A couple of years ago a club I was playing at burnt to the ground on Thanksgiving Day along with my road equipment and my band's. The recovery took over two years. Although it was expensive, the main loss was in life energy in the process of rebuilding the rig as well as sub-par performances in the interim. I had most of the basics in a MySpace blog but recently deleted it...MySpace seemed an inappropriate forum to showcase a fail (Eg: hire ME I'm the guitarist you need....also all my stuff burned)....so I started THIS blog and will use the link when appropriate.
I've attempted to document the process of rebuilding in detail, but will add more fact and dates in the future.....
I play in a Nashville, TN. band that does about 140 road dates a year (at the time we were doing over 200 and I didn't have a place to live, I'd just stay in hotels when we were "home" in town). In 2008(?) we were booked in a Michigan club for Thanksgiving week (Wed, Fri, Sat). We loaded in, checked, and played Wednesday. The club was closed for Thanksgiving but the owners had invited us over (their home is next to the club). When we arrived for Thanksgiving lunch we saw fire engines, lots of them. Someone had deep fried a turkey inside the club's kitchen. Everything burned....guitars, amps, drums, in ear monitors, mixing console, racks of outboard. We did not have full production with us, only backline and monitors but it still totaled to just under $80,000.
We had the weekend and the next week to pull together rigs for the following weekend's show. I had an extra Marshall and pedals in storage but only one extra guitar, a Les Paul. The gig is a 3 guitar gig (there are different tunings) with acoustic, plus half of the material was country so a Les Paul is not optimum. I borrowed an Ernie Ball Silouette from John Zocco.
I still needed to replace my Ibanez 550. Insurance was filed and a makeshift rack was haphazardly assembled (in my hotel room) to use for the variety act until I could get permanent replacements. I ordered some routers and starter gear from Tour Supply Nashville and had it delivered to my mom's in Atlanta to save on tax. On my way to pick it up I stopped at every music store to attempt to replace the Ibanez. I was not particularly polite or casual~just all business : "hello, my name is blah-blah. I am looking for a hair metal guitar with a locking Floyd. I'll be buying this guitar today and will only take about 15 minuetes of your time but I'll need you to stay with me. I'll need you to assist and facilitate the process. Are you ready to make a sale?" Apparently this type of rhetoric is not effective in retail in the Southeast. Lots of floor people lost an easy sale by getting distracted by a phone call, another customer, whatever <the guitar is only one of a hundred details or components in the type of rig I use and I simply did not have the time to turn a 15 minuete process into an hour long fiasco because my salesperson is trying to help 5 people at a time> on my way back from Atlanta I called my friend Joe Scarborough who works at The Soundpost in Chattanooga. They had my Jackson, had me in and out, and made the easy sale. I named it "Satan".
The rig got me through New Years but I would need something smaller and more versatile until I could piece together a permanent rig (it would take over two years to complete the project). Line6 had a swiss army knife type of piece called an X3Live. I could use it direct in casinos (50% of our clientele at the time) or as a pedalboard to my amp. It also had a gaggle of synths that were useful to us. Line6 also had a guitar called a Variax which "models" (or simulates) other guitars, it could also be pre-programmed for any tuning and eliminated the need for multiple guitars. I used both these pieces for the next year and a half. They would be a blessing (previously mentioned) and a curse (there were numerous technological glitches with both pieces and I had no artist support, only consumer support). I would have two rigs: the Line6 I used on a nightly basis to gig with, and the permanent one that would get slowly pieced together in hotel rooms across the United States. Time, energy, and money needed to be focused on the permanent rig but the Line6 needed so much attention every time it failed or glitched, it slowed the process.
You might be asking why the permanent replacement would take so long to slowly get pieced together in hotels across the United States (as previously mentioned). Take the insurance money, order the parts, put it together? Well...My gig is a rack gig. Management had specified I use a pedalboard (it is STILL awkward to this day because I am using the wrong tool for the job). The pedalboard I had previously assembled to use for this band had minor issues (some were valid, and some were G.A.S.). Instead of using the claim money to replace my gear piece by piece I opted to start over from the ground up. This was probably a mistake. It seemed like a good time to change my pedalboard and gear since everything was gone. Right?
Wrong. In science you have to have a control in an experiment. I didn't have a control, EVERYTHING was new.Also the traveling and constant dates made it nearly impossible to assemble and trouble shoot.I would have to drag everything out of the trailer after soundcheck, set it up, and work on it in the hotel room. It wasn't always possible to do everyday, plus we were always learning new songs and trying to record a CD every 12-18 months. Also when assembling a pedalboard there are sometimes custom parts that need to be special ordered (a 90 degree plug, industrial velcro from Tour Supply, the Keely mod instead of the stock one......and on and on). Hotels do not receive packages unless you are checked-in. Most of the mail order had to wait until we were back in Nashville (it would be delivered to someone in the band). Sometimes times it was months before we were home, at that point in time we would usually stay gone for 3-5 weeks at a time year round. So long story short what would have taken me a month if I would have been home working a day job, took me over two years because I was on the road.
