A small (self-ironic) review of the Axe on my last gig

Zwiebelchen

Fractal Fanatic
Soo... right after playing a show at a local club (along with 3 other amazing bands) this one guy stepped up to me and couldn't believe that this sound came from just a 2-HU rack unit directly to the board (I had it resting comfortably on top of a 4x12 cab that was brought be one of the other bands ...).

Five things I noticed that night:
1) the green glow of the LCD messes up any good photographs
2) Any iPhone does better pictures than a 10 year old semi-professional digital camera these days
3) no matter how good your guitar sounds: it doesn't matter if you can't hear the vocals through the house PA
4) it's nice to be the only band that took less than 10 minutes to hook up their gear :p
5) if the only compliments you hear about your show are for the sound, chances are you skipped practice one time too often ... :p
 

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5) if the only compliments you hear about your show are for the sound, chances are you skipped practice one time too often ... :p

Lol!! That just made me realise I get loads of comps on my sound, so maybe I need to be practising a bit more....! Heh heh heh!
 
That "guy" is a girl and she is our keyboard player. Classical concert pianist... which means she needs sheet notes. Looks terribly Rock'n' Roll, I know... :p

Ahhhhhh. ..

There's a local band that has a laptop player. They just have him at a table with a laptop at the front of the stage. Often looking across the stage instead of at the crowd. He looks like he's at Starbucks checking his email in the middle of a band.

Then again it's hard to look too cool with nothing but a laptop.
 
Then again it's hard to look too cool with nothing but a laptop.

Get inspiration from DJs... they mastered those "I look cool despite my macbook" moves. The key is having a pair of cans around your neck. Instantly makes you look like a musician.


richie-hawtin-610x399.jpg
 
I sometimes bring an amp and cab as a backup to a show in case there's ever a pa problem (although there never has been) and stick the axe in between cab and head. I'll get asked by what I'll sometimes find out later are tube purists after the show how I got so many good and different tones from the amp. I'll go with it and probe them into talking their minds on digital fx units and such, and then reveal at the end that it was the axe fx the whole time and that the amp hasn't been turned on in the months that I've had the axe fx. Often times I get the "oh wow, really?!", sometimes I'll get "wait, you mean the sounds never came out of the amp", and I almost always get after either of those exclamations, "...can I try it?".
 
I don't mind the green screen, especially when you see major bands with a rack of them hiding in the back :p
 
I see a new product for the magnetic footcontrollerlabel guys. "greenshades"! makes the LCD visible for looking from above, but dims it to the front!
Could be done by polarising or with blinds...
 
I don't mind the green screen, especially when you see major bands with a rack of them hiding in the back :p
When I got the Axe our drummer was like "can we mount it in a housing that says 'Marshall' on the front so we still look like a rock band?"

My response was "idk, when you see Metallica, Steve Vai, Dweezil Zappa, John Petrucci etc. filling out their rigs with an Axe FX it really doesn't seem like you need any extra justification."
 
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