Musicians buy gear. The value of gear is expressed in terms of price for performance–what you pay versus what the stuff does, how well, and for how long. Either lowering the price, or increasing performance (if the increase is actually usable) increases value. I offer up a few ideas on how to save money on gear below. I’ve used all of these techniques with success, and they may be useful to you too.

1. Ask yourself whether you really need whatever it is you’re about to buy. The best reason is that you’re going to use it on paying gigs for sure, and you know you have the gigs. Another good reason is that you need better gear because you’re a better player than you used to be. The worst reason is that you want to buy something that does what something else you own does already. When you have five delay pedals and two reverbs, you’re not making things easier for yourself, and you’re definitely not saving money on gear. (Professional recording engineers may have three different reverbs, but nobody else should.)

2. Make a list of what you really want the thing to do. If you’re thinking about a delay, for example, what sounds do you expect to make with that delay? Where do you expect to use it–on stage, in studio, both? What kinds of features enable you to make the sounds you want? Do you need tap-tempo, the kind of delay that the Edge uses to get his casacading tones? Do you need a Chicago-style slapback? Do you want the delay to sound really clean, or with an edge on it, or fatter and darker? More and more devices now are purpose-built, and more money spent on a device built for a different purpose than yours doesn’t necessarily get you closer to the sound you were really looking for, so figure out what the box has to do to give you that sound.

3. Research the gear. Go to harmony-central.com and read the user reviews. Go to Musiciansfriend.com or Guitarcenter.com and do the same. Find out what the stuff costs new, and what a factory second costs.

4. To save the most money, buy used. I recommend that you buy used from an online dealer like guitarcenter.com to reduce risk to an absolute minimum. The slight premium you pay for a 15-day warranty is worth it if you don’t want to take a chance on getting stuck with gear that’s broken or just doesn’t make a sound you like. Wait until the gear you want shows up in good or better condition at a 50% discount from new, then buy.

5. The next least expensive option is to buy a factory refurb or factory second. These can be glitchy–somebody returned it for some reason, and the reason 1) may or may not be consequential to the device functions, and 2) may or may not have been addressed before it went out for sale. But factory refurbs and factory seconds generally offer full factory warranties at a 15-20 percent discount over new, and usually they work well. When they don’t, you use the warranty, which I’ve done at least once.

6. The rarest circumstance, but one of the big opportunities, occurs when a manufacturer upgrades its product line, and immediately sells off any inventory remaining from the previous line. Discounts of 50 percent on new gear in the box are not unusual in this situation. However, for you to take advantage of it, you need your wish list to be up to date, and you need to know what stuff will work for you; if you need a reverb, for example, and some manufacturer starts selling off their discontinued reverbs, you need to know whether those devices are going to do the job you want them to do. Go back to step 3 (research the gear) before proceeding in that case.

7. If you’re in it for the long haul, don’t buy the cheapest stuff. When you’re just starting out, there’s no point buying top-of-the-line gear. Once you know you’re going to be in it for the long haul, don’t buy the cheapest stuff out there. A five dollar harmonica might be okay for a few weeks, but you’re going to need something better as soon as you decide that you really want to play the thing.

Final comment: the process described above is time-consuming the first few times you do it, and it’s time spent not playing music. One very good way to save money on gear is to not buy it very often. When you buy, look for a piece that sounds good to your ears, fills a clear need, and is durable. In other words, get more mileage out of every purchase, and don’t make many.

Ron Holmes, the outstanding amp tech who built my customized Crate VC508 (my little 5 watt Blues tone monster), has just introduced the Harp Commander IV, a nice piece of gear by a guy who knows harp gear. Details can be found here.

Holmes Harp Commander 4

The Harp Commander is a high-end piece of gear for sure. It’s clearly designed for both performing and recording, with a lot of gazintas and gazoutas (a/k/a inputs and outputs). You can feed multiple outputs at once, and you have different options for which signals go where.

The HC4 sells for multiples of what a Digitech RP sells for; it’s boutique gear with a price tag to match. We haven’t tested it, but if Ron built it, it’s built to last. Check it out.

I’m playing Alpine Wines in Driggs ID tonight (Wednesday, August 7 2013) with Susan Berkenfield on vocals. This duo is turning into a very interesting project, where I’m learning to use the looper (and a new, expanded setup that includes a keyboard) for jazz as well as blues and rock. I’ve been focused for a year or so on using the looper with harmonica; adding keyboards to the loop arsenal makes for a bigger and more varied sound. It also makes for more complicated moves within songs, but you give something up for everything you get, don’tcha? It’s pretty cool to lay down a piano part (or two, or three) for “My Favorite Things”, then solo on chromatic harp until it’s time to return to the keys. Yes, I’d rather have McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones behind me, but I’ll take the looper until they drop in.

