Le matériel des guitaristes pro(s) - (Sommaire en page 1)

Quel est le meilleur moyen de connaître le fonctionnement du système d'un guitar hero ?

Réponse : demander à un fan du guitar hero en question.
Ici : un fan de Brian May qui a reproduit à la presque identique le système actuel de son idole

Pratique.

Ce n'est pas vraiment "un fan du guitar hero".
C'est Mike Hill en personne, le tech qui a fait le rack d'effet de Brian pour l'enregistrement de "The Cosmos Rocks", + tournée 2008.

C'est son copain Rothery qui va être soulagé.

Porcupine Tree new album
Porcupine Tree are happy to announce the forthcoming release of their tenth studio album "The Incident". The record is set to be released via Roadrunner Records worldwide on 21st September, as a double CD.

The centre-piece is the title track, which takes up the whole of the first disc. The 55-minute work is described as "a slightly surreal song cycle about beginnings and endings and the sense that 'after this, things will never be the same again'."

For a “blues” guy, you’ve got one of the most complex touring rigs I’ve ever seen.
Honest to god, I look at my rig and I think it’s pretty simple—simple in the sense that all the pieces talk to each other so easily. Everything communicates through MIDI. My new Marshall JVM heads and Diezel VH4s are almost identical in the way they talk to each other and turn effects loops on and off for different settings. The TC Electronic G-System adds effects and changes everything at once. The Boss GT-6 is mostly for my in-ear monitors mix. The setup runs really smoothly, actually. Sure, the cabinet count has grown and grown, because there’s only one guitar in the band—and sure, I could play through one Marshall in mono and just crank it on 10. But those five cabinets aren’t really that loud—they can’t be, because, honestly, my ears are fried and I’m constantly dealing with tinnitus. The extra cabs are really just there to simulate the ambience of a hall or a coliseum. We play a lot of sheds [amphitheaters] where the sound just goes out and doesn’t come back, so I have some cabinets set wet with effects so my area of the stage sounds like I’m playing indoors.

The World’s Most Insane “Blues” Rig Resonant with lyrical, B.B. King-style vibrato and ornamented with R&B trills, Neal Schon’s guitar playing is still very much alive with the simple blues mojo that gained him notoriety in the Bay Area clubs when he was still in his early teens. It’s the delivery medium that’s gotten more complex. When Schon’s tech, Adam Day, is asked if he can think of a more complex stage rig, he can only cite the Edge’s famously elaborate U2 setup.
Schon’s backline setup starts with a Lectrosonics wireless. (“Neal had been ‘on the wire’ for a while,” says Day, “but when he heard this system, he liked the sound enough to go wireless again.”) From the receiver back in his amp racks, Schon’s signal passes through 45-foot Mogami cables to and from his pedalboard, which includes a Dunlop Buddy Guy Wah, a Boss compressor pedal used mostly for Strat solos, and Xotic ACand RC-Booster pedals. (“Lectrosonics systems tend to run a little bright, so the extra capacitance created by all that long cable actually serves to balance out the sound a bit.”) A TC Electronic G-System controller at Schon’s feet handles all MIDI-implemented effects and amp channel changes, an expression pedal controls the overall delay level (the delay time seems to work nicely for most songs when set to 600ms), and Schon uses a Gibson Digital Echoplex to create the loops he solos over during instrumental interludes between songs.
That’s the simple part.
Things get more intricate back at the amp racks where Schon’s signal is split five ways courtesy of Framptone Amp Switcher and 3-Banger pedals. One signal feeds a drawer-mounted Boss GT-6 processor that runs through a Demeter tube preamp into a Roland M-120 Line Mixer feeding Schon’s in-ear monitors as well as a Marshall Dual MonoBlock power amplifier driving two 1960B 4x12 cabinets in stereo. Schon’s signal is also split between two Marshall JVM half-stacks with G-System effects in their loops, and two Diezel VH4 heads running in stereo courtesy of an Eventide Eclipse processor in their loops (used primarily to fatten things up occasionally with “a little detune”). Each Diezel drives a separate 4x12. And because one is run flat out to get a full sound, its cabinet is turned backwards and miked up behind the stage, thus keeping Schon’s stage volume down.

"It was half assembled from the rig we had on the last Darkness tour," says Adi, "so a lot of the pre-cabling was already done. I just had to change some of the routing for the signal cables and run some extra mains for some of the new effects, which run on non-standard power supplies. The rig is pretty much a different configuration to what we had previously, but we have kept most of the front end. We've still got the Sennheiser radio system — Sennheiser EM3532 receivers and Sennheiser SK5012 belt packs. We're still using the Voodoo Lab Ground Control Pro loop switching system as the brains behind the thing, and the loop switching system is pretty much controlling all of Dan's effects."
These effects include an old Ibanez Tube Screamer overdrive pedal, an original RAT distortion pedal, an MXR Micro Amp, a Moollon overdrive pedal, an Mk1 DigiTech Whammy, a solid-state version of the Watkins Copicat tape echo, and the new Electro Harmonix POG (Polyphonic Octave Generator). They're also using a couple of Line 6 products — an Echo Pro, so that they can set the delay times to the tempo of the tracks, and a Line 6 FM-4 Filter Modeler to handle what Adi describes as "a couple of wacky strange sections".
Amp-wise, Dan will be plugging into a couple of Marshall Plexi heads, as well as a Diezel Herbert, for most of the sounds, plus a Mesa Triple Rectifier "to make the heavy sounds even heavier".
Adi has built a sophisticated switching set up for controlling amp selection.
"All the switching between the amps is controlled by two Mesa Boogie High-Gain Switchers, which are in turn controlled by the Ground Control System," says Adi. "It just means that once all the presets are programmed correctly, you press one switch and it'll select whichever combination of effects, through whichever combination of cabinets and amplifiers you require. It's pretty versatile and you can get almost unlimited combinations of sounds, so we should be able to cover all that's on the album and then some!"

Guitar-wise, things are going to be quite restrained for the upcoming tour (at least in Dan Hawkins terms!). Dan's only going to be taking eight Les Pauls with him — a couple of Standards with stock pickups, a '92 and a '76, two fairly new Standards, two Customs with Fishman Transducers in the bridge in order to get an acoustic sound, a Jimmy Page signature model, and a three-pickup Black Beauty, which was specifically made for Jimmy Page but ended up being a bit on the heavy side for him.
As far as packaging guitars for the long haul, Adi will take a different approach depending on the number of axes a band insists they need.
"The guitars go into individual cases and then into one big guitar trunk," says Adi. "That means you've always got some wheels and you can put other stuff on top of the trunk in the truck. With The Darkness, everything was in individual guitar cases, but towards the end, we ended up carrying I think 26 guitars. If you've got 26 guitars each in their individual case, it very quickly gets quite messy. Also, once you're packing things into the back of an articulated truck, you don't want small stuff, you want big stuff that you can stack and can be wheeled around."