Archive for Guitar Gear
One Foot, Two Buttons
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I love rehearsal time. Aside from working on the worship set for an upcoming weekend, rehearsal is also an opportunity for a worshipguitarist to perfect one’s pedal stomping skills. As we were rehearsing an uptempo praise tune with a guitar solo, I had experienced a little “foot glitch” going into the solo.
My Fender Deville was set to the “normal drive” setting (Red Channel Light – Yellow Drive Light). For the solo, I was going for the “More Drive” button on the footswitch (Red Drive Light). To my great dismay, I accidentally hit both buttons making the amp go extremely clean. Nothing like trying to do a rocked out solo with a clean sound. The sound freaked me out so bad that I started to go atonal during the solo. Multitasking is not one of my better traits. – (look for the correct sound and continuing with a solo.) I recovered with 4 bars left to make a somewhat coherent musical statement, although, it wasn’t enough to undo the damage.
Pastor Rick Muchow looked over at me and said, “Dave, do you need a capo?”
This weekend, I will be using my rack setup – there’s more room between the buttons on my MIDI controller.
And they say baseball is a game of inches.
The Vox AC30
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For the past month, I have had the opportunity to use the Vox AC30 extensively.
Being an LA-R&B-Gospel player most of my life, I can’t say that I’ve had many requests for the type of sound that an AC30 delivers.
My church recently purchased an AC 30 to fulfill backline requests for visiting bands and, it was also the main amp at a church I was playing at this week in Atlanta.
Here are some personal discoveries that I have made about this legendary amplifier.
While tweaking the amp, I never really locked in to a sound that I preferred. Although, I did find a sound that was workable.
When the band started playing, the strangest thing happened; the amp sounded great.
When the band stopped and I played by myself, the sound went back to workable.
This amp seems to sonically fill in the cracks that the other instruments do not occupy. It stays out of the way of everything.
The amp has a huge midrange footprint that can’t be denied.
The lightbulb finally went on. I think some more trips to Nashville are in order.
