Dancing on the pedal board
Welcome back to part three of this kind of ‘making of’ of my live show from late August. If you’d like, you can read part one here, and part two here. In this third part, I want to talk about how I did the whole show in the end and how it all went.
As I mentioned in the last post, my original plan to use Ableton Live automations for controlling my guitar effects didn’t work as expected. So I needed a different solution.
Blast from the past
Drawing inspiration from my punk band days, I recalled my trusty pedal board. If you have not played electric guitar – or looked closely at someone playing electric guitar on stage before: Most guitarists will have some form of a pedal board by their feet when they play their instrument. These boards are usually quite personal, definitely somewhat unique to any player, band or the genre of music. While one guitarist might be satisfied with just a tuner and a distortion pedal, you may see a massive board with tons of effects at someone else’s feet.
I was already sure, that I would not be playing my guitar through a real amp, but use virtual guitar amps. I personally am a big fan of the sounds of Guitar Rig, but there are many great alternatives out there by now. Since there would be no real amp, I also decided to not use analog guitar effects on a pedal board, but a MIDI-enabled one. Unlike a cluster of individual pedals, this board features six toggle switches in a single, integrated unit—each programmable in Ableton Live to control nearly every aspect of my project. The specific board I used for my set even has built-in Ableton Live functionalities, though those are geared towards managing the entire project rather than just tweaking the guitar sound.
Programming the pedal board to work with my project the way I needed it to would prove to be its own little challenge: In most cases my guitar’s sound is made up from a few components. To make things a little simpler, I chose to use the same virtual amplifier and cabinet combo throughout the whole set. Still, different songs would need different combinations of effects – while I’d play with some overdrive and a little delay during one track, I’d use a phaser and some reverb on another. Usually, a song would come with multiple sound changes throughout – the opening song of my set ‘Places to go‘ for example, begins with a long, moody intro, in which I have some distortion and a heavy phaser in my guitar’s effects chain.
Turn the knobs to 12!
To make these shifts possible, I prepped all my effects in Guitar Rig. As I mentioned earlier, Guitar Rig is my go‐to virtual amp plugin. There are many different one out there by now, but I have gotten used to Guitar Rig and am generally happy with the sounds.
It lets you piece together your sound like building a custom rig—select your amp, choose your cab, create your pedal chain, and save it as a preset for when you need that signature tone.
A screenshot of my Guitar Rig 7 preset. On the right, the signal flow is visible. The flow is split into two, making it possible to switch sounds with one button.
Originally, I planned to create one preset per song and simply click “Next” on the board to switch between sounds. Additional buttons would toggle specific effects within each preset. Unfortunately, while toggling individual components worked, switching presets did not. I had to rethink everything: how could I pack all the necessary functions into a single, reliable setup?
Less is more on stage
They say limits breed creativity. I suddenly felt very limited in what I could do with my guitar and I had to get creative to make it all work. In the end, the solution was quite easy: Simplification.
Those of you, dear readers, who play an instrument or sing on stages know, that everyone wants to show off during a live show. That’s why we all do it. Especially with virtual amps and instruments, you can go crazy. If I wanted to – and if my pedal board would allow for it – I could play a different amplifier with every song, even change it during a song. Even as a professional audio engineer, I felt the need to show off my skills and knowledge. But let’s be honest here: That’s nonsense.
Way back in my band days, I learned a valuable lessen about playing music with others, or really working in any team for that matter: I learned, that everything needs to be “songdienlich” (pardon my German!), which means that everything you do should be serving the song. Don’t dive into a five minute guitar solo, if the song doesn’t call for it. Don’t act like anyone is the most important part of the show – we’re all here to play this song.
This is something, that I have always kept in my mind when it came to composing and producing music. It’s an almost minimalist approach in a way. Strip everything that is not important or necessary to the song at hand. And I decided to use this approach in my live set as well. That meant scaling down my presets by a lot.
From one preset per song, I dismantled it, until I was left with one preset for all the songs, with effects to turn on and off as needed. Not only did this make the setup and use of my effects much easier, it also mimics a setup on stage much more closely. It made the whole show feel a little more like a live punk show on stage.
The Final Setup
In the end, my setup was surprisingly simple:
- “Disco On/Off”: Toggles between the two signal flows (see above), basically toggles between a more compressed, cleaner sound and a more aggressive, distorted sound
- “Solo”: Toggles a boost for extra aggression during solos
- “Dist”: To turn my distortion on and off
- “Wah Wah”: A toggle for a Wah Wah pedal, that I did not end up using during my set
- “Phaser”: Toggle to turn a Phaser effect on and off
- “Tuner”: For silencing the guitar during tuning
Meanwhile, my preset kept a delay and reverb running continuously. That was it—minimal, effective, and totally enough.
I hope you enjoyed this (surprisingly deep) deep dive into my guitar sound. Feel free to leave any questions you have in the comments below or you can ask me on my Mastodon. Stay tuned for the final entry where I’ll reveal more about my overall technical setup and share my perspective on the gig. Hope to see you there!