March 31, 2025
Last night was wonderful for a lot of reasons - most especially a lovely crowd! But I'm celebrating a mundane yet thrilling-to-me item too.
My Fender Stratocaster has been my go-to electric guitar since I was 15. It was my job and income during high school. Paid a lot of my way through college. Bars, weddings, parties, whatever it was - my trusty Strat and I did it together. We went through quite a collection of amplifiers to be sure! But always together, each of us accumulating a few more scars and scratches each year.
For the last 30 years, of course, my main guitars on stage have been acoustic. As a solo singer/songwriter the majority of the time, the Strat isn't often the right tool. It's more of my band instrument. Since I began doing shows with Beyond Borders back in 2008, my Strat gets out on stage with me, but the acoustic environment is very different - drums plus acoustic instruments are not standard issue rock band configurations. And I've really struggled finding the right combination of amplifier and effects pedals to do "our thing" to my satisfaction.
During the pandemic I got a Helix modeler - basically just about every amplifier and effects unit under the sun at your fingertips, programmable, built for the stage, and yet, incredibly challenging to me to "dial in" sounds I liked for certain songs. It's great to have so many options for the really diverse array of our material that calls for my electric guitar! I messed around with it a bit now and again, and liked it enough to keep working with it, but of course we didn't do a lot of band shows during that period, with big layoffs between.
The run of shows we did last autumn before we went into the studio really got me "under the hood" of the Helix. In particular in the studio really brought out all the nuances and imperfections as well as making it possible to dial in the sweet stuff. I'm thrilled with most of how it's recorded.
Getting ready for last night's show over these last few weeks, I started tweaking and balancing all the various different presets and snapshots, getting the volumes consistent within a song and between songs, working with a small stage amp, the PA system at the studio and my bandmates in-ear monitor mixes. Last night I took it out on stage and it pretty much delivered EXACTLY what I expected, and it was fun as hell to play. For all of the jokes about guitar players starting soundcheck with the volume at 4 and being up to "11" by the end of the show, I set the amp volume during soundcheck and never touched it the rest of the night. My reliable old friend sounded better than ever, from glass to snarl and back with the flick of a footswitch, and allowing my hands and fingers to really dance freely for the first time in a long time. It was a high all its own!
If you were there, I hope it sounded as good in the audience as it did on stage.
Photo © Stephanie Thompson
Photo © Scott Moore