Alpine Wines in Driggs ID–wine and song at the very least

I’m recording these shows, and should have some interesting stuff to listen to in a few days. Stay tuned.

We’re really proud of our RP500 patch set. It’s loaded with 50 great original patches, and it runs on the Digitech RP500, a VERY nice box for stage performance.

Come and get it at the store.

RP500 in upper right

And stay tuned for our RP1000 patch set, coming this fall!

Now that our Digitech RP500 patch set is up and running, we’ve set our sights on the RP1000. This is Digitech’s top of the line RP, with a lot of interesting performance features and a lotta lotta lotta amp models, cab models, and FX to work with (not to mention a WHOLE lotta user patches to program), and we’re looking forward to loading it up with a huge pile of great sounds.

The Digitech RP1000: it’s big, it’s bad, it’s in our sights

The RP1000 is a hefty piece of gear, but it’s only two inches longer than the RP355, and I may end up replacing the RP355 with the RP1000 in my rig. Certainly the RP1000 is a more flexible piece of gear than the RP355. To take only one example, I have five dedicated foot switches on the RP1000 for switching FX in and out of a patch, and the switches themselves are much easier to operate decisively than the close-set-and-easier-to-trigger-accidentally footswitches on the RP355. That means radical alterations to a patch during performance are possible using the footswitches only. That’s about as flexible as a Zoom G3, though you still can’t chain FX in any desired order on the RP1000.

We’ve already started work on converting patches from the RP500 to the RP1000, and we expect to finish the job before year-end. Stay tuned for more info on the full patch set, pricing, and everything else you’ll need to know about this cool new patch set running on Digitech’s baddest-ass RP.

I jammed with some friends at a party in Driggs, Idaho on Saturday night (August 24). The musicians I played with weren’t spectacular, or even professionally competent in some ways, but it was a really enjoyable jam session. At some points, the combined sound of the players was truly exciting, to an extent I really hadn’t expected. It made me wonder about the things that make for a good jam. Here are the three things I think of first in that regard.


The first thing is attitude, which is expressed most strongly by how much and how well a player listens.
These guys listened. They did their best to learn new tunes on the spot, and when they locked onto a groove they held it. They weren’t virtuosos, but they avoided all the common mistakes, like playing too much or playing over each other or playing stuff their fingers or minds couldn’t handle. They played their parts, mostly simple ones, solidly.

Listening makes a bigger difference than anything else in a jam session; a jam is really all about how the musicians relate to each other in the moment. These guys related.

If you start with the attitude that you’re there to make the band sound better, a lot of other things, like listening carefully, tend to fall into place. If you start with the attitude that you’re there to show everyone how incredible you are, then you’d better hope everybody else isn’t running the same game, because everyone will be fighting for all the space, all the time. Better to listen and find the places where you can make a difference without derailing everyone else.

The second thing is knowing the tunes and the style.
It’s tough to really play something great if you don’t know the structure of the piece you’re playing or what kinds of moves work in the style that the piece represents. These guys didn’t know all the tunes, but they watched and listened for the structures, and they got them on the second try at least in most cases. They certainly knew how to rock.

The third thing is being prepared to play.
That means being sober, or at any rate not too stoned to handle your instrument. (Sober is best. Will Lee pointed out years ago in an interview in Keyboard magazine that the essence of the drug experience is alienation. Alienation can be fun, but it definitely does not improve your ability to relate to other musicians, or anyone else, so it’s worth nothing in a jam session.) It means being reasonably in practice. It also means that you have the gear you need for the performance, it works, and it can be set up as close to instantly as possible. Nothing says “novice” like fumbling around trying to get your gear set up while the audience loses interest and walks away.

It’s not a bad idea to have different versions of your setup for different situations. I used my quick-setup rig for this gig: harp into Audix Fireball, Fireball (wired) into RP355, RP355 into JamMan Stereo looper, looper into Peavey KB2 amp. I carry the RP355 and looper set up on a board that I can just put down on the floor, more or less ready to go.

The pedal board for this gig was the one on the right

If I’m playing in an open mic, I need to get the setup down to 5 minutes or less; if I’m playing in a jam session at a bar, 2 minutes or less is tops. That means that I can’t bring the RP355 and looper to a jam session at a bar, because it takes too much time to set up both the audio and power connections; for such events I use the Tech 21 Blonde pedal or the Zoom G3, either of which runs on batteries, meaning setup consists of plugging a mic in and a line out to the PA. I make sure to carry a looooong 1/4″ cable to any jam, because I never know how long the cable run to the board will be.

