Peavey KB2 Amplifier: it’s what’s for gigging, at least for now

RIP Walter Joyce

Walter’s relationship with the harmonica, like mine, was lifelong once it started. So far as I know he was playing regularly with blues bands to the day he died. He had great wit and intelligence, and lots of talents. He had more, and more varied, careers than most people, and he attacked each one with zeal and skill. I was glad to know him, and I’m sorry he’s gone.

Most people’s deaths come too soon, and of course Walter’s did. You can learn more about him at his facebook page.

The pedal boards with their bright new coat of red paint

To transport each board and its load of pedals, I’ve ordered a soft case designed for a small keyboard. I considered a hard case, but at this point I’m not planning on flying around much with this rig, and a soft case is both less expensive and good-enough when you’re carrying your stuff in a car. (When I go on a plane, I just take the RP355–never mind the board.) I’ll test the case when it arrives later this week to make sure it’s snug enough for its cargo.

Finally, I’ve picked up another box of industrial-strength velcro, and I’m gonna velcro those pedals to those boards like nothing’s every been velcro’d to anything before. So by end of week I should have a setup that’s transportable and secure. The last step will be taking a close look at the cabling, and making every cable connection just exactly as long as it has to be (and no longer). Then I bundle the cables somehow so I don’t have to deal with dozens of loose cables at setup time.

At some point, I’ll probably swap out the Nady 4×1 mixer that’s at the apex of the two boards for a stereo mixer, so I can run the whole rig with a stereo mix. That’ll add two or three 1/4″ cables and a power supply to the complexity of the rig, not to mention a bigger chunk of mixer at the top. But that’s for later, and for now this setup is plenty good enough.

Where this all pays off is on the gig, when I can throw a complex setup down on the floor in a few minutes and have it work perfectly, and get it off the floor and into my car in a few minutes more. When all’s said and done, it’ll look good, sound good, and work good. And good is good.

This live performance was recorded at a reunion concert on “Sierra Center Stage,” which is apparently a television concert series on some channel somewhere. (Seems like it must be a PBS series, dontcha think?) I never heard of the show before I saw this video. The video is pretty cool. It includes interviews with the musicians, and the playing is very, very hot.

Mark Ford blows nice harp and shows a lot of sensitivity to his sound and lines. His attention to rhythmic precision is reminiscent of Magic Dick, but he’s no Dick clone. He fits well with the band and compares well to his harp-playing contemporaries, but he’d sound even better if he wasn’t standing onstage next to an absolute monster like Robben Ford, whose playing here frequently defies comparison.

You can name plenty of guitarists that play as well as Robben Ford–guitar virtuosos are not in short supply–but you can’t name anyone who sounds like him. His playing here seems encyclopedic in its command of line and timbre, with lots of stuff you wouldn’t expect to hear in blues guitar. Everything sounds totally appropriate to the genre as well as thoroughly original. Mark Ford’s lines sound far more traditional in their note choices and techniques, though the amped tone and rhythmic precision are more modern.

Peavey KB/A 100 keyboard amp: notice the outline of the 15″ woofer

The main difference this makes in the rig is that the super-low frequencies I’m generating with multiple octave dividers don’t make the speaker crap out anymore. It also makes the rig heavier by about 20 pounds, but I guess my car can handle that, even if my back struggles to do so.

Not satisfied with upgrading the amp, I laid out a proof-of-concept pedal board this weekend; I bought a board, 1″ by 8″ by 6 feet, and cut it down to two boards, 29″ long each. I then velcro’d the pedals to the boards. Here’s what it looks like.

Pedals and boards–must be a pedalboard!

Putting the pedals on these things does a few things for me. First, it stabilizes the pedals, because they’re now mounted on something bigger and heavier, so they don’t move around. Second, I can scale the rig up and down quickly and easily. I can do two kinds of performances using just the right-side board: a typical band gig, where I use the RP355 alone; and a minimal solo gig, where I use just the RP355 and the JamMan Stereo. For a full-blown everything-I-can-do gig, where I want as much sheer sound-generating power as possible, I can take both the boards.

