, but the amps there were massive, and the lead guitarist had a full-stack (!) for some tube amp. i wasn't even sure it was mice'd, but everything else was. So, why not our place which actually somewhat larger?

Like I said, I will ask today.

oh god, keyboard players.... when it comes to the mix out front you want to hear the keys loud and clear but not the opinions of the guy playing them. Keys players are all nutty. They bitch that we guitarists need stage volume to get our tone and play our best, but they want all the bandwidth in the PA. I know their instrument covers a lot of octaves, but its rare for them to use all that range in the context of a pop ensemble. Any non-piano sounds they use can really be shoe-horned into whatever frequency range is available in the mix anyway. You can cut a lot of frequencies from anywhere in a Rhodes sound, B3 tone and especially from synth textures and still have them sound darned good in context, whereas a guitar HAS to have certain frequencies or it will not be heard no matter how loud it is turned up.

Alright, so there are several reasons that we don't use any microphones for our guitars and bass. Here they are:

Too Loud

Having to do with the way the church is set up, amplifiers pretty much blow the faces off the people in the front row, and everyone in the back get little to nothing. Even the PA would be of not help because they'd basically be doing the same thing now (amplifying guitars as main speaker) rather than simply pushing the sound of the guitar further.

This is just an unfortunate aspect of the building that is our church. It's not big enough to constitute the use of guitars cabinets with microphones, and not small enough to simply keep the guitar loud and everyone else at the balanced levels without blowing up the front row of peoples' faces.

Microphone bleed

In front of our guitarists, we have four singers (One lead, three backup). So, of course, a micriphone should only amplify voices, no the guitar in the background.

So, we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Apparently our bassist has a tube amp direct box that he's been using ($60, he said) which explains why the bass sounds pretty good.

As for us, I was suggested two options: first, like you said, tube amp direct boxes. Apparently our sound guy has had one, so we'll use it for the acoustic. When I suggested using it for the electric guitars, there came another problem. It has been done, but due to the number of effects in the pedal chain, it caused too much noise.

That leaves one option that I thought of that technically would work: Isolation cabinets, or amplifiers mice'd and behind plexi glass. There's a little room just behind the stage we can put it, but now there's a problem with money.

Anyways, first thing I thought of was the Rivera Silent Sister. Thanks for the tip, Mick Thomson. Each one's 1k each, so we're all basically saving up for a REALLY nice amp, one we won't have to replace anytime soon and one that we can speaker out to the seperate room and plug into the iso cab, the plug straight into the PA.

I'm learnig quite a lot from these experiences... This is good.

That sounds like a lot of lazy soundguy BS

You avoid mic bleed thru proper mic selection and good placement. A little bleed is even desireable andhelpful as longas its all in phase.

But stop buying stuff. Try having the electric guitarist turn his cab towards the back or side wall. And mic it.

Although if he has too much noise it doesn't matter if hes direct or thru his amp. Noise is noise. He should track down the offending pedals and ditch them.

and you? you play acoustic, all you need is a DI for your piezo and/or a microphone.... your job is to strum in time with the drummer in a way that reinforces the beats that the bassist isn't accenting (or sometimes to lock with the bassist), you're just a tonal hihat.... you should be easy to mix in right

EDIT: I am about to buy a plane ticket and come out to LA to fix your sound just because I am tired of hearing about problems that are common to every small venue situation.... a classic church solution is to either tape off the 1st 4 or 5 rows of seats or put a sign up that people who are offended by music that's louder than speaking voices should sit further back to avoid getting a faceful of praise and worship band.

Well I didn't get this directly from the sound guy, I rather asked the bassist and lead guitarist, but they work close with the sound engineer and, of course, know a lot more than myself.

Mic bleed... Choice of mics is not my alley, but placement? Unfortunately, the stage is simply set up that way. The lead guitarist is directly behind (about five to ten feet) three microphones. But to turn the cabinets around...

Now this makes me think of a concert I went to, I had thought about this. It was a Jetpacks concert and the rhythm guitarist was the only one who's amplifier had been reversed. Didn't know why, because everyone else's amps were mice'd and facing forward.

I can try asking about this tomorrow afternoon. Sound engineer will be there, I'll tell him about this.

Acoustic is not to worry, we've been slowly fixing the sound with it, and this old direct box will hopefully solve any sound issues we have.

And I know you MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT be joking, but if you aren't, just tread carefully, eh?

or what, you'll punch me thru the web? I'm just trying to help you out, kid... you have sound problems and you were thinking of trying to solve them by wiring up some gear that would blow the channel on your sound guy's mixing console. I coulda just let you do it and laughed at you behind my computer monitor.

But yeah, I am always joking about everything but physics and engineering. Then I am deadly serious. Your objection to my constant sarcasm is duly noted.

Well I wasn't trying to be callous, I'm more terrified of what the sound engineer would think of me rather, I'm sure you can take care of yourself just fine. When I say tread carefully, well you seem like the kind of guy who'd try to redo the whole system to achieve a standard. That's good, but there are those who'd easily object.

Also, I'm sorry, I'm dead tired. I should probably sleep more, but who needs sleep? I got coffee for that.

Anyways, on a side note, I have an update photo! Here it is!

http://i.imgur.com/wSnMcFHr.jpg

spiffy, how do you pedal guys reach the buttons in the back without getting distracted from playing.... you get your LP-alike yet?

I can't remember the last time I gutted an existing live sound setup. Its just a question of laying out the stage wisely and using what you have in the most productive way possible. Like putting an expander/gate on the vocal mics even if you have to do it as a stereo bus because you don't have more than 1 decent gate. There's a certain breed of sound guy that cheeses me off. They think the musicians exist to serve their dream mix, an unattainable fantasy, when the sound system and FOH mixer are only there to serve the music and therefore the musicians who mak it. A good musician is fine without a PA and sound man, but a sound man without music and musicians to make it is just a bump on a log.

Well, everything here has a very specific purpose, and most of the music I play requires very little tap-dancing, just knowing how to use each pedal consistently. By that, I mean using a set of pedals for a good amount of time. Others would tap dance to do different things, but I believe a good musician knows that a single tone with a good amount of effects can do a lot more than an ever-changing tone. Of course, I could be wrong.

So much to learn! So mic signals go through the mix to an existent audio mix-bus which usually has some sort of effect such as reverb. It seems kind of arbitrary to not compress a signal knowing that it's going to be hitting very high or low levels both in notes and volume levels. Also, you mean mix-bus compression rather than a gate into a mix-bus when there's no available gate, right?

(Was reading this.)

Edit: Sorry, forgot to say. LP-look alike is not here yet... came yesterday, but I wasn't there to sign off. Still never arrived today. Odd... UPS said they'd try again today, but apparently it never happened.

I had an amp show up via FedEx a few weeks ago at 8pm.... depends on how busy the driver is and where his route takes him before he gets to your neighborhood.

SOS is writing about mixing recorded music. Live sound is not the same principles.

Noted.

Guitar arrived today, and let me just say:

I have never seem a guitar as gorgeous and sexy as this one. I feel so undeserving to even look at it, it's everything I've wanted in a guitar! I still need to swap out the strings for some 11 gaugue strings (No 12s at the local shop) and then I'll plug her in.

... What's her name?