Knowing how to set your gear up and get a good sound, almost instantly, tells everyone in the band that you’re not a novice. Being sober tells them that you’re serious about your performances.

There’s more to jamming than these things, of course. These are very basic things. But the fact is that the basics take you a long way. They certainly took the guys I played with Saturday night a long way. I’m going to remember that session.

As noted in our post about saving money on gear, buying used when the price drops to 50% or less of new is usually a good deal. It’s even better when the purchase comes with a quality rating up front and a warranty, which reduces risk to near zero. Along those lines, we seem to have hit some kind of tipping point in the market for used Digitech RPs: guitarcenter.com, one of the biggest online dealers of used gear, has numerous devices in good to very good condition available for less than 50% of retail.

RP155s in 5-star condition are selling on this site for $30. RP255s, which retail for $149.95, are selling on guitarcenter.com for as low as $55; four-star rated 255s are going for about $75, or half of retail. Three-star 255s are on offer for $65-70. RP355s are selling for as little as $99, or half retail, with 4 and 5 star rated devices going for $99-$149. RP500s are selling for as little as $149, or half of retail.

We need a new pic of the RP lineup…

This big supply of used RPs in good or better condition is good news for people who’ve been waiting for good deals. Check out our store for advice on choosing an RP, and to order our patch set for yours.

This performance of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” was recorded live at Alpine Wines, Driggs, ID on the night of 31 August, 2013. The vocalist is Sue Berkenfield, with piano and harmonica by me (Richard Hunter, in case you’re confused about whose blog this is).

Sue Berkenfield at Alpine Wines 31 August 2013

I play the chord structure once on (synthesized) piano, looping as I go; then I do a chorus with (live) piano over (looped) piano, then switch to harmonica, first for an “acoustic” solo through my vocal mic (which is running through the Zoom G3, with a patch designed for vocals with a slight amped edge), then for fills and a solo using a Digitech RP355 patch that includes a Matchless amp model coupled with a pitch shift of a perfect 5th up, and a delay line to add some mystery to the tone. (This patch is not included in the Huntersounds v16 RP355 patch set, but is included in the v16 RP500 set under the name MAPST5.) The harmonica is a Seydel Session Steel in C, played in second position (key of G).

Little Wing performed by Richard Hunter and Sue Berkenfield, 31 August 2013

The piano sound is created by a Roland JV1010 synth module, an aged but still effective device that includes a number of cool pianos. The harmonica mic for the RP setup is an Audix Fireball with V element. Everything, including instruments and vocals, is running through a Peavey KB2 keyboard amp, and is recorded by a Zoom H4 sitting a few inches in front of the amp grill. That’s about it for the gear.

A few notes on the harmonica blocked on the second solo; somehow I got them unblocked again. I think the sound and conception are cool enough to carry it through stuff like that, but there you go. We’re still living in a material world…

This is obviously a very cool song, and I love that it works so well with such sparse instrumentation, including an acoustic harmonica sound. Placed side by side with the heavily effected harp, the acoustic harp sounds every bit as otherwordly. The ending is a little abrupt, but up till then it’s very effective.

Dig.

This performance of Big Walter Horton’s chromatic harp instrumental “Have Mercy” was recorded live at Alpine Wines, Driggs, ID on the night of 31 August, 2013. I use two patches on the Digitech RP355 for this piece: a double-octave-down patch to lay down the bass line on the looper, then a Blackface Deluxe patch with slapback delay for the rhythm and solo lines. This latter patch is included in the Huntersounds v16 RP355 patch set under the name of “BDBlue.”

The harmonica mic is an Audix Fireball with V element, and the harmonica is a Hohner CX12 in the key of C. The piece is played in D minor. The RP355 goes into a Digitech JamMan Stereo looper, and from there to a Peavey KB2 keyboard amplifier. The performance was recorded on a Zoom H4 positioned a few inches from the grill of the KB2.

This piece was written to take advantage of the strengths of the chromatic harp, and does it ever. I’ve been playing this piece since the late 1970s, and I find that on any given night it can bring out anything from jazz to hard blues. This night was on the bluesier side, and I like the groove. I hope you do too.

