Two Amplified Rock Recording Setups


My basic setup is a Lee Oskar harmonica. For amplified work, like blues or rock and roll, additional gear is necessary.

I’ve used a number of setups live and on record that yield good results, and I’ll describe here the setups I used on two recordings. Samples can be found below in RealAudio format.

Put the Lever Down


This piece was recorded with a fairly simple setup: a Shure 565 running into a Boss BF-2 flanger, which in turn was plugged into an Electroharmonix Deluxe Memory Man, then into a six-band EQ (don’t remember the make; it was stolen later) and from there directly into a Fender Champ, one of the real old ones; it was tan tweed with brown cloth, and it only had one control: for volume. Erik Lindgren, the producer, had found it in a pile of trash on the sidewalk in Cambridge, MA on garbage pickup day. It worked when he plugged it in. I blew it up in the course of recording Play With Me, the companion piece to Put the Lever Down. I’d had the flanger for about a week when we recorded this piece, and I really liked the big swirl that the BF-2 put on the sound.

Download a full-length RealAudio format sample of Put the Lever Down
 (Note: this file is a little over 700K; it'll take a few minutes to download.)

You'll need the RealAudio player to use RealAudio files; you can get a free copy direct from RealAudio by clicking here.


Blindman’s Holiday, The Postman is Reading My Mail


Blindman’s Holiday was a guitar-driven rock band, and I wanted a big, heavy sound for this song. I ran an AKG BT330D mic into a DOD Heavy Metal Pedal, then into a Boss RDD-10 rackmount digital delay set to flange, then into the Deluxe Memory Man, and finally a Hush II pedal (which provided noise gating plus a little compression). The signal from the mic was split, and one side went through the effects chain while the other side went directly to the board; we recorded both the clean and effected signals on separate tracks. That allowed the harmonica to morph from very clean to heavy metal in the mix.

Download a RealAudio format sample of The Postman is reading My Mail
 (Note: this file is a little over 300K; it'll take a few minutes to download.)

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