All The Small Things

When I was watching George Thorogood on Sunday, I noticed that they had no backline on the stage. Which got me thinking - could I do the same? For most of Saturdays gig, I’d not been close enough to my amp to hear it - I’d been listening to what was coming out of the PA on my in ear monitors. And I wasn’t tethered to my amp by a cable any longer, thanks to the new wireless system. So why have an amp at all? A quick trip to R&T Music provided the answers. Of course they had a solution, of course it sounded superb and of course they were happy to take some money off me! As I’ve photographed my new bass preamp/DI pedal in front of my existing amp, you can see that there is a considerable size and - trust me on this one - weight saving.
The only small issue I have (and the reason I still have my amp) is that to set the pedal up, I need to plug it into the PC and do all sorts of complicated things whilst monitoring the output, until I get the sound I want to hear in my ears and - by definition - out front. This is not my area of expertise, but luckily I know a man for whom all that sort of thing is as natural as breathing. So I’m hoping that by Thursday night Stuart will have waved his magic wand and when I play at our gig on Friday night it will sound like I’m using a high end amp through an 8x10 cab! And all without having to lug such an amp and cab up two flights of stairs.
I’m not guaranteeing I’ll be playing all the right notes though. I don’t think the software to do that has been invented yet…