This must be getting serious if I’m figuring out how to put the stuff on stage and keep it there. Stay tuned for more on the evolving rig.

Accordingly, I’ve created a very simple tone on the G3 that fills in a lot of holes. It’s a Matchless amp model, preceded by a compressor, with a touch of spring reverb. I’ve set the compressor high enough to make the tone from the amp model steady and loud, and the spring reverb adds a little depth and width to the sound. This tone isn’t interesting enough to be a really effective lead sound on its own, but if you put it together with an octave patch or an autowah patch on the RP355, it fills in the low-midrange frequency spectrum with plenty of power, leaving the RP355 to handle the big expressive moves. If I want something even bigger behind the 355, I can add pitch shifters, filters, and whatever else I like to the basic G3 setup.

My floor rig, May 3 2013

My harp mic goes into a Radial BigShot ABY box, where the signal is split; I can use the ABY’s footswitches to send the signal to my RP355, my G3, or both at once. The outputs from the Zoom and the RP go to a 4×1 Nady mixer. The (mono) output from the mixer goes into the mono line input on the Digitech JamMan Stereo looper. My vocal mic goes into a TC Helicon Voicelive Play, and the output from the Voicelive goes to the mic input on the JamMan. So the JamMan is where all the signals are ultimately combined, and the (mono) output from the JamMan feeds the Peavey KB2 keyboard amp. Finally, there’s a footswitch that controls some of the functions on the JamMan; the one I use most is removing the most recently recorded loop layer.

That’s seven pieces of gear on the floor, four of which have their own power supplies, which is a lot of cables, a lot of power supplies, and a lot of real estate to manage. Cable overload is a potential issue here, but as you can see, I’ve put some time into making the cable setup simpler and more compact, and it’s definitely worth it to get these huge, cool sounds.

One good multiFX device by itself is very nice. Two opens up a world of even bigger sounds. I like big. I’m stickin’ with it.

Bass on this performance is by Steve DuBois, drums by Harry French, and acoustic guitar by Phil, with Bobby Dunlap on electric guitar. My guess is that this is part of the performance I did with these players at a dance at the Woods Hole Community Center, which performance took place in 1979, or so I recall. I have the whole night on cassette somewhere…

I don’t recall what instrument I was using (except that it was a diatonic in the key of F, played in second position), nor the microphone. It would definitely NOT have been a bullet mic, and it was almost certainly a stick-type vocal mic. It may very well have been my Shure 545 PE, the one with a “pistol” grip. (This was Paul Butterfield’s preferred mic too.) I’m sure that the amp was my favorite of all time, a 45-watt Fender Super Reverb that I bought used in early 1975 for $100 (minus the reverb) and modified with a pair of Electrovoice SRO 12″ speakers. I also took all the vinyl off it, sanded it down, and stained it with a bright cherry red stain, followed by two coats of polyurethane. It was quite the striking piece. (It was stolen from Phil’s van not long after this recording was made, alas.) I plugged the mic into it and played–that was my setup in those days. That amp weighed a hell of a lot (because of the SROs, of course), and it made a sound that cut through more or less anything. You can hear in this performance that it gave me plenty of headroom to work with. The original recording was made on a decent stereo cassette deck with a pair of Sony dynamic mics, which was the best we had to work with in the 1970s, kids. (And we were grateful at the time that we didn’t have to lug an open-reel deck to gigs just to get some idea of what we sounded like, believe me.)

Not much more to say about this, except that it’s worth hearing again. Thanks Randy for sending it to me.

