Tag: effects
This is the rig I used with a Bulletini mic at the show I did last Sunday (25 September 2022), straight into the PA. All the basic harmonica food groups are here represented, but at the show I only used the Joyo American Sound and the delay. I could’ve used the vibrato on a tune or two, but except for my short set the music was about acoustic guitars and vocals, so no need for autowah, pitch shifter, and vibrato. The rig is light enough to carry easily with one hand, so no need to disassemble for a stripped down show either. On a tune or two I turned off the Joyo, and the Bulletini produced a very pleasant acoustic sound
A frequent question from novice harp players is: what should I buy for my first amped setup? Some of the people reading this are going to buy an amp for themselves or someone else for Christmas, or buy one after Christmas with their Christmas money. So here are a few things to keep in mind when you head to the store. (NOTE: this advice is aimed mainly at harmonica players, but the basic concepts apply to just about anything you play through an amp, e.g. guitars, keyboards, and so on.)
For the last year or so, I’ve been using an effects pedal from Digitech, the iStomp, in front of my Digitech RP500 running my patch set. I just added another iStomp to my rig, and I reckon it’s time to talk about it.
I said in a recent post that I had cleaned up my rig, reducing it to a few pieces: a Digitech iStomp running Swing Shift, a Digitech RP500, and a Digitech JamMan Stereo. Well, it wasn’t long before I completed the Zoom G3 patchset, and once I did that I wanted to combine the Zoom with the RP500. So my rig has expanded again. (Alas.) You can see the new rig in the picture.
Our first set of 35 original sounds for harmonica and the Zoom G3 is now available for purchase at this site! For your listening pleasure, we’ve recorded those sounds as we played them, using a Seydel Session Steel harp in the key of Bb and an Audix Fireball mic and a Zoom H4 digital recorder positioned about 6 inches in front of the speaker grill on our Peavey KB2 keyboard amp. No post-recording processing has been applied to these samples, except to normalize the volume levels; this is what the patches sound like, and nothing else.
My rig is always in flux; I’m always trying a new piece here or there. Over time my rig tends to spread, like kudzu, taking up more space on the floor and more time to set up and tear down.
I’ve been working intermittently on a patch set for the Zoom G3, and it’s nearly done–just a round or two of setting relative patch levels and completing documentation to go.
Digitech RPs have a very nice single-line pitch shifter, and a very nice rotary speaker effect too. If you could use them both at once, which you can’t do on a single RP, you’d get some decent simple organ tones. (You can actually get decent organ tones with a rotary speaker alone, but a pitch shifter helps a lot.) But if you really want to emulate the sound of a Hammond organ, you need multi-timbral pitch shifting–the kind you get with an ElectroHarmonix POG or HOG, where you have multiple independent pitch-shifted lines running in parallel. Unfortunately, a HOG or POG costs $300 and up, and it takes up a pretty big chunk of space at your feet, too.
I decided last week to check out a promising alternative: the Digitech iStomp, an interesting device that’s essentially a reconfigurable stompbox. I bought my iStomp from guitarcenter.com used for about $60 shipped, a savings of close to 50% compared to buying new.
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RP355 or RP360XP?
With the new possibility that Digitech will retire the RP355, it’s important to ask again whether it’s better to get an RP355 or an RP360XP. Here’s my current thinking on the topic.