So now it was January.I had the Line6 gear to keep me working, guitars (PRS Santana, Mexican Strat, and Satan),and a Fender Hot Rod Deville. I needed a pedalboard (and later would replace the amp with a Dr Z). First you determine the pedals, then the extras (snake, buffers), then the power, then you size it all and determine the actual pedalboard it will be mounted and housed on. I knew what I DIDN'T want~my old pedalboard. The Carl Martin Combinator was noisy and the buttons kept falling through. The American distributor in New Jersey was super cool and very gracious. The techs in Denmark were dicks. Two consecutive Carl Martin Combinators were failed.
I started using www.proguitarshop.com as a reference as well as the forums on www.Harmony-Central.com I decided on some pedals, started on the process, and then our trailer was broken into. All they took was MY stuff. A bag full of pedals, the Strat, and the PRS....start over again....another claim....buy more stuff. It's almost March at this point...................
I should mention that my set-up was a two pedalboard set-up. The first was just meat and potatoes guitar sounds, we make country albums, meat and potatoes is all you need. But country albums and dates from an Indie act doesn't pay the bills so we use another name and book the act playing covers in clubs and casinos playing variety music. Variety is not meat and potatoes. Variety is bells and whistles. There is no keyboard player or second guitar player (I'm IT). So all the bells and whistles come from the second pedalboard. Yes it is possible for a 3 piece (Zeppelin/Halen lineup) band to entertain playing a variety of music to a variety of demographics for four hours without atrophying the ear (using only a guitar and an amp)....just as it is possible to produce the same orgasm by rubbing the same clit the same way for 40 years..... It's probably a good idea to switch things up every now and then to keep the ear (and clit) stimulated and not desensitized....so the two pedal-board approach made my life hell, added an extra year, and an extra $8,000 or so of trial and error (final running total).......should have just used tracks like everyone else.
After the guitars were stolen I started using the Variax exclusively. This meant I didn't have a control for my "experiment" (I could only approximate the relationship between guitar,pedal,amp since my permanent guitar would eventually be a real one). I went through a handful of pedal/pedalboard approaches.Occasionally I would use a "work in progress" at a gig to see how it responded at show volume (there is a phenomenon called The Fletcher-Munsun Curve that makes decisions at hotel room volumes useless at show volumes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FletcherMunson_curves). I eventually settled on a combination of pedals, guitars, and amp that work well together and are versatile enough to cover most of the country, rock, pop, blues that we play.
The second mistake I made was deciding to update my rack at the same time I was redoing my pedalboard/amp set-up. My rack was old and needed updating and some clean-up. I don't particularly like gear, I would rather play and make music than just screw around with sounds all the time. So I figured while my head was in gear-land go ahead and kill two birds with one stone (it would drive me way into debt). I had a second home in Phoenix, AZ at the time and my rack would be my west-coast project while my pedalboard would be my east-coast project. The band I'm in is headed by a singer/drummer LTR. Not always a great idea. Any band could combust at anytime but even more so for those that are intertwined w/ a relationship. Having a different rig in a different part of the country seemed to give me the flexibility to be available to 1,000 working bands in 2 regions rather than 100 working bands in a city if I needed to jump off a sinking ship. The theory only works if the rack works though.
I made mistakes but I made good decisions too. I got it done and continue to think of faster, cleaner, lighter, safer, more responsive pedalboard applications (which is what we all do essentially). I HAVE learned that custom mods and special order widgets,and boutique companies that don't have retail are not the right approach for me. If I had an endorsement with tech support; maybe. If I had a world class guitar tech on the road with me at all times; maybe. Otherwise if I can't get it at a Guitar Center-Best Buy or order from Tour Supply, if I can't try or hear your product in person with MY gear with ME playing it~ forget it. I cannot get life energy, time, or expense back from shipping your unit back for the full refund as promised. I'll get the refund but I'll lose my time and shipping money. That's time I could have played, written, or recorded. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the idea of an Axess, or Axe-FX, Pedalsnake or any number of small business proprietary manufacturers. That's the American way! More power to them. (yes I KNOW that Axess is from Canada). It's just not for me. I travel too much and I can't afford two of everything (yet)......
BTW I would highly recommend MusicPro insurance. I've had 3 claims with them in 21 years. They've been fast and professional, and their rates are competitive.
August 2011
