Pit gig in ears, no monitor, lead sounds

Oh, I should add that I would recommend using the new Dynamic Character control. It was designed specifically for this reason.

I shall be trying this also. I don't play in an orchestra pit, but our sound engineer at church makes sure there is little chance for sonic bleeding and that the FOH sound is very direct which can make guitar presence with high/mid gain difficult to achieve at times. Cliff - could you please elaborate on what that control does to the amp/cab combos???

I mostly have overcome this with what others mentioned: Drive pedal, Mid boost in PEQ, Volume boost, etc. OP - do you have an MFC to control the AFX with? You could assign a custom command for enabling/disabling the dynamic character control as Cliff mentioned if you wanted to do an A/B test in "the pit" or just directly on the green-screen interface. Just a thought for next steps.
 
Yes, it's lack of acoustic reinforcement. I did a test a few years ago and I don't remember the actual numbers but having a speaker aimed at the guitar adds many dBs of power to the lower mids coming out of the guitar. IOW, if you measure the spectrum of the signal coming out of a guitar alone and then compare that to the signal coming out with a cab or monitor in proximity at a reasonable volume there are a LOT more lower mids with the speaker present. This results in a "thin" sound without the speaker.

Great info Cliff... I've never given this any thought but it makes a ton of sense in the high gain area as well. THIS (along with the ear bleeding awesomeness coming out of the cab) is probably the reason why guitarists love to stand in front of a cab. Not only is the 'dry' string tone into the pickup going into the amp, but the distorted tone is looping from the cab right back into the pickup and getting distorted again in a "recursive mirror" loop! Crazy!

recursive_mini.jpg
 
Oh, I should add that I would recommend using the new Dynamic Character control. It was designed specifically for this reason.

I've been doing this on all my presets since it was introduced. I really like what it does especially at bedroom levels where you don't have a ton of speaker interaction.
 
Yes, it's lack of acoustic reinforcement. I did a test a few years ago and I don't remember the actual numbers but having a speaker aimed at the guitar adds many dBs of power to the lower mids coming out of the guitar. IOW, if you measure the spectrum of the signal coming out of a guitar alone and then compare that to the signal coming out with a cab or monitor in proximity at a reasonable volume there are a LOT more lower mids with the speaker present. This results in a "thin" sound without the speaker.

I was thinking about this exact thing recently and wondering if it would be worth experimenting with the Axe Fx feedback block to send a small amount of after-the-cab signal back to the input. Perhaps heavily filtered or even through an IR of the guitar's net response to a loud cab signal?
 
There's two basic problems: The missing air feedback to the guitar and the wrong sound of the IEMs. When you add a peq before the amp block to boost the lows and when you rise certain dynamics, you can correct the feedback problem a bit only, but the crystal clear sound of the IEMs will remain. Don't get tempted to correct that as well...btw it's a good thing.
 
I've used one of these mounted to a home made plywood "wedge". But it was with bass guitar.

AuraSound AST-2B-4 Pro Bass Shaker Tactile Transducer

I rested a foot on it when I was playing with in ears. We fed bass guitar, kick and floor tom to it.

It doesn't change the EQ of the audio but it gives you the impression that you are moving more air.


That's what I was going to recommend. It's on my gas list.
 
I run direct a lot and have experience running in the pit (Rent, Rocky Horror Show, Little Shop, For The record, etc) out here in LA, with no wedge or monitor. Jh16 in ears

I understand your frustration, but as its already been mentioned. Acoustic reinforcement affects your guitar tone. There's not much in terms of EQ that'll be a quick fix. For my lead sounds in the pit I always had a expression pedal tied to delay feedback to add a little more sustain on some lead lines.

At the end of the day, I had to understand that it wasn't "my" gig or "my sound" that would best serve the show. One thing that did help was just practicing using headphones only without any amplification to get used to the sterile feel, especially on clean patches without letting it affect my playing.

Gear for pit musicians has come a long way. I remember plugging into a DI box and having that fed to an axiom for a run of Moulin Rouge. Talk about sterile and flat.
 
I use IEM most of the time and I can def hear a difference compared to using a clr pointed up towards me. I bet of verb helps me out. I don't sweet the change to much though because I am ok with how it sounds through the IEM. Cab sounds better but IEM doesn't sound bad
 
I run direct a lot and have experience running in the pit (Rent, Rocky Horror Show, Little Shop, For The record, etc) out here in LA, with no wedge or monitor. Jh16 in ears

I understand your frustration, but as its already been mentioned. Acoustic reinforcement affects your guitar tone. There's not much in terms of EQ that'll be a quick fix. For my lead sounds in the pit I always had a expression pedal tied to delay feedback to add a little more sustain on some lead lines.