Have Mercy performed by Richard Hunter, 31 August 2013

Now that the Huntersounds v17 Patchset for Digitech RP500 is shipping, I’ve started configuring my RP500 for live performance, which means adding in patches that are song-specific and setting up the sequences of patches that I use in my looped performances. Every looped song is supported by two to three patches, sometimes four, and they all have to work together in the mix, which isn’t a given. I don’t necessarily design patches out of the box to have compatible EQ and FX, and if that stuff clashes for any reason it can make a multi-layer loop sound like any of a hundred different kinds of bad.

So here are my steps for creating collections of patches that work well together in a multi-layer loop. I’ve framed the discussion in terms of my Digitech RP500, but the same basic steps apply to any Digitech RP (or any other amp modeler, for that matter) that you want to use for looping.

I keep the standard Huntersounds RP500 v17 patch set in user patch locations 1-50, so I’ve always got the basic materials in the box. Taking those materials and making them song-specific means:

1) Putting the patches in the right order on the RP500. I want the patches laid out side by side in the order I’m going to use them on a song. I generally work in pedalboard mode now, so that means the next patch I’m going to use has to be immediately to the left or right of the one I’m currently using. This is easy to set up with Xedit, possible but harder from the RP500′s front panel. I generally set my song-specific patch sequences up beginning with user patch #51, which gives me a total of 50 user locations to work with; at 3 patches per song, that’s enough for 16-17 songs in total, which is plenty.

2) Deciding which frequency ranges the patches will occupy. When I design a patch to be used by itself, I set the EQ up differently than when I know I’ll use it in a looped sequence. By itself, I want a patch to be big and bold; in a looped sequence, maybe not so much, because with another few layers in the mix that big, bold sound may smother everything else, or reinforce a frequency band that’s already overloaded. When I know which patches I’m planning to use, I sculpt their individuals EQs to make sure they’re not colliding. For example, I take out everything above 2000 hZ for the bass, and everything below 100 hZ on everything else; I might take an organ sound and scoop out the midrange frequencies to leave room for a chunky midrange autowah part. (This is all easier and more precise on the RP500, where you have a nice parametric EQ that allows you to specify Q (band width) and center point for low, midrange, and high EQ in addition to a separate EQ that’s based on the EQ for the selected amp model.)

3) Setting the volume levels. Everything in a looped arrangement can’t be as loud as everything else. I like the bass line strong because it’s usually the first thing to go down, and the thing every other part follows, so I want to make sure it’s loud and clear. An organ or vibrato patch might be next, and I’ll make that a bit less loud than the amped-up lead patch that follows. I generally use the Amp Volume setting in the patch itself to set these levels, as opposed to setting the relative overall patch level in Xedit, but either works. I prefer the former because I can get at it from the RP500′s front panel if I need to. In fact, the RP500 has dedicated real-time control knobs for amp level and amp gain, so you can really do a lot with the basic amp tone in real time, if you’re willing to bend over to move the knobs.

4) Setting the reverb, delay, and FX levels. Reverb and delay add a feeling of distance from a sound source, and a sense of the size and shape of the room the source is sounding in. I generally want little or none of either on the bass line, plenty of reverb on whatever’s going to play the main rhythm part (to push it into the background a bit), and less reverb (and possibly more delay) on whatever’s going to play the lead line (to make it fit into the “room”, but not be buried in it). I often use a prominent slapback delay on the lead voice to make it sound bigger, but I try to be careful with the reverb, which can push the harp too far away from the listener if you’re not careful, especially when there’s a lot of other stuff going on. A big reverb or delay can make you sound huge, but it can also make you sound like you’re at the other end of a very big space.

Where modulation FX are concerned, especially time-based FX like chorus and flange, I try to make sure that they aren’t making some other part of the loop sound weak or distorted, which can happen when time-based effects introduce comb-filtering into some part of the frequency spectrum.

That’s about what it takes to get the RP500 ready for performance. When it’s done your whole show is right there at your feet, ready to rock, and you know it’s going to sound amazing every time. I really enjoy having that kind of power available to me onstage in a compact package with a lot of real-time controls. When I think of what I went through in my 20s and 30s to reliably get decent sounds from my gear, I cringe. Now it all just works and sounds great. Wow.

I’ve done a few recordings with the Italian band Lowlands, and a few weeks ago Ed Abbiatti, the leader, sent me some rough mixes for their next record and asked me to lay down some tracks. It was another opportunity to check out the RP355 as an audio interface and recording tool.

