Hi everyone,
Intermediate player here. I'm going to be playing guitar in a high school production of School of Rock. It's most likely going to be direct. I'm generally an old-school player but I'm not afraid of using a modeler, it's just that I don't have much experience with them.
I expect I'll need a good Plexi sound along with a Deluxe Reverb and AC30. Maybe I will have to plug in an acoustic.
Current Rig:
Les Paul Special Tribute P90s, Player Tele, couple of PRS SEs
Polytune mini 3
Phase 95
ODR mini 2
Blues Driver
Carbon Copy
Vibro Champ Reverb/Blues Cube Hot
I could go the cheap route and just add a Valeton GP5 to my board. Or I could step up to a Boss GX100 or similar. I was also looking at a Tonemaster Deluxe Reverb as it could be used silently. I'm leaning toward the GX100 just to have everything I might need FX-wise built in.
I'm interested in your input and suggestions!
Music Theater is basically my main gig these days. That’s a fun show, congrats! And super simple on the tone side. I think there’s a couple ways you could go from where you’re at.
First, a couple considerations if you’ve never done theater before:
- Think ahead about how you’re going to handle switching instruments and muting the ones you’re not playing. (This show is just acoustic and electric so not too complicated on this side of things)
- You’ll want a volume pedal, or at least a way to mute yourself. Bonus if you have one volume that controls all instruments. There will be lots of times when you need to be silent while waiting for a cue and the last thing you want is to accidentally hit a string or something and ruin the scene.
The tones in this show are very straightforward classic rock inspired. A Plexi style crunch is going to be your home base and you’ll want a simple delay, a phaser, and maybe something to goose it for lead parts. You’ll also want a Fender clean sound with maybe a light overdrive option as well. I wouldn’t worry about the Vox. I know it says it in the score but something like your Blues Driver will get you what you need.
I would say first option is you’ve already got most of the sounds you need in your current amp and pedals. You might want a drive pedal option that is a little higher gain crunch than the ODR. If you like your amp you could get a load box and use it. This is what I do right now - tube amp -> Friedman Mic-No-Mo -> Suhr Reactive Load. That would give you tones from gear you’re familiar with, but you could run silent if needed, and something like a Palmer or mic-no-mo is nice so you don’t have to have an open mic.
Another option would be to get a simple amp sim pedal. Something like an Iridium, DSM Simplifier, or UA Lion/Dream. Then you could use your pedals and use that as a stand-in for your amp to go direct.
Do you know what your plan is for handling your acoustic?
Another idea that would easily handle all your electric and acoustic needs would be an HX Stomp.
I actually think you could easily cover this whole show with nothing but an HX Stomp with an expression pedal attached to control volume! It would be super compact and you can find them used for around $400 these days.
This is how I would set it up for this show:
Preset 1:
Acoustic
Preset 2:
Plexi amp with the three footswitches assigned to a boost, phaser, and delay
Preset 3:
Deluxe Reverb with the three footswitches assigned to an overdrive, chorus, reverb
Add a Volume block to each preset that is controlled by the expression pedal, so you’ll have one volume pedal to control all sounds.
Plug your electric into the Input and your acoustic into the Aux Input and your instrument switching will be automatic so you can just leave everything plugged in all the time and it instantly mutes the instrument you’re not playing.
