Du calme, Wilson va te donner la réponse pour le Gigrig.
Citation:
SW: Last year we did a short tour to promote our DVD and I’m just thinking maybe we used it on the Arriving Somewhere tour… it could be as long ago as mid-2005, halfway through the Deadwing touring cycle, and I can tell you exactly why we did it. It was simply because… it’s a nice piece of gear, but actually the practical reason was we could no longer afford to fly around our custom rigs. I used to have a huge Bob Bradshaw custom-made rig and it’s fantastic, but it was so heavy and it was so expensive [to cart] particularly when you’re doing things like fly-in/fly-out festival shows in Europe or in America. We would sometimes get like eight, nine, ten-thousand dollar freighting bills just for doing a single show!
We got to the stage where we thought, “Well no, we can’t do this, We’ve gotta’ find a way to make the guitar systems more portable, more mobile without sacrificing any of that kind of flexibility and quality” and Wes actually discovered the G-System before I did, and he recommended it to me. Every piece of gear has its own little kind of quirks that you have to get around, and
the G-System has one problem which I’ve had to solve with another pedal board, a gig rig pedal board, which is that it’s too slow in switching from channel to channel, and so I’ve had to have another pedal board which bypasses the G-System when I need to get the direct-inject crunchy sound off the hot channel on the amp. So they’ve all got their little quirks but you kind of work around those things and you get used to them, and it’s working pretty well at the moment. And, it’s a lot more portable as a kind of system.
Citation:
JW: I’ve been using the Bad Cats, because in the early days we were kind of economically challenged in what we could carry. Normally, I’m a Marshall guy from way back. I mean, my ultimate dream rig from way back – at one point it was two Marshall 6100 heads and two 4X12s in stereo, and a rack of stuff. It was huge sounding.
The problem with that is it’s so expensive to ship. So when I took this gig Steven and I got these Bad Cat combos, because they’re hand-wired – they were Hot Cats. Out of the box, man, you just plug those things in and they rip like a Marshall! They’re EL34 based. So I was getting really close to my old tone out of a 30 watt combo, and he was, too.
Then a couple of years ago we got to the point where we could add 4X12s, and when we went back to 4X12s he bought the Lynx rigs by Bad Cat – he has three of the Lynx rigs on tour. And again, those are kind of Marshall based, but more aggressive – EL34 based, but even more aggressive, hand-wired. That kind of aggression wasn’t really my thing, so I took that opportunity to go back to what I started with, with Marshalls.
So I bought a modded 1978 JMP 100. It’s modded to hell and back – a guy named Mark Cameron modded it. That head is actually responsible for the last couple of records – The Incident and his solo record, and then one of my other Marshalls did most of the work on the record before that. The other thing about it that’s nice, is that I’m using the old Marshall gear and it’s a nice contrast between the real aggression that he gets out of the Bad Cat, and I get more of a classic 70’s kind of tone. So the two of them really complement each other.
IC: I’m sure you crank it.
JW: Oh, it’s cranked. Yeah. But the cool thing about the mods is… there’s a guy named Dave Freidman in California that does amazing mods for not too much money – it’s still loud as God, don’t get me wrong – it’s loud. But it’s not nearly what you had to do before, because the mod makes the tone come out with a lot less volume. So I don’t have to use a Hot Plate or anything, it just goes. It’s a 100-watt Marshall cranking, and it’s just perfect.
IC: As far as some of the floor effects – you don’t use rack gear, right?
JW: No, we got out of that. We both did – he had a Bradshaw rig, and I had a GCX rig, which is basically a Bradshaw rig that I built instead of Bradshaw. So we had all of our pedal effects in the rack-mounted switching systems and MIDI controllers on the ground, and it was like: ‘My God, we’re shipping these 130-pound racks and pedalboards and amp rigs.’ I was looking for a solution to eliminate the switching system, and there’s a guy in England that makes a system called the GigRig, and what he does is he takes a Bradshaw-style design and puts it in a floor unit – and it’s unbelievable.
I put a TC Electronics G-System in the loops, put in all of my favorite old analog effects – just the different colors, all of my favorite gain boxes, looped them into this GigRig, and I had my ultimate rig and no rack. I had a 70-pound pedalboard that I could fly as checked luggage! So when I get a call to do a gig – like I said, sometimes I get a call to fly out and cover somebody – I literally check my pedalboard and strap my guitar on my back, and I have my switching system.
So it eliminated my 150-pound rack. Then Steven liked it so much that we built him a rig based around the same idea, and he eliminated his rack system. I do more with this rig than I ever did with my rack rig. I can’t even count the number of effects – I think I have 14 things going through it. I’ve got it switching my amp channels, switching a piezo in and out, blending a delay and a [TC Electronics] Nova System separate from the rest of the rig, and an effects rack. Then I have all of my favorite old boxes in front of the amp, and it’s just amazing. And it’s just a 70-pound box.
[Steven’s] rig is the same thing. Actually, I got away from using the G-System because his original G-System went down, and I gave him mine. He’s still using that one. Then I bought one of the little TC Nova Systems for the super-weirdo effects. Because one of the things that Steven does when you record guitar tracks with him is he’ll take them home, and use all of his plug-ins to torture them, make them into things unrecognizable as guitar.
So to cover some of those tones, I’ve got to have one of those TC boxes, so the Nova System’s working great for me. He’s using the G-System and I’m using the Nova System, and that comes in for all of those weirdo tones. It’s really cool.
