In the past few weeks, I’ve learned a couple of Silversun Pickups tunes on the guitar. While I generally love the fuzz tones brought forth by the Smashing Pumpkins and Silversun Pickups, I rarely attempt to play them as I have no real effects pedals to my name to make the songs actually sound awesome.
After getting the itch to learn a few new tunes, I started putting some serious thought into getting an ultimate effects board…I’m not talking about piecing together pedal after pedal…I’m talking about the Lord of the Rings pedal…one pedal to rule them all!
A few days later, I stumbled upon a topic that I had read about years ago, but never really explored…guitar amp modeling.
Essentially, you can use a computer as the Gandalfian effects board you’ve been searching for. And that’s what I did. And it’s beautiful.
Here’s what you need to do to set up something like me.
1. Take guitar out of case. Marvel at its beauty.
2. Plug it into your mixing console with the 1/4 to 1/4 cable. I personally have a Fostex MR-8HD which acts as a recording device as well as a mixer.
3. Run another cord (1/4 to 1/8) from the mixer speaker output to the input of your laptop. In my case, I have an older MacBook which allows me to do this. I know newer models do not have a separate input and output at the same time. Not cool!
4. (Read about the magic that the laptop can do later on in the blog posting).
5. Run a cable (1/8 to 1/4…or whatever your PA speaker uses) to the PA speaker. I believe there are some PA speakers that are in stereo. I guess you would need a Y-split for that (or use of two speakers). In my case, I got the one, so all I need is the one cable.
Voila, you essentially have a system that starts from your guitar and outputs it’s sound to the PA speaker.
So what can the laptop do? Well…a lot of things! The laptop acts as a DAW (digital audio workstation) where it processes all the signals going into the laptop and outputs it with whatever effects you have placed onto them. There are TONS of amp modeling software out there, but I chose to use the Guitar Rig 4 software after some research. I also use Logic Pro but have not played around with it too much at this point (with this current setup).
The Guitar Rig 4 software is pretty flippin’ sweet. You can choose what type of amps you want to use, and add whatever effects you want to use as well. Or you can load up presets of some popular combination (think Stevie Ray Vaughn’s rig). There is also an active community creating presets that you can load into the system. Want that U2 effect for ‘Beautiful Day’? Find it, download it, import it into the software and double click. Voila, done. You now have Edge-tone! Fascinating.
This definitely is the best setup for a cheap (I say cheap while also laughing at the fact that I had to buy a laptop and a PA speaker to accomplish this) price and is less expensive than purchasing a bunch of different amps and effects pedals.
I will be honest…I’m quite the novice when it comes to setting up a rig (live or otherwise) so this post is for those of you out there like me who took awhile to understand a few concepts. I will also mention that I loved the fact that Guitar Rig 4 had a LIMIT button for the output…I noticed some crackling on the PA speaker at one point and thought “Hmm…I must be over driving the signal…better check that out.” and I noticed that the software has a LIMIT button to prevent overdrives that can potentially blow your speaker. Hell yes.
The only thing missing from this setup would be some type of MIDI floorboard so if I wanted to play live, I could switch between effects fast. There are also other hardware devices out there that may make my process easier…you can buy a Gio floorboard which eliminates the need for a mixer and plugs through USB instead of the audio input/output. I’m just writing about what worked for me and if there are people out there that are in similar situations, maybe this can help!
Iplaying: Keep on Rocking in the Free World – Pearl Jam (Toronto – 2009)