I pulled up to a gig recently after being hit just a day and a half earlier with the worst sinus infection of my life. Wondering if I'll even be upright after the gig, I unload my truck and setup my stuff. Keep in mind that in addition to my guitar rig, I've recently added a keyboard and just days prior had finished wiring up a rolling rack that holds a combination of mixer/monitor gear for in ear monitoring as well as my acoustic processing. In other words, my portion of the load in and setup is always a little more involved than the rest of the band and I'm already feeling crappy.
I'm there early and, though feeling pretty terrible physically, am looking forward to playing. This is a relatively new venue for us, so its kind of exciting and I knew our little following would be there so I really wanted to make a good showing. This would soon prove to be a chellenge.
Immediately upon making the initial connections and testing out my various signals, I realized how terrible my guitar sounded. I've put more time and money into this rig than I care to admit, but it has always served me well and I take great pride in my tone and the frequent comments I receive from complete strangers about it. I did make some recent guitar and pickup changes and even halved the output power of my beloved Pure64 amp, so I'm immediately thinking it was one of those things that I did that was causing this terrible, thin, high-endy, honky, quacky sound to come out of my rig. Maybe my new Parker DF524 really was thin sounding as I had feared or that I really needed my recently ordered Manlius pickups to arrive. Maybe those TV Jones pickups in my Gretsch Pro Jet were adjusted improperly. But the SG sounded crappy too, and that's always been consistently wonderful. Maybe I had lost a tube or had a funky cord somewhere in my chain. Or maybe it was that occasionally temperamental switch on one of my drive pedals acting up again. The point is that I probably could have gotten better tone out of a 1984 Peavey Decade (remember those?) than I was hearing right now. All I kept thinking is that this sound guy - who kind of had a chip on his shoulder already - thinks I am a complete id10t with too much money to spend on gear I didn't have any clue how to use.
Still having a lot of sinus pressure and with show time coming closer and closer, I had to do whatever necessary to move on. So I played with the EQ on the amp, tried to dial out the badness and dial in some goodness in ways that I've never ran the EQ with only little success and went on with the show. Probably should have just brought in my backup amp, a very cool little Fender Super Champ XD and played the gig with that. Mic'd up it would have been just fine.
So we start the set, and the band's a little rough anyway. I'm sick, my tone sucks, its only our second gig with IEMs, we're at a new club and I'm just trying to get through the night. Set 1 done and over with. OK - got through it. What the h-ll is wrong with my stuff?!
Second set starts and we're starting to cook and finally get into our groove. The people are into it, I'm feeling worse and my tone still sucks. Some of the new songs we introduced tonight also sucked, but we move on. Maybe its just the pressure in my ears causing me to hear things in a degraded state, but everything else sounds great in the IEMs including the pristine clarity of my sinus pressure induced ultra nasaly voice through an all too accurate Shure Beta 87. My God what a great mic, but I digress...
The second set is nearing a close, thank God, and it turns out the elusive problem is about to be revealed. We approach what would normally be one of my favorite times in the night where I strap on (yeah, I chuckled too) my beloved Gibson Custom VOS SG in preparation to cover a couple of G&R songs that I usually nail and a great sing along by Journey to close the set. Knowing I'll be using my wah soon (the awesome Fulltone Clyde Deluxe), I look down to ensure the chicken head knobs on the side are in the proper position and I NOTICE THAT THE FREAKIN' WAH LED INDICATOR WAS ALREADY ON! It had been the entire night.
I spent nearly two thirds of the night playing through a half-cocked wah pedal and didn't even know it. My God I am so stupid and should probably just give up playing let along my quest for ultimate tone!OK, so maybe I can legitimately blame this oversight on some extreme head congestion, but COME ON! I guess the moral of this longer than necessary story is: check the obvious stuff first, bonehead!
God Bless,
J.Vincent
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