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Rob’s Stage Rig
Equipment:
Contrary to popular belief, my stage rig is pretty straightforward. I almost always rotate my two Takamine EN-10c’s after every tune, while Marc, my guitar tech, re-tunes for the next song. The guitars are each set up with two ¼" jacks. The first jack sends the output from the onboard Tak saddle pickup/preamp to a Trace Elliot Acoustic preamp. The other jack is stereo with one channel carrying the Sunrise magnetic pickup output and the other carrying the Fishman SBT contact transducer output. The SBT is mounted on the underside of the top about 3" back and below the bridge. The stereo Sunrise/SBT cable is fed to a Sunrise direct box which splits the two signals. The SBT goes to another Trace preamp and the Sunrise goes direct to channel one on the mixer. The output of both Trace preamps also go to the house board, each on it’s own channel. During sound check, we work on blending the levels and EQ of each channel to suit the room. As for EQ, we generally start with some baseline settings, which tend to work well in most venues. For the Sunrise signal, we usually roll off everything above around 125Hz, so the Sunrise* is reproducing only the lowest of lows. It adds depth and clarity to the low end. You feel this in your chest mostly, as opposed to actually hearing it. The majority of the signal comes from the Tak saddle pickup which is usually EQ’d from 125Hz to about 5Khz. The rest is made up with the SBT which produces the sound most like that of a microphone. This pickup is really key to the sound. It adds the top end of the midrange above 5Khz, as well as the extreme high end, adding sparkle to the sound. We usually have to play with the relative level of this pickup the most. It can be a real pain in the ass at sound check since too much yields feedback, and too little tends to make the midrange stand out and sound kind of honkey. I recommend experimenting with a variety of pickups when shaping your live sound. I think you will find, as I have, that ultimate flexibility is key since room sounds vary so widely. God, do I miss the electric days when all I had to do was slam an SM-57 in front of one of my Marshall cabs, play one chord, smile, and go back to the hotel… — Rob
* Since Rob is only interested in giving you renal failure with the signal from his Sunrise pickup, he removed the three treble pole pieces so as not to subject you to any unnecessary frequencies. Check it out… |
