Guitar Gear

I was in a rush the other day to make it to the pre-service rehearsal at my church. I was farting around and didn’t keep track of time, and realized that though I could make it to rehearsal, I wouldn’t have that much time to set up my usual rig for Mass. I normally bring a couple of guitars, my amp (a modified Fender Hot Rod) and run through 5 effect pedals (Tube Screamer, Boss Chorus, Boss Delay, DigiVerb, and a BBE SonicStomp – and no, I don’t have them mounted on a board – yet). The guitars are A/B’d through a Morley ABY box.

As I said, I didn’t have much time, so I just loaded up my amp, Pearl (my beloved Strat), and my Tube Screamer into my little SUV,  and sped off to church. With so little equipment, I was able to bring it all into the church in one trip, and set up in 5 minutes. Being the leader of the band, it was imperative that I get set up quickly so I could run rehearsal.

Once I got set up, we started rehearsal. As we got further into it, one thing struck me: I wasn’t missing the tone from my other pedals! It helped that none of the songs in the set didn’t require any texturing (some of my songs were written to take advantage of a deep chorus). But just the raw tone coming from the amp (along with some spring reverb), sometimes combined with the edginess of the Tube Screamer, was incredibly pleasing to my ears, and it has made me really re-think the necessity of having a bunch of pedals. Not that I would do away with them altogether, but I’ve now decided to take a much more minimalistic approach to my tone. Actually, it’s sort of a relief, because it means I won’t be buying more gear in the immediate future – though as I’ve written in the past, I do have serious GAS.

But the GAS notwithstanding, there’s a lot to be said about just producing raw tone. Try it out, you may be very pleasantly surprised.