After Action Report: Church Slide

First things first: I've seen suggestions that you drink coffee right before you take a nap, so when naptime is over and your body has metabolized the caffeine, you're energized and ready to go. So, as I sat awake at 1:30 am, knowing that call time was 7:30 am, I started thinking I should've had that cup of coffee right before I crashed, or not at all, instead of at 6 pm.

Anyway...

Starting at practice. Signal chain is Guitar > Wireless > Pedalboard > D/I Box > Hidden Amp > Mic > PA.

Song list starts with slide guitar. I'm not Sonny Landreth, but the song didn't need that, but it needed someone who could do it. Made me happy.

Normally, I bring my pedalboard because I know all the pedals, but I was asked to use their pedalboard, which includes a volume pedal, 2 "dirt" pedals, a compressor that I can't discern, a Line 6 DL4 delay and a Strymon Blue Sky reverb. I was hit with the following issues:

• My Number One is not optimized for slide playing. The action is high enough, but I go with Ernie Ball Extra Slinky .008-.038 which makes it hard to not accidently fret and such. 
• My Number One is a Telecaster with standard single-coils, which were not powerful enough to drive the dirt pedals to have discernable dirt, which gave me a plinky clean sound when I wanted a dirty rhythm sound, which caused me to not play the way I wanted on some of the other songs. There was enough to get enough hair on it for the slide stuff, though.
• Something caused all the hum to hum all the possible hum. 

I didn't really debug the hum at first, but eventually I learned that the hum was between the wireless (turned off the pack; hum still there) and the volume pedal (heel down; hum gone). So, most of the practice was a struggle to not just sound like a beehive. 

So, when it came time to play for real, I brought my Squier HH Tele. I love it; it's easily the lightest electric guitar I own, and I don't think I've put on new strings yet, so it didn't have the eights and the string tension was high enough for me do better with slide. The humbuckers were enough to drive the pedals to get the better distortion from the pedals, which meant that I could get enough of a rhythm crunch for the points I wanted it.

Also, I was plugged directly to the pedalboard, so no hum!

First pedal on my board is an always-on EHX LPB-1 to get my clean volume about the same level as my dirty volume. I dial my gain to the point where I'm well in the grinVd on my dirt pedals. I'm thinking 1) adding at least the capability of more output for the guitar is a good thing, and 2) perhaps I go for too much crunch on those pedals. My "lead" distortion is a Washburn Soloist, which was inexpensive and I think is beginning to show signs of failing, and I'm considering a replacement. 

The Strymon is a very ambient-safe reverb, with a shimmer set on the Favorite pedal, but I was able to make it work for the slide, and I'm thinking I need to get something, maybe more like an EHX Holy Grail to go at the end of my chain. It's really good, but not me.

So:

• Consider heavier strings
• Consider higher output pickups for the Number One
• Practice with less distortion to get better and braver
• Price a reverb pedal
• Price a lead-tone distortion pedal

After Action Report:

This was a few weekends ago, where I ably backed Greg Jones. I'm the one on the right, hiding behind my hat. You can tell it's me by the murdered-out #1.

This was after one rehearsal, and I was really uncomfortable with a lot of the material, so I spent more time looking at my feet, my chord sheets and pedalboard than is good. I'm sure most pics of me that day would look identical to this, with me not looking out at the audience. I need to work on stage presence.

Greg plays Americana, and I felt one song really worked with a slap-back guitar, along the lines of Luther Perkins. I can play a rockabilly boogie-woogie in Perkins' strange kind of way, but when it came to playing a lead, I just kinda doubled down on the rhythm. The slapback boxed me in, in a way that the dotted-eighths of the Edge and so on never really did.

But, I enjoyed the songs, playing, playing in front of people, and playing with another drummer. And yes, to get the right sound, we used a suitcase as the kick drum.

After-Action Report: Derp!