I’m on the road as I write this, and it was very gratifying to see again how easy it is to set up the RP and a laptop in a hotel room. The entire rig consists of:
• The laptop
• The RP355
• A Fireball V mic
• A USB cable to connect the RP to the laptop
• An XLR cable with an inline lo-z to hi-z transformer to connect my Fireball V mic to the RP
• A pair of headphones to monitor recording and playback through the RP’s headphone jack

As you can imagine, it took only a minute or so to connect all the gear. (There really isn’t much to connect.) Then I started up my audio recording application (Cakewalk Sonar 8.5.3), and within another minute or so I was recording. Hand-holding the Fireball ensured that the sound of the room was in no way reflected in the recording. And, of course, using the RP355 for the interface gave me access to all the Huntersounds patches I have running on that device.

I did tracks with autowah, rotary speaker, and pitch-shifted FX, plus a nice take on one piece with an amped-up Chicago tone. So easy, so quick, so good-sounding—I just love this rig for recording overdubs, and it’s certainly easier on everyone’s budget than it would be to drag me down to a recording studio, where everyone frets about me nailing it on the 5th take while the studio is pulling down a cool $200 per hour.

I’ve done a lot of work with the RP500 lately, and it was nice to revisit the 355 and remind myself of how cool that box sounds. You can’t beat the performance features and the flexible EQ on the 500, but the 355 does what it does very, very well, and it’s a lot easier to throw it into a shoulder bag for trips like this.

I’ll see if I can post a few samples from the pieces here. In the meantime, if you’re not using your RP for recording yet, what are you waiting for? The RP is all the recording interface you need to make great-sounding harp tracks.

Rob Paparozzi met the Shoos when the latter were busking in the street, and we’ve highlighted a video of that performance on our site. The jam led to a recording gig, and here’s the result. Rob’s solo starts at around 2:07.

I’ve been working on new sounds for the Digitech RP500–no surprise there–and I’m having a lot of fun with the Gibson GA40 and Digitech Blues amp models, neither of which are available on the RP355 and down.

The GA40 amp model is a raw-throated kind of amp model. It hollers, with a touch of screech in the tone. The matching 1×12 cab model adds a lot to the general sense of raw blues shouting. In fact, I’m using this cab model with other amp models now when I need more screech and holler in the tone. It sounds like the Champ 1×8 cab model–which is also screechy when you need it–only with more low end punch. In short, it’s one seriously blue amp model.

One of the amp models that sounds nice with the GA40 cab is the Digitech Blues. I didn’t know what to expect from this model, and it has no matching cab. But it turns out to have a nice, beefy midrange punch that goes well with blues harp, and it matches well with the usual cab suspects for big blues harp sounds.

New features take time to explore, which is why you never know exactly to do with one of these devices the first time you turn it on. I’m having fun seeing what these new models can do. Stick around for more discoveries.

I get a lot of requests to make patches sound tougher and more distorted. (Nobody ever says “make something that sounds angelic.” I do it anyway.) Anyway, I realized recently that I’ve been focused on making the patches in the RP tougher, and I haven’t thought much about the mic.

This is a big deal, because different mics, like different amps (and amp models) have different sounds. Some mics sound hairier than others. The Fireball V, which is my default mic and the one I generally recommend to others, isn’t the best mic to have in your hand if what you want to hear is maximum grind.

I happen to like the amount of grind in the Fireball just fine, and the mic certainly does plenty of other things brilliantly. But the point remains: people who want maximum grind need a mic that grinds. The follow-on point is that you can use your favorite blues mic with the Digitech RP, and when you do the RP will act much like your favorite blues amp.

Left to right: Shure 545SD with Bulletizer, Fireball with inline volume control, Bottle o’ Blues

Here’s a recording I made today in which I demonstrate three mics–the Audix Fireball V, the Shure 545SD, and the Bottle o’ Blues–playing similar blues licks through my Digitech RP500 running a patch I made based on the Gibson GA-40 amp and cabinet models. All of these mics are very moderately priced; the 545SD is less than $100 at retail, the Fireball V is about $149, and the Bottle o’ Blues is about $66 with shipping. It’s a good thing that these durable mics with tons of character are available at relatively low prices; it’s a very economical way to change your sound, or to add a new range of sounds to your palette, and the learning curve is pretty low. (Um, you plug it in, you cup it in your hands with a harp, and you play through it. Any questions?) NO changes were made during this recording beyond swapping the mics; I didn’t adjust the recorder position, the patch settings, the output volume of the RP500, or anything else besides the mic in my hand. The differences in the sounds are the result of the mics, and nothing else.

The recording is less than 3 minutes long, but it shows you a lot about the difference a mic can make. The Fireball sounds nice and full, tough enough to do the job. The Shure sounds tougher, and you get a lot of response from the mic whenever you move your hand. The Bottle o’ Blues sounds big and very dirty, with the kind of flat-out rawness that you expect in classic Chicago blues.

