New member seeks pickup comparisons

[solo-act]

Another update. Waiting on tools since the local luthier didn't have a 2mm bit or something to fit a metric shank. I had to find/buy them myself because the luthier wanted to charge me his time to track down the tools....geeze.

On a more positive note, I've made a big upgrade/downsize of the live PA rig. Like I said before, the axe-fx shrinks all guitar gear for acoustic/electric into a black box. Now I've shrunk a bunch of other stuff into another black box called a metric halo 2882, crammed into a 4 space rack that can interface with the two sets of speakers/power amps/cables, and also act as an interface in the studio. This lets me sell off a bunch of gear and keep my previous 4 space rack with the little mackie, vocal fx, compressor, as a doomsday backup just in case. Here's a snapshot of the new "brains".


I can stash this 4space into an overhead bin, fly anywhere in the world, and have all the signal routing, mixing, signal processing for acoustic, electric, voice and backing tracks, and have wireless units for electric guitar and the vocal headset mic (which slips into the back). How it works is the voice & guitar analog signals go into the units, get converted to digital where all the mixing, routing, processing takes place, then they get converted back to analog and sent to PA.

This rack can interface with any PA, house system or bar's satellite sound system. It does so by being able to send any number of direct outputs at any level (mic, line, -10, +4, mic with pad, pre or post inserts/effects) to give a soundman or house system exactly what they need. All I need for myself is a small powered monitor and I can have my own separate mix and sound at my feet regardless of whatever the sound guy is doing. If that isn't cool enough, with a firewire hard drive, at the touch of a button I can record each output direct to hard disc with mastering quality eq/compression, so I can record/archive performances whenever I want.

All the computer horsepower, routing, effects, eq's, signal processing all takes place in the two black boxes, NOT the laptop. The laptop merely acts as a simple remote control which means I can do this with a cheap laptop and have two in case one fails (that's an 8 year old iBook in the photo). The axe-fx and the metric halo 2882 are rugged. Barring a big EMP or a long drop to concrete, they should be bullet proof as long as I carry the rack myself.

I did my first all-digital gigs this past weekend. Everything ran flawless, the sound was incredibly clear and smooth, best it's ever been. The rig allows total recall of all mixing/effects/eq/compression/gate, etc. After I complete the gig, I just save the configuration as a file with the room name and date, and I can recall everything the next time I play the room.

After configuring the stuff and testing it, it took a few days of staring at it to believe my dream of an all-in-one compact fly-rig had finally come to pass. Woo hoo!!