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This is the amp & FX set up that I built for Dan. Although the amp heads you see during the gig- behind that tall chap with the long hair- look lovely, they are not doing any actual work- this lot is where it all goes on. All this lives offstage with me but drives the cabinets that you see onstage (via very long speaker cables). The rack contains A Furman power conditioner, which smoothes out any ripples or spikes in the mains supply as well as providing handy power outlets (thereby removing the need for loads of plug boards).
4 channels of radio receivers which are Sennheiser EM3532. This is the first stop for the audio coming in from the transmitter packs which are located on the guitar straps.
Next is a Tour Supply 4 way switcher. This allows us to route the signal from whichever of the radio receivers we choose through the rest of the rig. Also used to select the Fishman input.
The Korg DTR2 guitar tuner does what it says on the tin. It also has a mute function which allows us to mute input to the rack and is remotely controlled from the footswitch.
2 Ground Control GCX Guitar Audio Switchers are next. These are basically multiple FX loops, there are 8 in each unit. Each FX pedal is assigned its own loop and you can switch it in or out of the signal path according to your requirements. This is much preferable to having FX pedals connected together in line (like a traditional pedal board) as usually when you get to the end of loads of pedals connected in series it usually sounds like sh*t. You can also use the loops on these units to control features on other devices i.e amp channels, mute, reverb or boost functions etc.
The FX on loops are-
1 x MXR Micro Amp
1 x Ibanez Tube Screamer
1 x Moogerfooger Phaser
1 x Line 6 DL4 Delay
1 x Line 6 Echo Pro
The control functions are used for-
DTR2 mute
Mesa Boogie amp switcher channels 1-5 (see below)
Mesa Boogie combo channel switch
Fishman powerblend pedal- this is a pre-amp/DI for the undersaddle pickups in the White and Black Beauty Les Pauls. The electric pickup side of this is run back through the rig via the 4 way switcher.
At the bottom of the rack is 2 Mesa Boogie amp switchers. The outputs from these go to the amp heads. All the audio from the above is fed into a single input and we can then send it to up to 8 seperate amps (although we only use 5) in any combination we require.
The Marshall heads are (top to bottom)-
1 x 1959SLP (factory spec)
2 x 1959HW (handwired version of the above)
1 x JCM800 (re-issue)
The first 3 of these are run via Marshall Powerbrake attenuators.
The final amp is a Mesa Boogie Lonestar 1x10 combo. This is sitting on top of the rack in the photo although the top is cut off! (the bottom of the silver grille cloth is just visible). This was originally run with a Fulltone tape echo at the front but this proved to be too delicate to tour and was replaced by a second Line6 DL4.
So, in conclusion, this system allows us to route any combination of FX through any combination of amps with the click of a switch. The whole thing was controlled by a Ground Control Pro footswitch which I don't have a photo of unfortunately, but here is the homepage the built in memory of which allowed us to store 144 different amp/fx combinations- more than enough for our purposes!
The Mesa Boogie Lonestar 1x12 combo drives one of the onstage cabinets. We do not use the combo's own speaker. Also the white and the orange FX pedals that you can see in the bottom of the rack were a routing experiment that we ended up not liking- I hadn't got round to removing them at the time the photo was taken!
