This blog examines, reviews and discusses how worship is being lived out in culture and in the church. We tackle everything from songwriting techniques in corporate worship, to interviewing worship leaders and pastors, to reviewing the last big rock concert.
James gives a lot of great advice in his post and I encourage you to read the entire post, but he opens up the post with some great general advice to guitar players.
“I have gotten a lot of emails lately asking for advice about how to get good guitar sounds. A lot of times I get asked something like “I have all the same stuff as you but i’m not getting the same sound for some reason”. I try to tell them , nicely, that they can buy everything I have, but it’s not going to make them sound like me. If that was the case I would have all of The Edge’s gear. And all of Jimmy Page’s gear. and I would have bought the same microphone as Bono…
I can play through anything and still sound like me. I can play through a line 6 spyder amp and still sound like me. I don’t enjoy that, mainly because a modeling amp just doesn’t respond the way a nice tube amp does. But I can make it work.”
The guitar tech for Kings of Leon shows off their guitar and effect rigs. I like how straight forward they are, not really any trickery, all standard tunings, pretty straight up rigs. They just know how to write great rock music. I also dig that their lead guitarist plays my amp, Ampeg Reverbrocket FTW!
Guitar players know how live rigs work, you go through phases, tone phases, effects phases, minimalist to surrounding yourself in stompboxes. You sell things only to buy them back a couple years later. Well poor musicians like myself do anyway. So I find myself rebuilding a lot of what I tore down a couple years ago, but this time I have clearer vision to the tone I’m aiming for. I’m pretty close right now, but need a few things.
Plenty more on the list long term, but this is my short term list and it’s over $1,000. Don’t tell my wife, she’ll pass out. BUT this is where you come in. If you or any one you know is selling any of this gear used, please pass it by me. I’d rather not get all this new. Or you can goto the ORS Store and buy some gear to help a brutha out. Contribute to my stimulus.
One of my favorite local pastors is Pastor Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church. It was love at first sight when I read their inviting tagline, “Don’t expect anything contemporary or liberal.” I mean that’s powerful, warm and loving all at the same time! Except I have noticed they do use some contemporary things like blogs, You Tube, websites, cameras, microphones etc… Pastor Anderson of course is best known for his “pisseth against the wall” sermon, but is quickly gaining notoriety for his guitar instructional videos. Pastor Anderson does make certain to explain that they do not play any guitar in their services, but if you find yourself in a more appropriate guitar playing situation like out in the woods where there is no organ you might find playing hymns on acoustic handy(I’m not making this up, just watch).
Worship leaders make sure and use this video as a mentoring tool for those up and coming worship leaders. You can thank me and Pastor Anderson later.
Gibson has released a self tuning guitar, they gave it the unfortunate name of ‘Robot Guitar’. How that name passed any level of critique is beyond me. It’s so very typical of the first iteration of any tech advance, where the name overplays the hand. Sooner or later this feature will probably be standard in most guitars and the name won’t make any reference to it. But for now we’ll be stuck with this I suppose.
I’m glad Gibson took a crack at it. If done well it could be a very useful feature. They packed it into a Les Paul which makes sense, with a name like Robot Guitar you’d almost expect a new model. Gibson claims Billy Corgan and Peter Townshend are already ‘using’ it. Using could mean Gibson sent them a free one and they opened the box and said it looks pretty. So I don’t know how much weight you can give that claim.
Robot Guitar Ultra Machine Deluxe auto-corrects strings out of tune and can store up to 6 different tunings. Also has a really cool way of setting intonation. You can checkout videos of it in action on Gibson’s website. I’m really impressed actually, looks well done. Robot retails for $2,900 which is pretty dang hefty. I’ll wait for the feature to become more standard.
Figure it’s time for some gear talk on here since I’m really excited about my new foot controller purchase. A couple years back I switched to Guitar Rig(GR) for my live rig. I never imagined I would be using a complete software rig ever in my life, but that was until I heard Guitar Rig. I used to be, still am I suppose, a collector of as many classic pedals as I could get my hands on. With my Matchless Hotbox being my pride and joy. All multi-effects pedal boards, amp simulators, software solutions I’d heard up until GR sounded sooo bad, I never even considered them. Then my brother begged me to start using GR on a few recording projects we were doing and I was really impressed. My huge complaint with multi-effects units and software apps has been that the sound is so obviously a digital signal, there’s no cabinet breathing, no warmth, no peaks that you can pick out. It’s just all washed and over compressed and just too cute and nice.
One thing GR lets you control in addition to any combination of amps and cabinets you wish is mic placement. I can’t tell you how important that is for sound and GR really hit it out of the park there. So once I realized that the amp/cabinet selections were actually really good, I then got to enjoy the wide selection of other effects. It’s super handy being able to get such a wide tone swing during a live gig. Not to mention the flexibility afforded by the other effects. But sound quality is of the utmost importance and I can honestly say that GR is the only software/multi-effects unit I’ve heard that makes me say “wow” (yes those are quotes around wow). And GR2 has made me even more pleased, but I’m upset that they continue to release major upgrades at a blistering pace, GR3 already is out. Ever heard of minor FREE updates Native Instruments???
So now onto my purchase. I originally bought GR 1 which came with a 4 button (not really banks) 1 expression pedal foot controller. 2 of those buttons are reserved for switching presets, so really you’re left with 2 buttons. That really made things tough, lots of preparation needed to be done on the presets making sure from song to song you could quickly get to each preset. Not an enjoyable situation. So I needed a bigger foot controller and found a Behringer FCB 1010 Midi Foot controller (actually a lot of them) on ebay for dirt cheap. 10 button, 2 expression pedals AND 2 dedicated preset/amp switches. So now I don’t have to use any of the 10 buttons for switching presets and the 2 expression pedals is huge. You always want volume control but many times I need tremolo speed or wah control or other such timings that can’t be tapped out. I can’t wait for it to arrive and get it all setup.
Recently I had the good pleasure of interviewing James Duke (guitar player for John Mark McMillan) as well as review his new release from his new project called “All the Bright Lights.” That record is largely instrumental and is a collection of incredible guitar tones and textures. So when I saw a blog post from James discussing how he gets his tones, it got my attention.
Current Gear:
My Shopping List:
Figure it’s time for some gear talk on here since I’m really excited about my new foot controller purchase. A couple years back I switched to 
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