[BETTER AUDIO ADDED] tube DI, 10 kilowatts, 18" subs, towers..beats a Twin, baby!!

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

I decided to try running an archtop directly into our house sound system at last Thursday night's show. I gotta be honest - I love my Blu 6, but it's hard to top 10,000 watts, twin 18" bass bins and 2 pairs of QSC powered line arrays for seriously great jazz guitar tone! I recorded this with my little TASCAM DR40 placed between the line arrays, so it picked up some of their output along with some from the QSC monitors on the stage side behind them. The drums and bass sound very good because the mics were pointed at them. Unfortunately, the recording doesn't really capture the fullness of the guitar because the mics were sitting between the speakers on a line between the grilles - there's no place for me to put the recorder further into the room because the front table is right there. But you get some idea of how good a top quality DI into the house system can be. The Radial Pro DIs are decent, but the Reddi tube box is one of the best in the business:



This Is my laminated Ibanez AF207, which is fairly resistant to feedback sitting in front of the Vibrolux at comfortable gig volume. It was amazingly free of feedback through the house system, even with full chords that included the 7th string. The live sound in the house was superb, and I'm going to use this regularly from now on. Here's a clip from the first tune in our trio set:

[Rob MacKillop]

The playing is nice too!

[0zoro]

Hej Nevershoudhave, I am not familiar witht he TASCAM DR40 though I know of it. I hve always thought of it as a quick record machine. I thought the recording quality was very good, though the balance as you said could have be improved upon. That and the nice playing as noted by Rob, very enjoyable !

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

The playing is nice too!

Thanks so much, Rob!

Whenever I try something new, I find myself concentrating more on the new thing than I do on my playing until I either adopt it or give it up. To save my hearing, which has remained good through 6+ decades of gigging, I've been using IEMs for the last few years after foam ear plugs for many years before that. I've always hated the way everything sounds with earplugs in, and I took them out for ballads and other low SPL tunes because hearing the music is a big part of the pleasure of playing. IEMs brought back a lot of that pleasure, but only in return for uncertainty about my volume both on stage and in the house. Even with someone at the board to make sure the house mix is right, it's hard to set that tiny volume knob on my belt pack exactly the same every time. And I find myself using my guitar's volume pot when I should be adjusting my monitors' volume to avoid affecting the house mix and stage monitors the others are using.

Running through the house system, I'm totally dependent on the IEMs to hear myself. The drummer has his own stand mounted monitor just to his right and pointed into his right ear. The bass player and the vocalist have a footer directly in front of them on the other side of the stage from me, and the footer on my side of the stage is turned down. Without my own amp right behind me, I really only hear my guitar through the IEMs and I found this to be very weird. I'm sure I'll get used to it because the sound quality is excellent - but it was distracting for sure.

I've run my flattop through the house system on a few occasions, and that sound is truly glorious. But I only use it for low volume playing - it's great for accompanying a vocalist. Here's a tune from a 3 hour show we did with several of the region's best vocalists, running the flattop through the house system. You can also see the drummer's monitor pointed into his right ear and the footer in front of the bass player. That's the wonderful Maci Miller at the mic.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Hej Nevershoudhave, I am not familiar witht he TASCAM DR40 though I know of it. I hve always thought of it as a quick record machine. I thought the recording quality was very good, though the balance as you said could have be improved upon. That and the nice playing as noted by Rob, very enjoyable !

Thanks! The sound quality from the DR40 is outstanding, but it's totally dependent on mic position. I record gigs purely for quality improvement, so I don't worry about the sound as long as I can hear what I played. As you can see on that stage, there's really no place to put the recorder where the mics have an unobstructed "view" of the house sound system. The audience is within 5 feet of the front edge of the stage, so I can't put it on a stand far enough into the room to get the house speakers. And if I put it on stage facing the monitors, it gets the monitor mix that's set for the performers. So I put it on a low mic stand next to the footer in front of the vocalist, which has it almost directly between the house speakers.

I've tried hanging it from a boom stand, sitting it on a music stand, etc. I'd like to leave it on the front table in the audience, but I can't trust that it won't be knocked off the table, shifted etc by whoever's sitting there, or even stolen. And there's a narrow aisle beteen the stage and that table that both patrons and waitstaff use even during performances. So every capture is a compromise. The video was recorded from the board, which is fine - but it doesn't get the fullness of sound that comes through when mic'ing the room.

[DawgBone]

Guitar sounds real good. Ride cymbal is on top of the entire band, lol.

I'd quit the music business if I had to use IEM's. Yuck.

[SandChannel]

Didn't Joe Pass go direct to a PA for a while? I remember he didn't want to carry anything to a gig other than his guitar. I would imagine results would vary depending upon the house.

[D'Aquisto Fan]

Your playing sounds great!

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

Much of our crowd this week was at the bar and clustered in the middle of the listening room. So I took a chance and put my recorder at the edge of the aisle that runs in front of the stage, which made for a much better sound capture. To be honest, the guitar sound through a system like this may even be a little too big for my taste. Live, it makes Martin Taylor's stereo rig sound like a 5 watt Champ. But I love the tone quality of my archtops through it, especially using the Reddi tube DI box (which is truly fabulous). I extracted the guitar solos from a few tunes to show the really fine sound you can get with ten thousand watts and about 700 pounds of speaker

These are my solos from a few tunes in our vocal set:

Straight ahead jazz:
Bye Bye Blackbird


Never Will I Marry


Autumn Leaves (the depth, power and clarity of the 7th string are amazing - dig the low A at 43 seconds)


Bossa: Triste


Jump blues: Drink Muddy Water


an unscheduled rock-ish solo in Chain of Fools (the vocalist pointed at me and stopped singing...)