SOUND ADVICE

Four of the best solo acoustic players on the live stage offer up advice on gear and how to overcome some of the perils and pitfalls of playing in front of an audience

“I’m using my signature Maton acoustics through an Udo Roesner Da Capo amp. I still use the AER Pocket Tools preamp as a direct signal into the PA, and then I go into the amp and then out of the amp and into the PA as well. So you get all the amp frequencies, all the direct frequencies and that way you can use your pickup and your microphone flat out. You get all that tone at that level with no feedback, because you cover the soundhole and crank the mic flat out.

“When I’m playing solo I want to sound as big as a whole band – the thud of a bass drum, the roundness of a bass guitar, so when you’re in the audience it feels like your head is really close to my guitar. In order for me to get those frequencies I need to drive the electronics in the equipment so that it’s delivering everything without compression, limiting or any of that stuff. My soundman, Steve, and I have everything flat and nothing is boosted: no boosted bass, no boosted highs, no fake high-end switch. You’ll often see a ‘tone switch’ and if you press it you’ll begin to sound like The Eagles – that smiley EQ. You don’t want that when you’re playing on your own because our ears like all the frequencies where the voice is – that’s where the melody on the guitar is, it’s all in the mids. So it’s, ‘How do I get the good mids and have plenty of bass, some air around the top, but not glassy, cutting your ear off?’

“In most cases where we show up, we go into the hall, we plug in, we get a sound, we have dinner, we do the show, you need minimum fuss. You don’t want to spend hours dealing with feedback and problems with the monitors – you don’t want any of that stuff and you can eliminate all of it if you do it this way. Cover the soundhole, get the sound on stage the way you like it and put it out there.

“People think that I have to have the monitors right and that’s all I care about, but that’s completely wrong. What I care about is the PA and the sound I get out in the room, because that’s my world. So we get that good and then Steve brings the monitors in. Basically, I have side fill – like a little PA in itself – facing me from the side and I have my guitar pretty loud and big in them. Then I have a little bit of guitar in the wedges in front, but mostly voice, so when I sing I can hear my voice well, but I’ve got the guitar sound in the side fills surrounding me.”

“When I’m playing solo I want to sound as big as a whole band – the thud of a bass drum, the roundness of a bass guitar” TOMMY EMMANUEL, CGP

www.tommyemmanuel.com

“It starts with the Ibanez guitar and a triplesource pickup system. I have a Fishman Rare Earth mic blend and a Fishman Power Tap, which is a bridge plate transducer and it’s really great for the percussive stuff. Three pickups come out of the guitar through effectively three different outputs – there’s a stereo output and a mono output – into my pedalboard, which has a little Bose Ultralight digital mixer on it, so I can EQ and compress the pickups. The magnetic pickup goes through a Zoom MultiStomp, which is a single footprint multi-effects and it’s amazing. That’s basically for special effects that I only want on the strings as opposed to the ‘drums’. And then the whole thing goes into a TC Helicon VoiceLive, which is a guitar and vocal multi-effects processor – I have different settings for every song, pretty much. That goes straight into the DIs to the house. I also have a Boss OC-5 octave pedal and my Blackstar Sonnet that I use for on-stage monitoring.

“My personal approach is not to produce the perfect sound of an acoustic guitar live. That’s not what I’m about at all. I want to use the electronics creatively to get a different sound. For example, the humbucker is quite warm and what it does is provide the information – the note content – which sounds like a weird thing to say, but quite often I see people play and they have the most beautiful, perfect acoustic guitar sound that’s really rich and loads of top sparkly treble, loads of nice bottom end, loads of breathy quality… but you can’t actually hear the notes they’re playing. The notes live in the midrange and they don’t have a pickup in a guitar that is direct enough to communicate what notes they’re playing to the audience. Once you’re in the room and you’ve got the reverbs of the room and the acoustics of the PA and everything, things can get lost really quickly. The overall sound is nice, but you can’t hear the tune.”

“I monitor through my own little Blackstar amps and they’re very close to what good onstage monitors would sound like at a nice venue. I don’t have them up very loud, and sometimes I’ll position them in weird places – right off to the sides, so basically I have the monitors pointing at my ears rather than up at my face. I don’t like to have them in front of me. If you imagine a festival stage with a row of monitors on the front of the stage – that’s a nightmare for acoustic guitar.”

