Musician Gear & Tech Discussion

We just recently lost our rythm guitar player. Our band played three peice this past weekend we have a great P.A.
I had a friend who's ear I trust come and listen and critique the sound. He said I need a Chunkier sound on my guitar.
I have a crate tube amp V32, American Strat, all kinds of pedals, I am thinking maybe I just need to rethink the way I like to e.q. my amp, as lead and very capable rythm player I can handle it as a 3 piece untill we find the right rythm player. I just need to fatten up my sound.
Doe's anyone have any suggestions or comments that might help?

If you have a good pa, the easiest thing to do would be to send your guitar signal in the pa thru a delay unit with 10-30 ms of delay. This will do a doubling effect on your guitar. The first Van Halen record was done this way. If you pan right and left, one side has an unaffected guitar signal, the other has a slight slapback delay. Done right this will make your guitar sound huge. If you put to much delay it will get watery sounding. You dont want to hear the repeats, have them tight to just make it sound like you played a second track on a recording.

This is the easiest thing I can think of for you to do without adding a second guitar amp. I am the only guitarist in my band and I have used tricks like this to fatten up my guitar.

Latley Ive gone back to a 20 watt tube amp live and close mic with a SM 57. Try not to use chorus much on your rig, to me it muds up the sound. Odd as this might sound cut back the gain on your amp and sometimes your guitar will sound bigger.

Good Luck.

Thanks JW123, I have split my signal thru a seperate effects processor (Nanoverb) this splits my signal and pans it hard left and hard right, we mike everything, I use a Sinheiser 906e silver large diaghram mike on my amp and split the signal at the board, I use to do this on my acoustic and it sounded huge thru the p.a. I am sure it will do the same for my electric.
In the old days I use to use to Marshall JCM 50 watt half stacks and ran them in stereo, but as I get older and wiser (weaker) I think this will be easier to split the signal at the mixer, my wife runs our sound and she said she might even tweak the e.q. settings a little differently.
I will let you know how it turns out.

sorry that should have read 2 marshall half stacks

Haley,

In my old days I used to split my signal with one of the original Whammy Pedals to a Mesa Triple Rectifier (150 watts) and a Sunn Model T (150 watts). The Whammy had chorus setting that you adjusted the width with the pedal. I could get a huge sound that way, but on the volume side it was total overkill. Occasionally I hook this setup up cause I still have both amps to get a comparison to my current sound. Im finding that a really good small (15-30 watt) tube amp sounds huge miced up. If your wife is good with sound, you might could run out of the slave on your amp thru the delay and then feed that into a seperate channel and she could blend the 2 together. A lot of times all those amps tend to cancel each other out when you run a couple of halfstacks. My little 20 watter covers anything from 100 seats to 500 fed into the pa of course. And I can really push the amp into that power tube distortion that I love to hear.

Good Luck

I am using a crate all tube v32 it is a thirty watt amp, sorry I wasn't very clear the 2 marshalls were in the 80's. I currently like the same setup as you a small combo amp that I can crank up, we play some festival type settings outside as in last weekend on the Kemah Plaza stage, and we also play small clubs up to 200 people so I like to keep my stage volume reletively low so our sound person (my wife) has more control over the mix. Our p.a. is 10,000 watts so we can run it in stereo. In the smaller venue's we just use half the power with one top and one sub on each side of the stage, in the larger areas we use double 18 inch subs with double the tops and 2 times the power on each side of the stage.

I have other guitars but my fav. is my american standard strat that I put a JB Junior in the lead position I also have a Johnson Marquis amp it is a combo amp that has all the emmulators and effects built in, it has a Ax7 preamp tube and has stereo out, it gets one of the best lead sounds around but the rythm sound is not as good as an all tube combo like I am currently using I think that re-adjusting my e.q. and running stereo is what I am going to try. I am getting together with that friend I was talkilng about who's ear I trust, we are going to try a bunch of different things tonight and I will let you guy's know what comes out of it. Thanks for the advise SP.

Thank you guy's, JW123 that fattened up my sound I tried a bunch of different things and wound up going right back to the stereo panned hard left and hard right with one side dry and the other with a 10 millisecond delay on one side my friend that helped me already has his p.a. set up in his music room so I just took my mixer rack over and plugged into his power and connected everything in the mixer and I'll leave it all connected so all I have to do at the gig is still just plug into the same channel of the snake that I always did, my signal is split at the mixer
S. P. I tried my Johnson Marquis and it sounded great on the leads but there is just something about an all tube crunch that just sounds better for rythm, another thing I have noticed about these modeling type amps is you can't get feedback, which I will use a lot especially at the end of a heavy rock song with that big concert style ending. So I will continue to use the Johnson in my music room for practice and leave that crate tube amp in the trailer for gigs. Thanks again everyone!

Haley, Basically you are faking a doubled guitar track. A tight delay will sound bigger, there is a point where it seperates and you hear the delay. This is also a great way to fatten up vocals if anyone is reading this. On our recordings we do this with the vocals. I ussually actually double a strat and a les paul hard right and left on recordings. Im glad that worked cause it was the simplest thing I could think of without adding gobs of equipment. The little amp Im using sounds so huge that I dont even do this anymore, of course live I play a Les Paul and they are a lot thicker sounding to my ears live than my Strat.

Good Luck

We played last night Saturday Dec.20th at B-Jiggers at the Holiday in on the Seawall in Galveston and It worked jw123 my guitar sounded huge nice and fat. When I used my neck position pickup man what a great blues sound I had that same big fat blues sound like John Mayer gets.
I would suggest any one try this but your p.a. has to be run in stereo! we play a lot of Van Halen, Eruption always gets everyones attention but last night I saw Jaws on the floor because of that huge sound! woohoo!

Haley,

If you guys are running in stereo you might want to try this trick on your vocals also.

We run our pa in mono and this trick actully works in mono also if you run into that at some point. Stereo would be cool to do, Ive just never done that live.

I just scanned over this and didn't read every word, so maybe someone already pointed this out, but the EQ will make a difference too, as per your original thoughts. That's my method for getting a bigger, fatter sound. I use lotsa bass anyway, I want enough treble to cut glass and enough bass it sounds like a 10 foot bulldog barking behind me when I go for a low A or such.

I run a Fender Super Reverb and/or a Peavey MX, the Peavey is run into a Kustom 2x12 cab (1967 rolled & pleated job). I Set it for plenty bass, around 6-7 or so and add mids until it fattens up. Mids both accent the bass and make it sound bigger. Your Crate should be able to do similar, if it gets good bass response.

Add some delay, and if you have stereo capability and pan it like JW advised, you should have wall to wall sound and it should sound huge too. Even clean, that's what I use the MX for, no such thing as distortion on the clean channel and it sounds like a full stack but clean with just a 2x12 cab. The bass will punch you in the back and "woof" even at fairly low volume levels. Like a 10 foot bulldog...