Guitar players, what’s in your studio recording rack?

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rpe

rpe

NM - Land of Excrement
EQ? Compressor? Reverb? Delay? Power Conditioner? What do you consider essential and where in your rack are they placed (top to bottom)?

Thanks,

rpe
 
What's a rack?

Honestly, I havne't had any major rack gear in my studio in years. For a project studio like mine, I've decided plug-in's are the wave of the future, and I use mostly Ultrafunk and Izotope Ozone for recording.

Now if you're asking what's in my guitar chain, my answer would be:

What's a rack?

Honestly, I havne't had any major rack gear in years. I typically don't like rack gear in my chain. I would pick pedals over rack gear any day! I run as direct as possible, with a two exceptioins: a clone chorus and a Crybaby 535 wah . The spring reverb on my Rivera is simply the best, no need for anything else there. I sometimes like to throw in a Roland triggered wah, but only rarely. I've been toying with idea of a Sparkle Drive too. The closest to rack gear I ever come might be my POD, which I use for quick tones when writing or doing something where tone isn't critical.

Long live pedals!

Aaron
http://www.voodoovibe.com
 
thanks Aaron......

........good to hear another perspective.

rpe
 
Furman PM-8 power conditioner to POD Pro for sure. Then I have the more live route and the studio route. If I want to really push air, the POD goes to a Carver PM125 power amp into a Marshall 1X12 cab with a Celestion Vintage 30. If I want clean sound, I jack the POD into a pair of M Audio SP5B reference monitors and mic the monitors! In any case, I go just the reverse of most people. I mic electrics, and record acoustic mostly DI. This is accomplished by splitting the signals of the onboard mic and the piezo transducer of a Fishman Prefix Plus stereo blender into the 2 channels of a Joemeek twinQcs. I have a TC Electronics M300, but I don't usually have it in my signal chain. The stuff I'm doing with the acoustic is not effect heavy, and for the electric, the reverb in the POD is adequate.
Also in the rack is DBX 386, RNC, and a Rolls RA62 headphone amp, but none of that relates to guitar very much, except the RNC, which I sometimes use to compress the Joemeek, a very different effect that the optical compressor in the twinQ. I don't really care much about rack position except the following.- Power conditioners and patchbays go on the bottom, 'cause all the cables end up there, and no preamp wants to be adjacent to much of anything else, especially another preamp. Result- transformer bleed with associated annoying hum.-Richie
 
rack, no.....not needed for studio. i go straight from guitar-->amp. alls thats needed ,unless i run some effects unit thru the effects loop.
now live....theirs a time for a rack....power cond, wireless, compressor, 7band eq.
 
Most of my playing/recording format is the rack. I have the Blue tube mic pre amp, ART sgx2000 express, korg tuner, EQ and a couple other gizmos I almost never use anymore. I just cant seem to get a handle on the whole DSP plug in deal. I am an old fashioned knob guy. Once I get the sound I like I pump it from my mixer to the computer. I can edit a wav fine after that.
 
The current trend is to not have rack guitar gear. I.e., it's more trendy to have amps and pedals now. Hell, if for no other reason, a head, 4x12, and a bunch of pedals just looks so damn cool.

That being said, my main equipment includes a Mesa/Boogie TriAxis, a Mesa/Boogie Quad, a SansAmp PSA-1, and a SGX2000. :rolleyes:
 
Thank you all for the responses

I really appreciate you addressing my questions.

thanks,

rpe
 
I'll record guitar in quite a few different ways, dedpending on what I want to hear. I RARELY record any kind of time based effects. I prefere a mic in front of an amp (personally I have a Line6 AX2 and an old Peavey Bandit I like). As far as direct recording goes, I have and use a POD, a J Station, an ART SGX2000, a Tom Sholtz Rockman and a Hughes & Kettner BATT. No pedels except for a Cry Baby wah and a Buddah wah.
 
Lopp said:
Hell, if for no other reason, a head, 4x12, and a bunch of pedals just looks so damn cool.
Click to expand...

not as cool as TWO heads and four 4x12 cabinets... and a Strat, of course...

the pedals are basically there to "extend" your cord...
 
since i dig the WAY down low sound, you need some stuff to keep it semi crisp so:

I have a power condtioner, a korg tuner, Hush Super-C, and a DBX 266 compressor/limiter/gate

i go in through the hush, and out to the amp.
in the effects loop i run the dbx and run the tuner
off the pre-amp out. yes it takes a while, but when
you are chugging along in B, it doesn't sound like a
hot mess of bass. i run the compression on the "over-easy"
mode, since i don't know enough about it. but i will
say that it works like i have it set up...
 
do power conditioners make a difference?

My rack is pretty wack, especially with my new set-up that I'm working on...

