Lillian Axe preset in the works...

Singtall

Singtall

Experienced
Vendor
I have in my possession a FM9 belonging to Stevie Blaze from the band Lillian Axe, and I'm working on a preset for him. Steve was the guy I watched in the club scene as a teenager, and he really had a profound effect on my musical future. I'd like to pay it back with a preset or two for his FM9. Steve is still playing thru a 4-12" cabinet loaded with greenbacks, but I'm hoping to convince him to go all digital, especially when they have to fly into a city for a show.

His soundman Jay Frederick dropped off the FM9 saying that Steve used his (Jay's) personal modded JCM800 from the 80's to record the album entitled Psychoshizophrenia, and to date it's been Steve's favorite amp that he has ever played thru.

So I started with the amp model JCM800 #34 and tweaked from there. I made a tonematch capture, and exported the cabinet, but it just didn't sound exactly right to me, so I added one of my own IR's to blend with it.

Once I was fairly happy with what I heard I moved on to adding parametric eq's to make the tones of a few past cd's, and I saved those in different scenes. the clean tone is based on what he's currently using live already.

If anyone would like to tweak on the preset and share the results it would be really cool.
 

Attachments

  • Psychoschizophrenia 800 34.fasBundle
    62.5 KB · Views: 55
Stevie Blaze is a highly underrated guitar player... I have seen Lillian Axe multiple times, and they never disappoint.
 
Opened a show for them waaay back 84 in Baton Rouge. He was a player then, I'll have to look them up
 
First time I saw them was in 85 or 86 at an old movie theater called "The Ritz" that had been converted into a venue. They had the short singer with the big fuzzy boots that was all over the stage. For years after I couldn't remember the name of the band, but "Misery...." had always stuck in my head.

In 88 (?) the last full cover band I was in was playing at "On The Rocks" in Deep Ellum. It was close enough to Reunion Arena that often times big name folks would drop in after their arena show. Stevie showed up one night. One of our sets started off with Misery. He got up on stage and used my rig to play with the rest of the band. Super nice guy.
 
Singtall said:
no takers on helping with this preset? no comments from anyone that has tried the preset?
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting the patch!

I may not have the ear for the finest nuances, but when I play the Crucified riff on the Psycho Tone scene, it sounds right to me.

I saw the guys several times each on the Poetic Justice and Psychoshizophrenia tours. Blaze gradually went from a more polished sound to really raw at the end. I was sad when he ditched the acoustic guitar on the performer stand....it added a lot to their sound. fwiw, I do remember that his cleans had a crazy amount of delay on them live.
 
ESPer said:
First time I saw them was in 85 or 86 at an old movie theater called "The Ritz" that had been converted into a venue. They had the short singer with the big fuzzy boots that was all over the stage. For years after I couldn't remember the name of the band, but "Misery...." had always stuck in my head.

In 88 (?) the last full cover band I was in was playing at "On The Rocks" in Deep Ellum. It was close enough to Reunion Arena that often times big name folks would drop in after their arena show. Stevie showed up one night. One of our sets started off with Misery. He got up on stage and used my rig to play with the rest of the band. Super nice guy.
Click to expand...
NO WAY!!! We use to play there all the time and we played with Lillian a lot! My band is NAKED ZOO from Missouri and we are still doing shows man! We played the Ritz and On the rocks and the Basement and Dallas city limits when we were in town. We got to hang with Pantera a lot too! Great times!
 
REDD said:
NO WAY!!! We use to play there all the time and we played with Lillian a lot! My band is NAKED ZOO from Missouri and we are still doing shows man! We played the Ritz and On the rocks and the Basement and Dallas city limits when we were in town. We got to hang with Pantera a lot too! Great times!
Click to expand...
Johnny Vines was the original singer of Lillian and he's passed on.
 
Steve is coming over to my house this weekend to test the preset! gonna be fun. he's bringing his head and cabinet as he likes to run into the effects loop and use the tube power and guitar cabinet. But I'm also trying to maintain a xlr out to console with the same tone as an option to help the soundman. I've added an EQ move to output 1 setup for Steve's cabinet. mostly a high boost. I tested it with a Carvin Legacy cabinet that I have here. we'll see what I have to do to it when he gets here with his cabinet with greenbacks. the idea is for both his cabinet and the xlr out to sound the same, or close to it. He's also bringing his personal wedges to test out the xlr out tone.

But tone really doesn't matter to Steve as much as the feel of the rig. He likes something more percussive feeling like a Nuno type of rig. I'm going to make several different presets to try to find a feel that he likes. I'll report back after Steve comes by here.
 
I went through all the scenes(at gig volume through my CLR's) and thought it was a pretty cool preset. I'll definitely give it more time in the near future.
 
Last edited:
I spent more time with the preset today and it still kicks ass! I can't wait to try it out at next practice to see how it fits with our mix.
 
Here is the preset final preset. I took the sound he favored from the original preset and added the effects and scenes that he wanted to make the final preset.
 

Attachments

  • Steve's Rig.fasBundle
    61.1 KB · Views: 23
That's pretty darn amazing. Steve is one of the guys whose playing just grabbed me and never let go. My wife and I still do an acoustic cover of True Believer. 🤣

Thanks to both you and Steve for sharing this!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom