PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Eddie's Post "Amp Talk" made me curious, Amps ?

Amps? Before the days of affordable PA's and mixers small enough for small groups and gigs it seemed like every musician in the band carried their own amp, I mean even the horn players. It was very common to see an amp sitting behind each player on stage. Now this was a long time ago. lol

However, since I started doing solo gigs (thanks to BIAB) I gave up carrying amps pretty quickly. I figured with the pedal variety available these days (I use 3-4 at the most) why not just plug guitar into the pedals thru my Bose LII, or for streams into my mixer in my streaming studio.

Just wondering if any of the other guitar players on the forum still drag amps around?

Later,

I do. My Kustom Defender 50 tube amp is fairly light and compact and sounds good, and I use a fairly minimal pedalboard (3-4 pedals tops), so it's not hard to tuck the pedals into the guitar case for me. That said, I've also taken my laptop and a small audio interface to some gigs, and that works fine too, but it's almost more complicated to set that up than a small amp and a couple pedals for me.

If I was gigging regularly I'd probably look at a different setup, but it works for me for now.

The only gigs I do now days is with some friends who don't really need me to play most of the time. So it is just for fun.

I have several amps I own. Fender Deluxe Reverb most of the time (for guitar). Two or three pedals. Mesa Nomad on occasion. In general the Fender Deluxe Reverb is loud enough and I can always mic it through the PA with a SM57. In ear monitors at loud gigs, nothing at a hotel gig.

Every now and then I drag out the Roland keyboard. Roland KC 150 keyboard amp. Play it through the PA if I get lazy...lol

If I were to play by myself, which I don't any longer, Small PA, lap top, interface, Shure Bata 87 vocal mic, guitar amp.

So...you may ask why drag all this stuff around? Quality of sound. Old school thinking...lol Also the fact that the guys are young and unload and load my stuff...lol One of the benefits of being a really old guy...lol

Only a few outdoor gigs require playing very loud...I really dislike being subjected to a Fender Twin cranked up on 14...lol I always ware some sort of ear protection.

I have both Guitar Rig 5 and 6 on my lap top that can run through the PA. I play through it at home all the time through a headset. Wife is not amused when I crank up the Super Reverb on 10, even in the day time...lol Long live Albert Collins!!

Billy

EDIT: with all this pandemic crap, I am not sure if I will ever play another live gig.

The problem I have found is that people my age, 70-ish, still think it's the late 50s and early 60s when there were no PA systems and your amp had to fill the room. I constantly had to tell people to turn their stage down when I did sound. One guy yelled back "Just turn me down in the fronts then!" I just shook my head and asked him "Do you even grasp the concept of house PA? If I turn you down out front because you are so oud on stage then only the first 30 feet of room are going to hear you. Are you even vaguely familiar with the concept of mixing? You have to be in the PA system or the back of the room won't hear you. Let ME control the sound. You just do what I tell you to do. Now turn your stage down to half of what it is. If you want to hear yourself louder, well, I can't adjust your ego. You pay me to do sound. Let me do sound." I never had a problem with him again. Turning somebody down out front doesn't fix the problem. It doesn't even mask it. The last time I went to one of those "bring your guitar out to the picnic and play along" things I took the little Line6 practice amp. They hung a mic in front of it and it was fine. I am standing 3 feet from it so I can hear it. If the PA is properly controlled, the stage should be quiet enough to talk to each other. Sadly I have only been able to convert 2 drummers in my whole life to play in a plexiglass cage so their sound stays back there with them. If the drums weren't so loud the guitars wouldn't want to turn up.

So... little, high quality amps. Wattage stopped being important years ago.

I once opened for Alvin Lee. He had 8 Marshalls on stage. 1 head actually had guts in it, and 7 of the cabinets were empty. I watched a roadie carry 2 of those speaker cabs at the same time during setup. There was a photo once of some relatively big time act with literally a painted plywood amp stack that stood on stage next to the real amp. I wish I could find that pic. I looked.

I found one pic but it wasn't the one I wanted.

I haven't played a live gig in several decades. The last band I was in was a house band gig that lasted 2.5 years. So dragging gear around isn't something I've done in a long long time. The last road band I was with had a road crew of 2 dedicated guys who could set up and tear down on their own. They'd occasionally have a friend or two with them. So the gear we had was not a big concern. I had a pair of 4x12 cabinets and a smallish combo amp to run them. Our PA was on the large side. As a 3 piece band, there was a fair amount of stage volume. Nothing crazy, but we did, out of necessity, need to fill the stage to a certain point. A number of the clubs we played actually had a dB meter at the bar and if the band exceeded a certain level, they had 2 warnings and then they got fined. We had a dB meter and we told our FOH guy that any fines were coming out of his salary. He always kept the band within the club's limits and communicated that to us.

Now days, I don't play out. I'm totally in studio for my grins and giggles. I use a few very small, low powered amps. My Mesa can get pretty dang loud, even with only 22 watts. IIRC, I used the Mesa in the house band and generally the master out was set to about 4.5 max, and that was sufficient. The players in that band were all seasoned players and knew how to control the stage volume. In the studio, I rarely turn it up much past 3 on the master. Same for the other amps I use. My POD2 has no speakers so it doesn't count.

Through the years since the house band, I have jammed and played backyard events a few times. I can count them all on the fingers of one hand. Wait.... I did put a band together that was a Christian music band to play one event. We played that event and the band disbanded after that. The event was a rally for the NC chapters of the Christian Motorcyclists Association. We played about 30 minutes of music on one of the nights.

My days of dragging gear and amps are over. Unless someone with a tour bus and a big budget pulls up in my driveway with a deal I can't refuse. Not holding my breath.

A sound man likes nothing more than players who understand how to use a master volume control. When I see a player who only knows how to slide everything to 11 in one sweeping motion... That is a rookie and he will get a lesson from me on the first gig.

Well Eddie I agree with you for the most part. The drummer gets loud and the bass turns up. Then the guitar turns up and the first thing you know no one on stage can hear anything.

This is not the sixties and we are not playing with Albert Collins. Gary Moore is dead. Steve Morse hands are so messed up he does not play as aggressively as he use to. Even the Montreux Jazz festival is not a loud as it use to be.

The idea that you can get the same tone and guitar reaction with a master volume control that you can get with a Fender Super Reverb turned up is pure nonsense.

The only place that happens now days is at a outdoor concert, and mainly in Mexico that I have been to or play at. There are some big biker rallies in Mexico where people play old school stuff like Steppenwolf at high volume levels. At least they did three or four years ago...I have not been there in a while but the drummer I play with was there last year and said nothing has changed.

We play in a outdoor place in the keys where there is normally three hundred plus people. Some songs get pretty loud from the guitar amp but we also know how to control the volume and we do no have a sound man. We use thirty watt amps at that gig and they are turned up.

Volume control is a skill just like anything else. In years pass when I had a sound man we worked together to get what the band wanted to hear. We never had a moment's worth of issue. But I can tell you for sure the first time he would have gotten in my face would have been the last day he worked for me. Same thing goes for the other musicians who worked for Lewis and I.

Billy

I only ever do that with ONE amp of mine, and that's because it's 5 watts and only has one knob.

As a sound guy myself, I fully agree with you. Usually I'm using either my Kustom or my Rivera, both are around 50w, and both get the master up to maybe 2-3 (depending on the drummer).

I agree completely. Unless of course the sound man owned the PA. Then I would have simply taken him out back and given him an "attitude adjustment". Punk attitudes are poisonous in a band situation and any other situations. Punks either respond well to an "attitude adjustment" or they leave and don't come back.

Either one is fine.

Jeezzzs Bob...your as bad as I am...lol

Actually I only ever had to get rid of one guy, a guitar player. He knew better than to be smoking dope at our paid rehearsal stage that I rented. I like the guy and we are still friends but no dope means no dope.

We only had a few rules. Show up on time for sound check. No drugs or drinking on the job. Don't mess with the vocalist. She is married and her husband is a real nice guy till you start messing with his wife. He was about 6'4 and 250 pounds. One look at him and that rule was a no brainer...lol

I know some bands do some crazy stuff and if you are famous perhaps you can get away with it. I have seen my share of famous and non famous musicians die from drugs and drinking and other equally stupid stuff. Bad stuff man.

I know perhaps some people don't understand the business side of the music business. I can assure you Joe Walsh did just what he was told to do when he worked for the Eagles. Joe has been sober now for 25 years.

I refuse to apologize for old school work ethic.

Billy

Amen to that. I had a relatively new guitar player in a band. He knew the rules. I looked over at him during a song and he was sneaking a drink from the beer someone handed him. I walked over and fired him DURING the song.

I just smiled at him and said "You can finish the night if you want to but you won't be paid. You're fired for drinking during a gig." He started to talk back but I just walked away from him and we finished the night without a guitar player. He called me a dozen times the next day apologizing but he did not get a second chance.

Some things require that kind of rigidity. Alcohol on a job is at the top of the list, just above drugs. On one of his dozen phone calls I told him "We play 4 nights a week. That leaves you 3 nights to go drinking." And that he should stop calling because he was wasting his time and I had to get to rehearsal so the new guitar player could learn arrangements.

Rules be rules!

Funny story Eddie about drinking on the job. I hired a new bass player and I guess he thought I was joking about the no drink on the job thing. He came running up to me during one of the breaks and said " Billy the bar want sell me a drink!" I smiled and said "Snake, I told you no drinking on the job and I told the bar not to sell any of use any drinks including me !!"

Shocking I know...lol Jonny Walker Red on your desk at Exxon...wonder how long that would last...lol

Billy

St. Patrick's Day. My sister and I were at a bar celebration. The band went on a 20 minute break and I watched the drummer down shots like they were Kool-Aid. Band gets back on stage with the drummer full of whiskey shots.

First song the drummer was off beat. It grated on me immediately. My non-musician sister asked me what happened. I told her as we watched the drummer get fired right then and there.

...Deb

Deb, that is the best example I could ever find of why I didn't want part time musicians. I want guys who have no other income source who HAD to take things seriously.

I have several stories in my music past like that. I had a drummer show up for rehearsal with a tall boy in a paper bag. I told him this was his one and only warning and if beer meant more to him than his job he should take his drums home right now and not come back.3 rehearsals later he showed up reeking of beer, so I fired him.

I had a bass player who loved his cocaine. He showed up at rehearsal with every sign of being high. He was a LONGTIME acquaintance, since we were kids growing up on the same street. The singer walked over with his set list on which he had written "Is he high right now?" And I took that list and studied it before saying "Yeah. You got it right." And we called rehearsal early and I had to fire a guy I had known since I was 8 and he was 6. We were 39 and 37 when this went down. WHY do I have to teach a 37 year old man to respect the other 5 people involved to not come to work all coked up? That guy died at age 48 from a cocaine induced heart attack.

After firing that guitar player from the previous post, on one of the many calls he made to beg me to take him back I told him "You seem to have this notion that you are working WITH me. No, you are working FOR me. This is MY band, MY business. I hire and fire. I hired you. You agreed to some rules. You then went back on your word, so I fired you. And this is over. Go join a fun band and get as drunk as you want. This is a serious business and I need employees who treat is so." I worked very hard to train the guys to NEVER refer to a gig as "play". That band NEVER "played" a gig. We "performed". We "worked". We never "played". People would call me every day asking "You playing tonight?" and I would always respond "No. I am working tonight. I played last night when the band was not booked."

I just don't get that "band = party" mentality. No matter what you do you ultimately work for somebody. If you run your band, you work for who hires you, and you follow their rules. One bar that booked us was owned by a guy who was a southern rocker. In a band that played 4 Tops, Temptations, James Brown and Wilson Pickett songs, whenever we were there we played "Whippin' Post" JUST for that guy. And he usually tipped us 50 bucks for doing an "out of the ordinary for us" song. I HATE that insipid song. All night long we do dance music and then do a song in 6/8 that nobody can comfortably dance to? But it kept us employed at that place so I gritted my teeth and did that awful cliche of a song. It's a business, after all. when we got bigger and our price went up we didn't book there anymore. We offered him a deal but we were $200 apart so he stopped booking us. I would still go in there for a few beers after that, and out of mutual respect he understood that we simply couldn't take less money when there was more always available, and I understood that the size of his bar was such that he couldn't sell enough to justify paying us. The bar is long since gone but maybe once a year he calls me to say hello. Business is business. Friendship is friendship. They CAN coexist, but they don't have to.

Hmmm.... topic. We used amps in our band.

Don't get all amped up Eddie, bad for your BP

Sometimes you just need to invoke Marshall Law...

Yep, Eddie I sometimes invoke Marshall Law...lol 1968 Superlead 100 Watt



We never actually killed the soundman but he did have to go to rehab...lol

Billy

There you go, Billy! I saw Hendrix in Cleveland and he had 4 of that exact stack. I was in the front row and the volume was literally blowing the clothes against my skin.

One of our guitar players a few years ago used that same stack.
With a Gibson .. silly boy.