The following picture of my ‘62 Fender Strat and Vox AC-30 was taken with a Canon EOS Rebel and edited at www.picnik.com by my favorite photographer, Leslie Brooke, using the theme “1960’s”.

What software or webtools do you use to edit photos?

This year’s tax rebate allowed me to justify two purchases that I wouldn’t have made otherwise.  Meet my two new friends, the Incase Dub Bag and my wife’s Blackberry Curve.  Both products have a massive cult following and both inspire their competitors to refresh their design concepts.  

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I recently used the bag on a trip to Washington D.C. with Fred McKinnon and had no trouble at all carrying it through the airport using its nifty shoulder straps.  On the trip up, I stowed it in the coat closet at the front of the plane and put it above my seat on the way home.  In fact, this bag, though it is larger than a standard carry on, apparently qualified for special treatment since it was a piece of music gear.   

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Brooke is now an official Crackberry fiend. It’s enabling her Twitter and Twitpic habit. She’s able to surf the net at lightening speed. I can’t make up random facts now without her trying to confirm them using Google. If she could just figure out how to run every facet of our business from the passenger seat in the car, she probably would. What I do know for sure is that she’s never going back to a phone without a full qwerty keyboard. Thank God for opposable thumbs.

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What did you spend your check on?        

I’ve been an effects junky since the Reagan administration. By popular demand (about 3 of my geek guitar buddies, which is a pretty big deal) I will be posting the effects rig of as many artists as I can to help you, the guitar player, reach sonic nirvana without going poor buying the random crap sold at your local music store.

I’m inspired by the video Mike and Barry’s rig that I was led to this morning over at http://mercyme.org/blog. I’ll be hunting for some of my favorites and would like for you to request any that you are having a hard time finding. If nothing turns up on the web, I’ll gladly contact the artist and request an interview.

Please let me know what you think.

How many of us find joy and appreciation in going through sound check at church or a concert event? I can imagine very few, unless you use some type of personal system like an Aviom setup. For the past 17 years, I’ve felt less anxiety about going to the dentist than I have running through sound check. I discovered this past weekend that the problem wasn’t the process but the methodology that has driven me mad all these years.

The following information may seem very elementary for some of you, like I’m trying to teach you a better way to wipe your butt, however, our typical routine may appear to be very familiar to most.  I learned “The New Way” while watching Sonicflood set up.  Please feel free to let me know if I missed something, as I was taking notes while trying to not pester the front-of-house tech too much.

The Old Way:

Band shows up, band sets up, band gets mic’d for the board. Then each member of the band, say from stage left to stage right, asks each other member to play as they shout out to the sound tech whether they need less or more of that voice or instrument in their floor wedge or in-ear monitor (IEM). There is a constant need to restrain people from the talking or playing, especially the guitarists (voice of experience) as each person thinks that the sound check is a perfect time to warm up by playing Van Halen’s “Eruption.” The band then runs through a song together, with each member wanting to stop each time they want to make an adjustment to their mix.

As a result of having to travel left to right on the board for each musician, the sound tech is found dead from exhaustion. The singers have left the building and sit in a comfortable chair at Suckbucks drowning in caffeine and sugar while the musicians work through counseling for the public outburst caused by having to run their floor monitor lower than the level of the actual amplifier that they so reluctantly placed in the hall closet or isolation box.

In my experience with The Old Way, the person that is most satisfied with their mix is the one that was most aggressive with the sound tech.  Oftentimes, the monitor becomes tuned less for reference, as it is intended, but more closely resembles an album mix.  The worst case scenario is one in which the vocalists are forced to share a mix with the instrumentalists.  Don’t do that.  Ever.

Average time: 30 minutes

The New Way:

Band shows up, band sets up, band gets mic’d for the board. Each member of the band, after testing that their amp is live and then warming up their chops with the Volume pot in the off position, holds up one hand in a fist until the sound tech signals what is being tuned, one board channel at a time. The musician, keeping their hand in the air, either points up or down to signal a change needed in their wedge or IEM. A thumbs up would then be given to signal a good level.

The beauty of this method in my eyes is that it would then be hard for the musicians to get lost in their own noodling and forget to tune their setup. The hard part is being able to gauge where you want everything to sit in your mix when only one person is playing at a time. After running through a song, any final adjustments can then be made.

Average time: 7 minutes

Does anybody make use of the “arm in the air” method?

I’ve been playing guitar for over 15 years and if there is one thing that drives me completely nuts it would have to be the addiction that musicians have with gear. Whatever we have right now is typically never enough. I’ve gone through a dozen guitars and half a dozen amps over the years but I’ve reached a point where I’m less concerned with impressing my contemporaries with my latest greatest gadget and more interested in contributing the closest aural presence that a band leader is envisioning for the song.

As you might have noticed in the picture above, I’m a Strat guy. Right now, I’m a one Strat guy, but I would love to have something that could serve dual roles and be a backup for my #1, preferably an American Standard with piezo saddles and a stereo output, for those moments when I want the acoustic sound but can’t justify lugging my Gibson around.

See what I mean? Gear addict. Me wants more.

I’ve had a Gibson SG for backup in the past, but that was sold during a lean period to pay bills. In dreaming of its replacement, I started thinking recently about all the excellent guitars that I’ve parted ways with in an effort to please my insatiable hunger for gear. One guitar in particular that I miss greatly is a mid 90’s seafoam green Peavey Predator that I picked up at a local pawn shop. This guitar is a perfect example of how overlooked Peavey has been over the years. It was setup better than most Strats that I’ve played, the stock pickups were hot and crisp, but that wasn’t enough. Despite the advise of local guitar hero Jim Mason, who is now a Nashville session guitarist, I swapped the pickups for Fender Texas Specials. These are the pickups I so loved in the Fender SRV guitar that I’d sold in 1999 to buy my wife’s engagement ring, a decision I don’t regret. Add to the Peavey an lsr roller nut and custom wiring, and you’ve got one hot axe. That I sold for $120 a year later. ‘Cause I’m stupid.

Now I have my eyes on a Fender Jeff Beck model and I see how I could have saved myself the trouble and just kept what worked best and stopped trying to show off my gear.

Musicians, unlike construction workers, like to make the very mistaken connection between name brand hardware and skill. How many people do you know that throw $2,500 at a Gibson Les Paul when an Epiphone would do (with or without a pickup upgrade)? When a construction worker goes to buy a tool, he evaluates the needs of the job, the cost, the quality of the tool, and how long its useful life will be.

One of the most famous examples of backwards thinking would be that of Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar, which, depending on the accuracy of the story, cost him less than $200 to build and netted him MILLION$ due to his investment in wood shedding (meaning, committing to learning technique while blocking out distractions). Eddie has teamed up with Fender to produce a $25,000 replica of said $200 guitar. It is worth looking at that from a spiritual perspective, because the same type of logic has been produced in the church. Imagine the Sermon on the Mount reframed as the Sermon in the Megachurch Convention Center. My mind is all over the map on that one, so I’ll digress…

I’m learning to be satisfied with less and accomplish the mission at the least possible cost. I hope that my guitar bling doesn’t come to the point of impressing people more than my guitar skill does in the same way that I hope that the church building doesn’t impress people more than the message of the Church does. Europe has some of the most impressive church buildings in the world. They sit empty. Hopefully the American Church isn’t headed in the same direction.

Are you, as musician, over equipped for your mission, looking to buy more stuff or are you satisfied with what you have?