“My approach is not to get the perfect sound of an acoustic guitar live. That’s not what I’m about. I want to use electronics creatively to get a different sound” JON GOMM

www.jongomm.com

“I go from my guitar into a volume pedal. My cable is stereo because I have a mic [inside the guitar] and I always think it’s best to have the pickup separate because I need to EQ them separately. From there I go to an LR Baggs preamp just to boost the volume of the guitar and I use a couple of effects, the Boss OC-3 octave pedal and a Strymon Big Sky reverb. From there, straight into an Acus Pre Stage 6 preamp, which is really state of the art, really good. So I have one signal, which is the pickup going to channel one, and channel two is the microphone. For the microphone

I don’t go through any effects pedals, it goes straight from the guitar to the volume pedal and into the preamp, because the microphone doesn’t need anything, only a bit of reverb. I take my own monitors. I’m the kind of guy who works really hard to get his own sound environment, and when I play I want exactly that environment. It took me ages to understand that and how to do it. For a while I had my sound engineer coming with me to every gig and I didn’t take my monitor. But this monitor is fairly small and the volume is good enough to carry through the gig.

“The biggest challenge on stage is not finding your comfort zone. When you are playing at home you think you are God, then suddenly you are on stage and the sound is not there. I think if you’re not happy, nobody’s going to be happy. That’s my main message: make sure you’re monitoring right and take the monitoring with you. Monitors all sound different. You might be lucky one evening and have an amazing sound, but I’ve done so many gigs, believe me, 80 per cent of the time you’re not happy with it.

“This Yamaha guitar I have is the best nylon string to get a sound with. I have more expensive Yamaha guitars, but my old GCX is my favourite. Acoustically it’s not that great, but with the microphone and the pickup it just works perfectly. I think nylon string is more percussive and you’ve got to get a really good microphonic sound. On the steel string I use 70 per cent magnetic [pickup] from [pickup maker and inventor of the Rare Earth design] Mike Vanden and 30 per cent mic. The nylon is the opposite; 70 per cent mic sound and 30 per cent pickup.”

“I work hard to get my own sound environment, and when I play I want exactly that environment. It took me ages to understand that and how to do it” ANTONIO FORCIONE

www.antonioforcione.com

“I plug my guitar’s pickups straight into a mixing desk on stage, which at the moment is the Bose T8S. So I’m able to mix, EQ and gain stage all the pickups that are in my guitar correctly – add a bit of compression and things like that – and it also leaves me with some creative routing options for my guitar pedals.

“I have my magnetic pickup plugged into a channel on my mixer, I can then take the output from that channel, run that into, say, a distortion pedal and then run that pedal back into its own channel on the mixer. In the case of an octave pedal, for instance, it allows me to do things that are not on the pedal, like compression and noise gate.

“The final three pedals in my rig are stereo delay, stereo looper and stereo reverb, so everything else gets mixed down in the mixer and sent out from there into the delay, looper and reverb and out left and right into front-of-house.

“I have four pickups: a piezo, mic and magnetic, and a ‘kick drum pickup’, which is essentially a little piezo under the saddle or bridge plate that will pick [percussive technique] up. This way I get to have extra control, so I can have a separate channel on my mixer, which has a kick-drum gate on it and lots of compression and low end, and I can send that out to its own channel at front-of-house, getting sent to the subs in the venue. It adds a bit of textural low end, but only when I hit it; it’s purely percussive because the noise gate is turned up so much it doesn’t pick up any of the guitar playing.

“The main challenge for me is twofold: first it’s making the guitar sound like a guitar. The solution for that would be combining pickup sources, though I’m able to create the microphonic quality of a studio recording a little bit with the internal mic. The acoustic guitar sound is actually coming from my transducer, which is not under the saddle, it’s under the bridge plate inside the guitar. It’s the K&K Trinity, the three little bugs that sit on the bridge plate, I prefer that to the under-saddle pickup, because it’s a little bit further away from the ends of the strings and you get a little less of that quacky piezo sound. Then the DiMarzio Black Angel magnetic pickup I’m using for some extra warmth in the strings. So by blending those three sources you can get a pretty good acoustic-guitar sound.

“The other thing would be understanding where your guitar peaks. My Indian rosewood Cuntz model has quite a steep peak at about 196Hz – a sort of G or F#, fourth fret, fifth fret D string kinda thing – and it does cause problems at volume.

So on my mixing desk I make sure I use a parametric EQ to scoop that right out and that helps a lot.”

“The main challenge for me is twofold: first it’s making the guitar sound like a guitar… The other thing would be understanding where your guitar peaks” MIKE DAWES

www.mikedawes.com