“Hey Brother” by Phil Gentile; Richard Hunter harp solo circa 1979

I’ve done a fair amount of recording using the RP as the audio interface, but this was the first time I’ve recorded acoustic harmonica tracks with it. The usual setup for recording acoustic harmonica in Brian’s studio is a large-diaphragm condenser or ribbon (read: expensive) mic feeding a high-end preamp (usually a Grace model 201), with the harmonica positioned a foot or more away from the mic. In this case I was using a handheld dynamic mic (the Fireball) that costs about a twentieth of one of the mics that Brian usually puts up, into a device (the 255) that costs about a tenth of what the Grace 201 costs. I was concerned that hand-holding the mic in particular would cut too many highs from the tone, but it was no problem. I set up the RP with a direct box amp model, took off all the EQ and FX, and let it rip. And it worked. (When I did the overdubs in Brian’s studio, we ran the Fireball V into his Grace 201. The Grace sounds wonderful, of course.)

Digitech RPs–They’re not just for performing anymore

I had the usual issues with this session that I get almost every time I’m working from a score and playing diatonic harmonicas. (I had to play diatonic in this case because the composer wanted a sound that was authentic for the era, which is 1864, and chromatic harmonicas were invented in the early 20th century.) Diatonic harps, by definition, don’t have all the notes on them. If the composer puts the missing notes in the score, you have to hope that they’re not exposed for long, because playing those notes with either bends or overblows will make them stick out, and the longer you hold them the worse it gets. My preferred approach in these cases is usually to switch harps, so that at any point in time I’m playing a note that’s already on the harp, and bending or overblowing only on passing tones, or for expression.

In this case, the piece was in C, and I used a Suzuki Manji in F for the first few notes of each section, and a Lee Oskar A Natural Minor (which has a complete C major scale in the mid-range) for the rest of the piece. It was a pretty easy switch once I’d practiced it a few times, and those choices gave me a lot of options for shaping the sound on the scale tones that were most prominent in the piece. Even with this setup, I had to use a prolonged half step bend on the draw 3 reed in the lowest octave of the A Natural Minor harp–in other words, hold a B natural–just before the end of the piece. It was a challenge. It was also cool, because in the score the B resolves upward to a C natural, which is the last note in the piece, and resolving the bend slowly upward made for an expressive ending. (When I was setting up for recording on Sunday night, I tried retuning a Suzuki Firebreath in Bb into Melody Maker tuning, which would have given me a complete C major scale in 3rd position; but I didn’t seem to have the right mojo for getting the thing into tune. I’ll try again later. In the meantime, maybe Lee Oskar will start making Melody Makers in Bb. Or someone will.)

You can hear the sound for yourself when “Copper” episode 19 airs (on BBC in the UK, and PBS in the USA) later this year. In the meantime, if you’ve got an RP and you haven’t recorded with it yet, give it a go. And don’t forget the Fireball V; I’m amazed at how much this $125 mic can do.

I just took delivery on three more Session Steels in Bb, C, and D, and I’m looking forward to putting them through their paces. If they’re up to the standard set by the A harp, I’ll be very impressed. These harps aren’t exactly cheap, but they’re certainly price and performance competitive with the Hohner MB Deluxe and Crossover, Suzuki Manji and Olive, etc., and so far they seem to be more durable than any of the similarly-priced competition. (Certainly my MB Deluxes and Manjis don’t hold up under hard playing the way my A Session Steel does.) Stay tuned for more commentary as I work with my new Sessions Steels.

Seydel Session Steel diatonic harp

I went over to Brian’s studio last night for a “proof of concept” session. The challenge here was to make sure the harmonica didn’t sound like cowboy music. It needs to be grittier and darker than that. So goodbye chromatic harp, goodbye hand vibrato, goodbye high-pitched warbles. I went for strong tones on a diatonic harp in second position, with a trailing throat vibrato, and the punchy harp with delayed throb seemed to do the job without straying into cowboy-land.

The proof of concept sold the harmonica, and this weekend I’m recording some takes in my home studio. The engineer sent me a Quicktime video clip of the scene, a click track, and two takes of the score for the scene, with and without the scratch harmonica part (which was played on a synth harmonica patch, and sounds like a cheery little accordian.) I also have a session scheduled with Brian on Monday afternoon. Stay tuned for more on how this project comes together. And in the meantime, check out the trailer for “Copper” below.