Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Making Do With Little

I tried an experiment today which got me thinking about how overly extravagant my full rig may be when all I'm required to do is to be a simple rhythm guitarist. My usual rig is a whopping 20kg, and I knew there wasn't going to be space at New Heart ministries' rehearsal room to accommodate my pedal board.

So, I did the unthinkable. I figured out that all I really needed was an amp sim, something to warm the signal up and a simple overdrive, so I went with the following:


The SansAmp GT-2, set to the California amp on clean with a centered mic.
The Xotic EP Booster v2, which is set to unity gain.
The Paul Cochrane Timmy, which I set to a lower volume.

After experimenting for a bit, I concluded a few things:
  • The California amp model on the GT-2 is quite hot by itself, and when the drive is turned up past 20%, it begins to break up slightly. All I needed to get a light crunch (of great tonal satisfaction, by the way) was to drive the GT-2 harder with the EP Booster.
  • I usually set the EP booster to 30% when I'm using it in my big board, but over here I could afford to get the signal slightly hotter, so I turned it up halfway. The really cool side effect of cranking it so much is the natural compression you get out of the pedal, so a compressor wasn't really needed.
  • Lastly, I went with the Timmy knowing that a light transparent overdrive will give just the right push for very little solos I had, and I didn't want to drastically change the character of the tone. Now that the signal was hotter, I had to turn down the treble on the Timmy to compensate (as I shared in a previous post, the Timmy has reverse-taper knobs for treble and bass)
The  results were very enlightening. It turns out I really don't need that much to get my desired tone!

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