This is actually pretty fascinating, and it has an unexpected guest show up. But I think they connected 319 effect pedals here:
This is actually pretty fascinating, and it has an unexpected guest show up. But I think they connected 319 effect pedals here:
I'm not lazy. I just work so fast I'm always done.
Once I had the money to buy them, I bought a bunch of effects pedals, and I plugged them all in. I think I had two distortion pedals, a wah wah pedal, my vintage MXR Flanger (which my dad bought for me for my 15th birthday, I think it was), and a couple or three of those Line 6 modeler pedals, the delay, the modulation pedal and maybe the filter pedal. So I turned them all on, and the noise all of them together made was horrendous. Absolutely unusable. Adrian Belew is right, you get the best results with just one or two effects at a time.
The Edge of U2 has a sizable pedalboard. He continues to tour and perform live with all the original pedals used on every recorded song.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
Did you get them lined up like this? Nikki's signal chain.jpg
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
PRobably the Bob Bradshaw CAE system. Bob started off building effects switch units back around 84-85. He originally built a few for some of the studio guitarists in LA, eventually building a system for Steve Lukather, who took it on tour with Toto (Luke took Bradshaw on tour with him as well, appointing Bradshaw as his new guitar tech). Andy Summers, Trevor Rabin and David Gilmour all replaced their Pete Cornish built pedalboards with Bradshaw systems (I gather that Gilmour subsequently reverted to using Cornish gear). He also built systems for Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Peter Frampton, Steve Vai, and lots of other people. Depending on what the client asks for, they could do everything from turning effects on and off, to changing patches on MIDI effects, to selecting between multiple amp inputs and so on.
I remember Guitar World doing a piece on Bradshaw in the late 80's, where he gave a few comments about each of his clients. He said that Andy Summers had come to his shop, after seeing Frampton's system when the two of them played in an all star band that Paul Shaffer put together for one of David Letterman's anniversary specials. He said Andy came in, demoed Bob's personal system, and liked it so much, he asked one for exactly like, which is a little different from the way it usually works. But Andy was insistent, he liked Bob's system, thought it sounded great. So Bob said he got duplicates of all the effects he had in his own setup, and even sold Andy the Tri-chorus rack unit because they couldn't find another one (apparentl, it was only built for a short period, so finding one for sale wasn't easy). Then like a year later, Andy appeared on a documentary on British TV about the history of electric guitar, and demonstrated his CAE system. Bob said it really meant a lot to him because it was listening to the Police records that inspired to get into working with guitar electronics and building effects/amp control systems in the first place.
On the other end of the spectrum was Prince. Bob said he never actually meant His Purpleness. Instead, Prince's guitar tech came to the shop, with a bunch of effects units and told him what Prince wanted. So Bob builds the rig, and takes it to a rehearsal or soundcheck or whatever, and Prince never shows up. So he shows the guitar tech how to do operate the rig, and presumably the tech showed Prince how to do it. BUt then Bob said he had gotten word that Prince didn't like the rig, and was going to send it back. He said sometimes getting people to do something differnet works out great, and sometimes it doesn't, and this was apparently the latter in operation.
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