about me
I have been playing guitar for about 15 years, and I started playing in church as soon as I could strum a handful of open chords on acoustic. I am currently the main electric guitarist in the band at a church that sees about 800 people every weekend. We play a lot of the current P&W favorites (Tomlin, Redman, Hillsong, Baloche, Brewster, etc.).
The purpose of this blog is to document my attempts to address the challenges of incorporating the electric guitar into a modern worship setting. Most of this will be of a technical nature, and will include gear reviews (guitars, amps, effects, etc).
I am 30 years old, and I’ve been married for almost 7 years. My wife and I have a 5 year old son and we are currently caring for a foster child (born in January ‘07) who we hope to adopt. I have a music degree in theory & composition. I currently teach orchestra and guitar in public school grades 6-8.
Hello,
I’m having an issue with excessive noise (humming & feedback) from my amp. When I touch any metal part of my guitar, majority of it goes away. The more distortion I have, the worse it is. I use a Boss GT-3 pedal, but I have the feedback whether I’m running through it or not. It’s worse when I’m on stage than at home, but it’s at either. I have the same problem with either of my guitars or amps. I play using the bridge pickup 99.9% of the time and have the following equipment:
Gibson Les Paul with 80’s model Seymour Duncan Super Distortion Pickup
Fender Jimmy Vaughan Strat with HSS pickups (Seymour Duncan SH-6 pickup)
Randall RG 100 ES Head with Randall cabinet
Randall RG 75
If you can give me any information about what is causing this or how to reduce it, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks,
Darrell
Suffolk, VA
You’ve got a grounding problem somewhere. First of all, check your cables. One of them might be bad. If none of them are the culprit, it’s probably the wiring in your guitar. Did you wire the pickups yourself? It’s really easy to miss a ground loop somewhere. I would go back and double check everything with a good schematic. They’re pretty easy to find with a quick Google search.
Good luck!
Hey,
I am a Worshipbassist in New Bern NC. Just wanted to give you some feedback. I love your blog. In an earlier post you commented about stage volume. We are on an Aviom system and it is awesome! It took some work but there is no mistaking the overall sound quality improvement. We are currently building a complete drum enclosure to finally end the last bit of stage volume. If you have any ?s I would love to be of some assistance. Please visit my church’s web site. I did the majority of our sound system wiring, setting, etc. Thanks for a great blog.
We’re kind of in a semi-temporary building right now. We will probably be there for the next 5 years while we develop and build on land that we just finished paying off.
When we go to the new building, we will almost certainly use the Aviom system. I don’t care for the wedge monitors that we’re currently using - they’re too directional and keep you anchored to one spot.
Hey there, i lead worhship for our youth group every week here in Washington state. I play a les paul through an AC15. Its pretty good sound, but stage noise has been an issue, which makes it so we have to turn down A LOT. do you think i should buy a couple cabs and put them on either side of the stage, and take away the mic for my amp?
Dude, you should build some isolation boxes and store the amps offstage. Mic the cabs from within the boxes and that will really cut down on the stage noise.