Live, the full blown set-up is 2 amps.. 1 marshall, 1 roland jc120. 1 mesa boogie v-amp. all of those are controlled by a rockman midi octopus and an art x15-ultrafoot midi pedal. I have an ART SGE and a Lexicon for some fx, but most of my reverb is at the amps. Sometimes I use a Behringer compressor. I also run my acoustics into the JC120 if there aren't any onstage monitors as well as sending a signal straight to the board via my sansamp acoustic DI. I'm about to use my digital mixer as the brain and have all the fx, routing, etc. done via midi into the digital mixer. Hell, with the ultra-foot's 2 expression pedals, I can even control the mixer's faders! Pretty extensive for live, but the stuff I'm doing live now is pretty diverse.

My most basic set-up is my guitar,a sansamp tri-ac and a lexicon reverb. That sansamp kicks ass. I find myself using it live more and more for my electric only stuff because I"m sick of lugging around an amp.
 
I have the following setup:

Guitar------>POD_pro------>RNC_compressor------>DELTA66_OMNI_soundcard_preamp------->computer.
 
no rack here either--except for a boss se50 stereo effects processor--which I mainly use for the delays and a bit of reverb...I mic my left and right amps into a motu828 that's firewire connected to my 1.3gHz pentium running cubase...very clean, very accurate...scattered on the floor are a vox wah, big-muff-pi, danelectro fab-tone, an old boss dm3 delay, and a new digitech whammy--which only gets used when I do beck's version of 'a day in the life' or vai's 'bad horsey'..
 
Lopp said:
The current trend is to not have rack guitar gear. I.e., it's more trendy to have amps and pedals now.
Click to expand...

I've been thinkin' about that Lopp, and here's what I thunk:

The '80's was kind of the peak of big rack rigs, mainly because they had finally become affordable. Everyone wanted a big rack - the bigger the better. I think at some point peope started to realize that they suck for guitar, and now people are returning to what sounds best - pedals.
Take Steve Vai as an example. Great player, but I simply cannot stand his tone. No matter how expensive those Eventides are, they just don't cut it for me in a guitar rig.

Or are you thinkin' it's just the old 20 year trend cycle, and we'll all be trading in our pedals in a few years? Hmmm....maybe if I start now I'll be thought of as visionary.

Aaron
http://www.voodoovibe.com
 
Yeah. The racks were extremely trendy in the 80's. Especially with the ADA's, etc. The minimalist grunge thing put an end to that. The racks recently had a bit of a comeback with pro bands using POD pros, etc., but real amps still kick their butts

Even so, a big problem with the racks is they're such a pain to configure. You have to program your preamp and then go through tons of tiny menus to configure your effects. You then have to configure your MIDI and remember which channels are your clean/dirty channels and which effects are used in each channel.

All that and then you remember the tone is more in your fingers than in all your settings. :rolleyes:


As an aside, I find it interesting how many people here use the SUX... I mean SGX2000. Waaaay processed sound. However, I just can't bring myself to get rid of mine. It's just too fun.
 
Aaron Cheney said:

Take Steve Vai as an example. Great player, but I simply cannot stand his tone. No matter how expensive those Eventides are, they just don't cut it for me in a guitar rig.
Click to expand...
I love Steves Tone. He doesn't always use the eventides. Can I ask what the last Vai album you have listened to Aaron?

Big racks are a pain, to wire, to move and to program. I kept mine small, 2 rocktron hush2bx's, a midiverb and multiverb lt, rockman chorus and an alesis 3630 multi effects. 6 spaces is about 85 lbs. I also used pedals at the same time. Boss sd1 and a wah wah of some kind. I still have this live rack in the studio and I use it as my B-rack.

SoMm
 
Is woman counted gear ?






umh... nevermind.
Stage primary rules are:
Guitar (Gibson - Standard Les Paul) --> Boss Volume pedal--> Boss Turbo Overdrive --> Boss Wah pedal --> Zoom 9000 --> Fender amps.

But I got many other guitars & frogs to kick on the floor ocasionally.

Studio ? Vary... but I prefer not using racks... just a matter of taste. :)
 
My studio guitar rack has a Roland GP100, and a Yamaha FX770.

But int he studio I've also got a Blackface Fender Band Master that I've owned for 28 years ...... and various pedals I've acquired along the way.

Both setups have their uses.
 
James Argo said:
Is woman counted gear ?






umh... nevermind.
Stage primary rules are:
Guitar (Gibson - Standard Les Paul) --> Boss Volume pedal--> Boss Turbo Overdrive --> Boss Wah pedal --> Zoom 9000 --> Fender amps.


Click to expand...

I never chain it that way. I always put the volume pedal last.... right before the amp. I don't like cutting the input level into the effects because it changes the effect. I like using the volume pedal to control the volume only.
 
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