Gaps between songs during gigs. Guitarist fiddling with Effects pedals/amp to get "the perfect tone"!

[TimR]

I played with a guitarist who had a £6k Martin. 

 

He would have been better off spending £5k of it on guitar lessons. 

[Captain Bassman]

3 hours ago, Captain Bassman said:

I cannot bear the complete inability of some musicians (from any instrument discipline) to keep quiet between songs. But it’s 9 times out of 10 the guitarist in my years of experience.

 

Learn your settings/effects/changes ad infinitum before the gig and if you need to retune between songs just mute yourself. It’s not difficult…

 

Nothing worse than inane knob twiddling or egotistical fret w*nkery between songs when there should be disciplined quiet whilst the next song is introduced. Or, even better, segue cleanly and professionally into the next song.

 

You don’t fork out 150 quid for top name tickets to see them p*ssing around unprofessionally before the first set or between songs. Neither should the casual pub goer or wedding guest be subjected to this.

 

Anyway, rant over… 😡😂

 

[yorks5stringer]

You lot are effin amateurs....get yourself a banjo player, their loud tuning during and after every song cuts across any interbreak communication with the audience and turns the most placid bassist into a raging maniac. You will then end up treasuring your formerly delinquent guitarist!

[Nicko]

13 hours ago, Captain Bassman said:

Learn your settings/effects/changes ad infinitum before the gig and if you need to retune between songs just mute yourself. It’s not difficult…

 

This.  My band used to develop the setlist for a gig and play the setlist as we were going to perform it a couple of times before gigging.  We already knew the songs the rehearsal was simply to make the changes smooth.  Our singer was a little uncomfortable ad-libbing any intros so I used to get him to practice those too.

[uk_lefty]

12 hours ago, TimR said:

I played with a guitarist who had a £6k Martin. 

 

He would have been better off spending £5k of it on guitar lessons. 

I have grown so tired of the "all the EXPENSIVE gear, no idea" brigade. Rehearsals are not to play through the songs, it's show and tell of "I've got a £1000 effects pedal, listen to this" before producing a sound you can never ever think of an actual use for. It's one of the big warning signs when auditioning people and why the audition should go on for 3 or 4 sessions so you can let their bad habits creep out. 

[DiMarco]

Love that notion. Expensive gear is largely played by shoe gazing lawyers and dentists who do not belong on stage. Hahaha.

Oh and by me. The bored IT dude who believes more is more and less is less.

 

Either way, It is perfectly possible to set up an fxboard with analog stompboxes and still have your tones available quickly.

The guitarist can use a looper like Boss MS-3 for instance.

 

But also keep entertaining people in between songs. This what a frontman does. Any band without a real frontman is boring af.

 

[mep]

Video a gig and edit out the songs and make him watch the inbetween bits of him. What will also surprise you all is How much time he takes.

[Geek99]

18 hours ago, rushbo said:

 

 

I worked with a guitarist who used the oldest Korg MultiFX thing in the world. It was huge and clunky, but he'd studied it, knew it backwards, forwards and possibly even in braille and could get any noise most people would want or care about. He always asked for a setlist a day or two in advance, so he knew where he was with his settings, but that was a small price to pay for a seamless performance.

 

 

 

 

* citation needed

Maybe he wasn’t actually a guitarist…

[fretmeister]

Helix would be perfect.

 

As would him not being an insufferable eijit. I managed to play For Whom The Bell Tolls and Sweet Home Alabama with the same settings on a Dual Rec with just a tweak of the guitar volume.

So can he.

 

With a Helix he can set up an entirely different patch per song, and within that patch have footswitchable options. It's like having 128 different rigs with you.

And that's just scratching the surface of the capabilities.

 

 

[geoham]

10 minutes ago, fretmeister said:

Helix would be perfect.

 

As would him not being an insufferable eijit. I managed to play For Whom The Bell Tolls and Sweet Home Alabama with the same settings on a Dual Rec with just a tweak of the guitar volume.

So can he.

 

With a Helix he can set up an entirely different patch per song, and within that patch have footswitchable options. It's like having 128 different rigs with you.

And that's just scratching the surface of the capabilities.

 

 

Absolutely agree on this - it's almost how I use it, and feel I'm barely scratching the surface. I've a couple of core tones, with switchable drive, octave and chorus within them. Plus a few song-specific patches. A guitarist could have a field day!

[Stub Mandrel]

14 hours ago, Captain Bassman said:

if you need to retune between songs just mute yourself.

There is a reason why decent tuners have a mute setting...

[rushbo]

19 minutes ago, Geek99 said:

Maybe he wasn’t actually a guitarist…

 

That's the weird thing... he was a gen-u-wine. 100%, died in the wool guitarist. But he was incredibly sensible and moderate, too. And a great player - one of those annoying musicians who just played everything really well all the time. When we played live, he brought a PRS, a Squier Strat in case of string breakage, his Korg MFX, a bagful of leads etc and a small MesaBoogie combo. Set up took about 3 minutes with a stage footprint about the size of a tea tray. What a guy. I should have married him. 

[casapete]

1 hour ago, fretmeister said:

Helix would be perfect.