At the end of the day, I had to understand that it wasn't "my" gig or "my sound" that would best serve the show. One thing that did help was just practicing using headphones only without any amplification to get used to the sterile feel, especially on clean patches without letting it affect my playing.

Gear for pit musicians has come a long way. I remember plugging into a DI box and having that fed to an axiom for a run of Moulin Rouge. Talk about sterile and flat.

Thanks yeah pit gear had come a long way, I thought the axe fx was going to be the answer to ALL gear problems. It's 99% there, Im still running FW15 and its hard to update the axe fx as you have to rely on the theatre wifi! First world problems!

Thanks everyone Ben come sit in on shrek! Be good to meet you!


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It's 99% there, Im still running FW15 and its hard to update the axe fx as you have to rely on the theatre wifi! First world problems!

Oh man... Discussion closed... Upgrade and try again mate with the G3 dynamics, you'll get there. What amps do you leverage??
 
Suhr badger with V30 and Friedman BE for leads with the basket weave TV cabs. .... Old school ;)


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Thanks yeah pit gear had come a long way, I thought the axe fx was going to be the answer to ALL gear problems. It's 99% there, Im still running FW15 and its hard to update the axe fx as you have to rely on the theatre wifi! First world problems!

Thanks everyone Ben come sit in on shrek! Be good to meet you!


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OHHH DUDE.
Get on the FW19 train (or 20 beta if you're feeling risky).

The amp feel is already light years ahead of Fw15. Try some of the new IRs while you're at it. I like a lot of the stuff from Cab pack 10. They're great .
 
Suhr badger with V30 and Friedman BE for leads with the basket weave TV cabs. .... Old school ;)

You can thank us later, go update. BACKUP YOUR PRESETS first, but try FW19 out. I still haven't moved just because the time hasn't lend itself to me to fine tune the drive pedals ;) .

NOTE: You will most likely be best served to scratch your presets from FW15, back them up and make sure you have a copy of them. BUT, I would recommend updating and building your presets from scratch. Cheers mate, good luck.
 
This terrifies me as I'll only have an eve to do it all, as I'm playing again tomorrow if anything goes wrong I'm screwed! Maybe I'll wait until the next gig... Very tempting..,


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Worse thing that can happen is you reload 15 and your presets.
Totally concur. 20Beta is the $hit. 15 was awesome. But you might find that some of your woes are already handled.
 
I do play with in ears so,e times as a side man, get ANY small speaker you can and put it close to the guitar. (Computer speaker will work) your not listening to it it won't be loud enough to get through your in ears but it will help the guitar vibrate a little. Tell the sound man it's only so loud and it will be pointed at you. See if that helps you. I've use a little round JBL blue tooth/cable iPhone speaker before. It's not loud but on a quiet stage next to you it actually helps a little. For me at least. If your not sure what that vibration is then you won't notice it doing anything but if you miss the ring, vibration of the guitar and a speaker thing it will work. Doesn't have to be loud. Again for me that is. Good luck.
 
Ha! Didn't realise that was you Craig! Yeah, it'd be great to finally meet you in person. I'm on this Love Me Tender gig for the next 4 weeks but I'll definitely see if I can swing by at some point after.

All my drives for Wicked were the Friedman too. It sounds massive! I really like the new Friedman Smallbox that went in a couple of firmwares ago as well. I'm going to try out a few of these ideas when I work out a patch for LMT this weekend. I'll let you know if they help things at all. The Dynamic Character sounds particularly promising.
 
Ha! Didn't realise that was you Craig! Yeah, it'd be great to finally meet you in person. I'm on this Love Me Tender gig for the next 4 weeks but I'll definitely see if I can swing by at some point after.

All my drives for Wicked were the Friedman too. It sounds massive! I really like the new Friedman Smallbox that went in a couple of firmwares ago as well. I'm going to try out a few of these ideas when I work out a patch for LMT this weekend. I'll let you know if they help things at all. The Dynamic Character sounds particularly promising.

Yeah I'm going to update tomorrow, drop me a text and we can sort out a meet up!

C


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I play almost exclusively with In Ears too. At first I was creating my patches through FRFR, then tried to tweak my IEM to match that. I was struggling live BIG TIME. When I switched my approach and created the tones with the exact IEM signal chain, then tweaked my other setup to match it, everything clicked. There is so much that you can do now, especially with FW 19 and 20beta, to create inspiring tones for any monitoring situation.
Beware that certain cabs lend themselves better to IEMs than others, so maybe think outside the box a bit, in order to get just the right overtones. (The High Cut parameter is my Secret Sauce in both the Amp and Cab blocks, for rockin' IEM tones...)
And make sure to ask for a flat EQ on your channel from your monitor engineer.
Hope some of this helps!
 
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