Audix Fireball, Shure 545 SD, and Bottle o’ Blues with Digitech RP500 GA40 patch

Keep in mind that this recording is all about amped blues, which is only one of the things you can do with a harmonica. In the same session, I used these mics in a range of musical settings, and I’ll put a few more of those clips out later.

In general, as I’ve said before, this recording confirms my impression that if you’re planning to play nothing but amped blues, you’re best off using a mic that’s traditional for that purpose, like a Bullet or a JT-30 (or in this case, a Bottle o’ Blues). That’s true whether or not you’re playing through an amp, or an amp modeler. (After all, an amp modeler mimics the signal processing behavior of an amp–ideally, the modeler will do whatever the amp would do in a given situation, and produce the same sound.) If you want to play lots of different sounds and styles, you’re better off with a mic with a wider frequency range and a smoother response, which is why I use a Fireball.

Anyway, for people who’ve been wondering whether my patch set works with any mic besides the Fireball V: yes, it does.

As I noted previously on this blog, I interviewed Jackson Kincheloe of Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds right after the band’s performance on the afternoon of Sunday, July 21 2013 at Targheefest in Alta, Wyoming. The band sounded great at this show, with a sound that combined a horn section of bari sax, trombone, and trumpet, a female lead singer with a big R&B tone, a BIG rock guitar, an amped harmonica, and a rock rhythm section.

This was a long interview, and I’m going to publish it in pieces. In this first part of the conversation, Jackson discussed his role(s) in Sister Sparrow and the gear that makes it possible.

RH: So Jackson, that was a great set. I was amazed at how much rock there was in the band. I watched a couple of the videos on Youtube and with the horn section it seemed very 60s R&B-ish. But that live show had a lot of rock in it.
JK: Oh yeah.
RH: How do you see your role in this band?
JK: I’m one of the premiere soloists, I guess, as our trombone player told me one time. I get to take a lot of kind of rock harmonica solos. But then I also do a lot of, which is recently in the last two years, of pads, trying to think of where the keyboard player would be, so I’ll do a lot of organ sounds.
RH: I noticed that you were using a chorus or a rotary speaker or something like that on a lot of songs. Maybe this is a good time to ask, what’s in your stage rig?

Jackson Kincheloe rockin’ at Targheefest, July 21 2013

JK: I go into an Electrovoice RE-10 (microphone), into the Samson Airline 77 wireless unit, which Greg Heumann set me up with, into a Kinder antifeedback pedal, which I was told about a long time ago by Dennis Gruenling. Mine is on the fritz right now. Then I go into a BBE compression, the Optistomp, then into a Boss harmonist PS-6, then into an Electro Harmonix Micro Pod, then into a Maxon autofilter, which is an idea from Chris Michalek, I got that early on, into a TC Electronics Corona Chorus, which is where I get my rotary effect. I’d like to get a better rotary effect. Then I go into the MXR Carbon Copy analog delay, then into a Line6 Echo Park delay pedal for my slapback and stuff like that, then into an Ernie Ball volume pedal, then into a tube amp.
RH: What’s the amp? Is that the amp that was facing you onstage?
JK: Yeah, I do that because sometimes in smaller places I don’t get a stage monitor. It’s like a Deluxe with some tube changes by a guy in New York City.
RH: We talked before about the roles you’re playing in the band, like the string pads you do or the organ sounds you’re doing. Did you start doing that stuff after you got your hands on some of these pedals. Like did the change in the sound change the way you were thinking about your role?
JK: Absolutely. I’d heard of people doing it before, you talk about it on harp-l, other people are doing it. Our old bari sax player–he’s no longer in the band, but we’re still friends–he introduced me to some of his effects. He used a looper and made a lot of very cool sounds. Anyway, it was all kind of by accident. I was playing a lot of the horn lines int he band and trying to fit in with too much playing. I still play a lot of the horn lines, but I play even more in between the horn lines, so then I was thinking I should do more of an organ pad sound that would fill up the background—cause the guitar’s the only guy that can make chords, the horn section, they play together, but there’s a lot of single note instruments, we don’t have a keyboard player able to cover that stuff.
RH: It works really well.
JK: Still learning, for sure.
RH: You can hear it filling in the space in the background. It’s another of the rocking elements in the mix as well.

Stay tuned for the next installment in this interview soon.

Grant Dermody is one of our favorite harp players, with great chops and a pile of excellent recordings in a wide range of roots-based styles on his resume. We got a message from Grant this morning to the effect that he’s getting set to record some roots music with a band in Louisiana, and he’s looking for donations to fund the project.