I was set to play on Sunday. I had all my gear together and set aside, and knowing the show-up time was 6:30pm, I was watching Disney-Pixar shorts on Netflix at 6pm when I got a text.

<you're showing up, right?>

<yeah, getting ready to show up at 6:30>

<that's when we start playing>

So there was a lot of Derp!, a hasty loading of the car, the slightest of soundchecks, and, despite all that, a reasonably decent gig. I knew the songs, mostly, so I didn't embarrass myself too much.

I did some, though. The first is the partscaster you see to your right. Despite the pots you see sticking through the control plate, it has no controls. It's pickup-to-jack. It's a partscaster, built from a factory second body from Guitar Fetish, a $5 bridge pickup from Reverb mounted to the body, and a neck salvaged from my son's first guitar, a First Act instrument where the body broke near the tremolo bridge mount. It's proudly a mongrel, and I've enjoyed it as a bedroom guitar.

But I rarely plug in my bedroom guitars, and I found while playing it, in front of people with only the most minimal of soundchecks, that the ringing highs I love while playing it unplugged turned into a shrill icepick when going through my pedalboard and the venue's amp. I generally tilt my pickups a little toward the high strings, in order to balance string volume. Plugging into my Frontman 25R with knobs at 12 o'clock, I went in with a screwdriver and reversed that. We'll see next practice how that goes.

A key part of my pedalboard is the volume pedal. I love to swell in, working with my delay pedal to get a keyboard pad effect. But, they've been having problems with hum, and so there's a noise gate on the amp mic. Which means I pick quietly and get nothing, and I pick louder and I get a surprising pop from out of nowhere. I've talked to the sound guy, and next time, I'll have time to get that worked out better.

All The Buzz

My baby.

I play guitar for my church. The core of my rig is a Boss GT6, but I've found it impossible to have a solid clean tone without the dirty tones just blasting it for volume, so I have a board with a compressor, Washburn Soloist distortion, DigiTech Bad Monkey, EHX LPB-1 clean boost, EHX Signal Pad attenuator, Danelectro Cool Cat tremolo, and Morley Little Alligator volume pedal, which I connect into the input of the GT6. The pedals are connected mostly with the kind of cables in a jar next to the cash register at Guitar Center. I power the board with a Visual Sound 1Spot, and normally, it's been no problem.

Signal starts with my #1, a mid-80s Telecaster I added a four-way switch to, which is my #1 guitar.

Yesterday, toward the end of service, I noticed a small buzz coming out of my system. I nudged some pedals and got a big buzz. I used the volume pedals to drop the volume and tried to figure out where the buzz was coming from. After service, I poked and found that switching out the cable connecting the board to the GT6 caused the buzz to go away, and switching in two longer cables brought the buzz back.

This is close, except I swapped locations for the Signal Pad
and Cool Cat, and swapped out the Death Metal,
which as too much gain for anything I need. I should redo
with the dirt pedals in the front row. 

Yesterday evening, setting up to play again, I simplified to just Tele -> GT6 -> DI, and immediately got all the buzz in the world, and found that, by turning down the volume on the guitar, I could change the pitch of the buzz. I expected either 1) nothing would happen, showing the problem was in the pedalboard, or 2) the volume would go down, showing the problem was with the instrument or involved the single-coil hum. What I got surprised me and I could base no diagnosis on it.

I was handed a loaner guitar and the issues went away.

This morning, I plugged my #1 into my amp at home and it sounded just like I'd expect.

I honestly have only the slightest idea as to what went on. I've had problems at that venue before, and the problems I've had with buzz there, I've had nowhere else. Then again, I'm normally either into the DI at church or my amp at home (or elsewhere).

My thoughts about the fix include:

• taking the #1 to the shop and see if my rewiring is problematic
• moving up to the next level for patch cables
• going from a 1Spot to a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power or the like
• finding a means to have a special ground for my gear

I'm in a confused state on the issue, and will have to plug things in and try things out to try to solve things. Any comments or suggestions?