“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” Live

My performance of Bob Dylan’s song. As Jimi Hendrix said while playing “Like a Rolling Stone” at Monterey, “Yeah, I messed up the lyrics. So what?”

Lead harp recorded with a Suzuki Manji harmonica in G, played in 2nd position through a Bulletini mic into a Line 6 HX Stomp running a Fender Princeton Reverb amp model (thanks Boris Plotnikov). I tried a lot of different modeled amps before I selected this one–it had the right combination of clarity and amped-up depth. Backing (organ-style) harp was recorded with an Audix Fireball V mic into a Digitech RP500 running a Bassman amp model with rotary speaker. In general, it’s good to use different devices and sounds when you use harmonicas for different layers in an arrangement–it’s another way to make the sounds in each layer distinct.