Grant Dermody

We’re planning to donate to this project ourselves, and we hope you will too. Here are the details, straight from Grant:

I wanted to let you know that I have just launched a new fundraising campaign, through Indiegogo, for my newest recording project; The Louisiana Sessions.

I start recording this January at Dirk Powell’s studio in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Dirk will be wearing the engineer hat for the project as well as playing on all the songs and tunes.

Orville Johnson will also join us on every track. Cedric Watson will play fiddle on the Old Time and Cajun tunes and Rich Del Grosso will play mandolin on the Country Blues songs. Dirk and Orville and I will produce the record.

My last two CDs each took over two years to complete. Doing them that way, a song at a time, for a few hundred bucks, with some down time in between, was doable financially.

Since I am playing with four musicians this time, instead of twenty-five plus, I have to record the whole CD in two, three or four day sessions.

I am playing with the best musicians available to make the best record I can. To pay them what they are worth is expensive. They all need to be paid all at once, as does the engineer. Then there is travel and lodging, and all this adds up in a hurry. This is why I need your help.

I am ready to create new music that is strong and joyful and deep. I have written a bunch of new songs and tunes. It is time for me to make an excellent record with great players in the musical mecca of Louisiana.

Please contribute what you can at one of the links below. I also need you, please, to pass this information on to anyone and everyone you know who might be interested in helping. It takes a village, and not just the people in the village that I know!

igg.me/at/GrantDermody or

www.grantdermody.com

We can’t wait to hear this new project. Check it out, and be part of it: help Grant with a donation.

Just in time for our interview series with Jackson Kincheloe, harp player for Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds, comes this video, their latest. The music was produced by Randy Jackson of Journey/Mariah Carey/American Idol fame, and it’s a ripper. Check out the cool rhythms Jackson K lays down behind the singer in this piece, and catch the band on tour.

Wow.

Koko Taylor with a festival band that includes Little Walter and Hound Dog Taylor, with Sonny Terry looking on askance. The band grooves with relaxed intensity, and every once in a while Koko shouts hard enough to make the hair stand up on your arms.

Walter’s sound here is more “acoustic” than many of his performances, a nice reminder that he didn’t need to pile on the distortion to make his point (something that many of his erstwhile admirers seem to forget).

Well worth the watch and listen.

Harmonica players tend to play traditional roots-based styles (like blues) with traditional equipment, and lots of harmonica players have never tried out the sorts of FX that guitarists have been using with great success for a long, long time. We’re going to talk about one of those FX in this post, the one that I think EVERY harp player should try (right after they’ve picked up a decent delay or reverb pedal): a pitch shifter.

A pitch shifter does what its name implies: it takes an incoming signal (like a harp coming through a microphone) and adjusts the pitch of that signal up or down. A pitch shifter makes a powerful addition to any harmonica rig, especially in terms of adding low octaves and other low intervals to the original pitch. Harmonicas put out a lot of energy in the high register to begin with, and in my opinion the added weight of low octaves makes for a better sound than additional top end. (of course, if you’re playing a Hohner Thunderbird, which is pretty far down in terms of pitch to start with, you might be better off with more top end.) My performance of Morphine’s “Early to Bed” at this site is an example of how much weight and power a low octave or double octave can add to the harmonica’s basic tone. This kind of rock material isn’t “traditional” roots music, of course, but just imagine how nice it would be to be able to fill the role of a tenor or bari sax in a blues band with a harmonica. I’ve done it on more than one occasion, and it makes for smiles all around.

Wade Schuman’s work with Hazmat Modine is an outstanding example of how to use a pitch shifter with harmonica. Wade uses an Electro-Harmonix POG, a device that generates one or more pitch-shifted octaves simultaneously, including low and high octaves and double octaves. The Electro-harmonix HOG, a more complex (and expensive) device, adds low and high 5ths, octaves with added fifths or thirds, and so on for a total of up to ten simultaneous pitch-shifted intervals, which makes for a pretty big roar when you crank it up.

The POG2, Electro-harmonix’s latest version of the POG, sells new for over $325. As an alternative, consider any of the Digitech RP series of devices coupled with my patch set for Digitech RP. These units can generate one pitch-shifted voice at a time, which can be set to any interval from two octaves down to two octaves up, and can be mixed in any desired proportion with the original voice. In the RP255 and higher models in the RP series, either the pitch shift interval or the pitch shift mix can be put under footpedal control for real-time manipulation of the sound, and can be combined with a range of other FX that include wah, delay, reverb, and distortion. Even the RP155, which sells for less than $100 new, produces an excellent pitch shift effect, which makes it one of the lowest-cost pitch shifters available (not even counting the other FX in the box), and undoubtedly the best single-voice pitch shifter available in a multi-FX device in that price range. The RPs also include a harmonized shifter that will harmonize original tones with a key- and scale-consistent interval (for example, 3rds in the key of E minor); I haven’t played with it much, but it’s an interesting effect for tunes where you know what key and mode you’re going to play in.