 

As would him not being an insufferable eijit. I managed to play For Whom The Bell Tolls and Sweet Home Alabama with the same settings on a Dual Rec with just a tweak of the guitar volume.

So can he.

 

With a Helix he can set up an entirely different patch per song, and within that patch have footswitchable options. It's like having 128 different rigs with you.

And that's just scratching the surface of the capabilities.

 

 

Whilst the Helix route looks good, aren’t we overlooking the fact that he’s a guitarist and with all those further options available to him it will only make things worse? 😆

[Pirellithecat]

That's a good point Casapete - Helix = Pandora's Box ????!!!!!! 

[binky_bass]

Make him buy a Kemper. Problem solved. 

 

You can set up hundreds of different amp/cab/effects combinations and assign them to a single stomp. So all he'd need to do is hit one stomp to change between entire set-ups. 

[rushbo]

15 minutes ago, Pirellithecat said:

That's a good point Casapete - Helix = Pandora's Box ????!!!!!! 

 

Someone needs to make a massively comprehensive multiFX unit and call it "Pandora's Box."

 

Here's the flight case for it: 

 

Edited September 14, 2021 by rushbo

[fretmeister]

2 hours ago, casapete said:

Whilst the Helix route looks good, aren’t we overlooking the fact that he’s a guitarist and with all those further options available to him it will only make things worse? 😆

As my main bass board has about 20 pedals in it I have now decided to stay out of this....

 

(And my Helix has about 100 patches for guitar stuff....)

[Agent 00Soul]

As someone who played in a shoegaze band where both myself and the guitar player used lots of stomp boxes and not rack mounts, I feel lucky to have avoided this considering some of the stories I've read on this thread.  For us, we simply got as close as possible to the sound on the record without having to make changes mid-gig.  If any one pedal absolutely positively needed to have a knob turned, we either incorporated it into the show, which can sound quite cool and psychedelic, or we would make a lightning knob twirl between tracks without a sound.  You can memorize approximately where the knob goes to or use masking tape to show the destination setting.  It took less than a second.  The guitarist had more complicated pedal boards - yes, boardS - but they had patches that he memorized and could easily change multiple times mid-song without anyone noticing, including us.

 

The trick with all this is rehearse, rehearse, rehearse all this in your normal practices.  We got so used to doing all these, that we would play 40 minutes without stopping unless someone broke a string or had a similar legit issue.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Agent 00Soul
grammar

[TimR]

Lots of generalisations creeping in.

 

The OP's entire set is only 8 songs.

 

If the band ever end up playing 2 hour gigs it's going to get real messy. 

 

Sounds to me on re-reading the OP, that the guitarist just isn't experienced with performing for a crowd. It'll probably improve, but until he gains experience and confidence he needs to simplify his setup and concentrate on getting the music and stagecraft right.

 

As much as we like to obsess about 'the right sound', the audience really won't notice.

[fretmeister]

2 minutes ago, TimR said:

Lots of generalisations creeping in.

 

The OP's entire set is only 8 songs.

 

If the band ever end up playing 2 hour gigs it's going to get real messy. 

 

Sounds to me on re-reading the OP, that the guitarist just isn't experienced with performing for a crowd. It'll probably improve, but until he gains experience and confidence he needs to simplify his setup and concentrate on getting the music and stagecraft right.

 

As much as we like to obsess about 'the right sound', the audience really won't notice.

And if they do notice, they won't care. They never do.

[Downunderwonder]

23 hours ago, Pirellithecat said:

To be fair he did point out that we were a bunch of clueless amateurs,

Maybe you are and you're only getting your just desserts even as the pot calls out the kettle???

 

Had the same problem with a much younger campaigner and his vintage Marshall, though it was not so old then. The pots were shagged so no tweaking could be repeated and it was never right.

 

At least he understood a show was not the time to shag about getting it just right.

 

The other guitar player gifted him his old Zoom when he upgraded. Cue even more shagging around at rehearsal with the two of them twiddling patches.

[Pirellithecat]

Enough already ... guitards have feelings too you know (well some at least).   

Yep - the 8 song set has taken years to perfect, and can't be extended as the audience would have to go home for a nap if we did more.   My other band manages a set with twice as many numbers in (probably) a shorter time - guitard has Fractal pedal thingy, so I'm not damning ALL Guitards. 

 

But I think Mr Harry Helix will soon join us on Guitar ........ 

 

Thanks for all the moral support everyone. 

[Jus Lukin]

-

Edited March 15, 2022 by Jus Lukin

[SteveK]

On 13/09/2021 at 12:17, Pirellithecat said:

Anyone got any solutions (except get a different guitar player!!) which should reduce the time taken to for our guitar player to change from being Gary Moore to Robin Trower in an instant?  

A good therapist!

I would wager that most of his faffing about is psychological, or nerves, or both. I guess someone has told him that getting the precise depth setting on his chorus and delay isn't important.

If all that knob twiddling really is necessary then maybe a reliable friend/roadie could twiddle for him.

[Nail Soup]

3 hours ago, fretmeister said:

And if they do notice, they won't care.

And if they do care they won't complain.

And if they do complain they won't get their money back.