new gear

my primary guitar

Guitar players are always looking for way to make their sound both better and easier.  I'm at a lace where I'm very happy with the cogent of my sound.  I have two amazing Lowden guitars that I love.  My primary guitar - the custom Lowden O25C  in the picture to the left -  has two pickups in it, a Sunrise magnetic and a McIntyre soundboard transducer.  Together they work very well for me... but to make them work well, I have a rack of stuff that is a royal pain to schlep around.

an earlier incarnation of my rack

The current incarnation has a different blender (the red thing on the top right) and I've removed the tuner (the 2nd thing from the bottom) but it is still the same overall size and essentially the same weight... and it sounds great.  When I was playing with Jamie Green, she would request that I bring that guitar and the rack so I could get that "beautiful guitar sound."  She was right.

For you gear heads, the signal path is a stereo out from the guitar to a stereo Sunrise buffer, to a Dtar Solstice blending preamp, with a dbx compressor in the channel inserts and a Digitech S100 digital effects unit in the effects loop, out to the PA.  I generally run the guitar with a touch of compression, a little chorus, and a little reverb.  The Sunrise is a touch louder than the McIntyre.

LowdenS10P - my 2nd guitar

My second guitar - an old Lowden S10P that is beaten to death, had some terrible repairs done, but sounds and plays great - has only one pickup, a Fishman UTS with the stock Fishman endpin preamp, so it doesn't require the blender or the buffer, but if I want the same rich sound with the compression, chorus, and reverb, I still needed to carry the entire rack... until now.  I got a new piece of equipment, a TC Electronics G Natural, that has pretty much everything that is in the rack plus more in one box that I can access on the floor and the whole thing is 11.2 X 10.5 X 3.5 inches and weighs 4.1 lbs.  And it sounds good..

G Natural

Because it is a digital unit, I can have the option to store 30 presets in addition to 30 factory set presets and I can recall them by stepping on the footswitches.  There are more effects there than I have in my rack plus switching between sounds is much easier and quicker.  It even looks as if I can set it up to work with the dual sources I have in my primary guitar so I can leave the rack at home almost all of the time.  I'm excited about that... if I could leave the rack at home all of the time and got the same quality of sound, it would be wonderful.

Now all I need is to get things together so I have more gigs more often.  I have to either find the right musical partner or get serious about the solo thing.

FWIW, if the G Natural works as I hope, one of these days, I'll replace the pickups in my second guitar to match those in the #1...