Digitech RPs do great one-voice pitch shifting at a great price

I’m partial to the RP series devices, which in my opinion offer very high value for money given that they include so many other FX along with the pitch shifter. The Zoom G3 also contains a decent pitch shifter, though not as robust as the RP’s in my opinion in terms of either basic tone quality or tracking. However, the G3 allows you to chain multiple pitch shifter modules in series, which lets you generate some complex tones that aren’t possible on an RP. (By “in series,” I mean that the pitch shifters run one after the other in the signal chain, so the second shifter in the series acts on the first, the third shifter in the series acts on the first and second, and so on. In the POG, the shifters run in parallel, so you can adjust one without affecting the others.) With a G3 you can generate chords from a single original note that span 4 or more octaves; for example, start with a double-octave down shift; then add an octave up, which gives us a chord that includes the original note, the same noted shifted one and two octaves down, and the same note an octave up. Add a shift of a 5th up to all that and you have a series of roots and fifths spanning four octaves and a 5th. Phew. If that ain’t heavy enough for ya, you ain’t from this planet. (Better make sure you’ve got something bigger than an 8″ speaker in your cabinet if you want to run that lineup, or you’ll blow the speaker cone to bits the first time you crank it up.)

The Zoom G3 does multiple-voice pitch shifting on the cheap, with a little less quality in the sound than an RP

In any pitch shifter, the things to look for are:

I love pitch shifters. The first time I ran a harp through a Digitech RP with a low octave pitch shift, over ten years ago in an instrument store, less than thirty seconds elapsed before I picked the thing off the floor and walked it to the checkout counter. The most important effect for any electric harp player is a delay unit, and a pitch shifter is a close #2 in my opinion. It adds weight and power to any amped harmonica setup, to the point that it changes the game for the player. If you’re playing anything but purely traditional styles, a pitch shifter ought to be in your rig.

I published samples recently of a set of blues licks played with three different mics–the Shure 545SD, Audix Fireball, and Bottle o’ Blues–through my Digitech RP500 with a patch of mine that models a Gibson GA-40 amp and cabinet. The clear conclusion I came to in that post was that a traditional blues mic–the kind that comes in a bullet shape–is tops for blues, whether you’re playing through an amp or an amp modeler.

I promised in that post to publish more samples, because amped blues isn’t the only thing you might want to play on a harmonica. (It’s not the only thing I want to play, that’s for sure.) In this post I provide samples of three different RP500 patches–one with a rotary speaker model, one with a TC Electronics chorus model, and one that combines the TC chorus with a long delay–used with each of three different mics: the Audix Fireball, the Shure 545SD (with Bulletizer by Greg Heumann), and the Bottle o’ Blues (which aced the blues test, as noted above). The samples were recorded live with my Zoom H4 positioned a foot in front of my Peavey KB2 amp. No modifications were made to the recordings, other than to normalize the various samples to the same volume level.

Left to right: Shure 545SD with Bulletizer, Fireball with inline volume control, Bottle o’ Blues

The differences between the mics are remarkable. The Fireball gives the rotary and chorus patches a gorgeous, widescreen kind of sheen, with very rich frequency content. The Shure has a noticeably more restricted tonal palette, but it’s nice and tough, perfectly suitable for all sorts of rock and blues. The Bottle o’ Blues completely smears the harmonica chords and grunges up everything it touches; it certainly wouldn’t be my first choice for any chordal accompaniment part, at least not if the actual notes in the chord (as opposed to the thick sound of a mass of pitches played at once) mattered.

Fireball with TC Electronic Chorus model

545SD with TC Electronic Chorus model

Bottle ‘o Blues with TC Electronic Chorus model

Fireball with rotary speaker model

545SD with rotary speaker model

Bottle ‘o Blues with rotary speaker model

Extended Fireball with TC Electronics Chorus model plus delay

Fireball TC Electronics Chorus model plus delay

545SD with TC Electronic Chorus model plus delay

Bottle ‘o Blues TC Electronics Chorus model plus delay

See what you think. For now, I’m stickin’ with the Fireball, but I’m keeping the 545 and the BoB near to hand for those occasions where a big nasty blue sound is exactly what’s needed.