WorshipGuitarist

This weekend, our worship pastor will be in Florida with our high school students, so he asked me to head up the worship stuff. Now, I don’t sing, so that duty will be delegated to my wife and our rhythm guitarist (we usually have more singers, but I prefer not to have a small choir on stage). My role has been/will be to choose songs (who is singing what, key, etc.), arrange the music, and run the rehearsal and/or soundcheck.

Here’s our setlist for this week:

• Your Grace Is Enough (B)
• Not To Us (B)
• Be Thou My Vision (B)
• How Great Is Our God (G)
• Finding Who We Are (D)

My wife has kind of a “folk-y” voice that lends itself well to traditional music, so we picked an old hymn - Be Thou My Vision. I’m doing something a little different with it so that it won’t be the typical piano block chord arrangement. We won’t even have a keyboard player this weekend, so that wouldn’t have been an option anyway. We’re going to do the intro to Coldplay’s Yellow (except in 3/4) and maintain that same style throughout the song. We haven’t played it together yet, but I think it will work out.

Check out a brief clip I recorded. I did the (really simple) drum loop using the ReDrum machine in Reason and the rest was done in GarageBand. I plugged the guitar in direct and used an amp simulator plugin (Liverpool Clean) along with a Bad Monkey and Fulldrive2 Mosfet.

Just thought I’d post a shot of my new board, now that the Crybaby and Crunch Box are gone.

My chain goes like this:

Ernie Ball VP Jr. Volume Pedal - Nice smooth taper, great for swells. I would rather have a Goodrich, but the EB is about 1/2 the price and works really well.

Korg DT-10 tuner - Not as accurate as the Peterson StroboStomp, but much cheaper (I picked mine up used for about $65). It’s also much easier to read than the Boss TU-2. I should probably put it before the volume pedal, since it makes some weird noises while tuning if other pedals are engaged.

Fulltone Fulldrive2 Mosfet - This one’s new, and I haven’t messed with it much yet. I think that it will mostly be used for solos and lead parts.

Bad Monkey - This is a surprisingly good pedal for $30. It has a lot of low end and sounds much better than it should. Unfortunately, it’s a bit noisy (I guess due to the cheap components), so I will probably replace it with something else. Top contenders include the Fulltone OCD, Barber Direct Drive or Barber LTD.

Line 6 Echo Park - I’m using this one for tempo-based delay to get that “Where the Streets Have No Name” kind of sound. The tap tempo is really easy to use, and the dotted-eighth setting is awesome. You can choose 3 different sounds - Tape, Analog, or Digital - and each has it’s own character. You can also dial in a different modulation (Wow & Flutter, Trem, or Chorus) to each delay type.

Boss DD-3 - I pretty much only use this for solos. For this application, it works really well.

Well, that’s my board for now. I’m planning to add a wah in the near future (probably a Teese or a Fulltone Clyde) and a couple of distortion boxes. It works pretty well for me right now, but I think that it will always be a work in progress.

Last week, I spent some time with our other guitarist tweaking our setup at the church building. It was time well spent. We adjusted our effects and amps, set EQs, and adjusted overall levels. Things sounded much better last Sunday. Everything was more balanced, and there was actual thump in the bass.

As a result of this tweak session, I ditched a couple of pedals: the Crunch Box and the Crybaby. The CB was just too fizzy to be useful in my setup. Maybe it works better in more typical 6V6-based Fender amps than my EL84-based Pro Jr. I also sold the Dunlop Crybaby. My only real problem with this pedal was that the sweep was too narrow. It was OK for rhythm, but it never really got vocal enough for lead.

I recently bought a used 1×12 closed-back speaker cab (from a guy on The Gear Page) and a new Hellatone 30 speaker (from Avatar Speakers). I got it on Wednesday evening and installed the speaker in the cabinet. Yesterday I brought it up to the church and cranked it. What a difference. The sound is huge. No more farting out on the bass strings - just deep, resonant crunchy goodness.

I ordered a new Fulldrive2 MOSFET from Fulltone Custom Effects to give me a second overdrive/boost option. I’ve never played one before, but everybody uses one, so I have to give it a shot. It’s on the truck for delivery today, so I should be able to test it out this weekend.