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Pod HD 500x in Musical Theatre situation.


stephenwguitar
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Hi Folks,

My HD 500x has just landed, and I'm just starting the mammoth task of getting to grips with the beast. My previous setup was 4 stomp boxes (Distortion, chorus, tremolo, tuner) and a JD Wah Wah. My main guitar is a Japanese Fender Strat, and I have a Joe Pass Archtop for jazz stuff. Amp is Blackstar Club 40. I gig mainly in theatre orchestras, so I'm looking for clean, subtle sounds to 'blend' not overpower.

 

My FOH sound is often at the mercy of the sound engineer at the venue, but I'm hoping with the Increased I/O options I now have, things will be easier.

 

I just wondered if there were any other guitarists here who perform in similar situations? Any general advice for a complete newbie would also be appreciated!

 

Steve

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You'll have it easy. First, you're right. Your sound is at the mercy of the sound guy. Plus, your monitoring will likely be subpar. But on the other hand, your audience isn't there to listen to you. You don't have to tweak the last 20% of your tone cuz no one cares (except maybe you). Just get something close and have fun with it. Expect it to be a trial/error situation. Bad tone on 1st night isn't going to kill the show, but learn what's missing and try something a little different for show #2. Also, learn to program the thing w/o a PC and Edit software. You may be called on to do something specific on the fly (during rehearsal usually - like invoke a heavy tremolo or something you weren't expecting. You will be expected to know how to use your gear.

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I would echo 'get to know how to change peramaters on the POD'. To get used to the process I'd set your 1st patches up as your previous rig. Put your distortion, chorus, tremolo & wah in the same order and stick to amps you know. That way you should get the idea of how the blasted thing works (;-)) pretty quickly. Then you can start adding bits. Remember you can download patches from Customtone - but expect to have to tweak them as they were prolly set up by people with different gear to you.

 

Have fun!

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The nice part of doing stage work ---- 

The sound system is available. 

 

Unlike a church, they don't kill the heat and electricity for six days a week. 

Unlike a bar gig, you aren't limited to 20 minutes before show time to have the PA. 

 

In your instance, when everyone "takes 5" you can continue to work. 

Hell, it's show business. An 8am call time means you have 4 hours to work on your gear because 8am is really noon. 

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Thanks guys,

 

Appreciate all the comments. I've just downloaded edit, and yes I'll be taking Matt's advice and replicating my old setup as a comfort blanket. And in reply to pfsmith, yes it is a help that the audience aren't there to listen to me. The main people listening to me are the other musicians who might recommend me for other gigs etc!

 

My next show is Hairspray in a couple of weeks, a show I know well, which calls for pretty standard rock 'n' roll tones, along with bits of chorus/ tremolo for the slower numbers.

 

My next show after that is Monty Python's Spamalot which calls for jazz tones, but also asks several numbers to be played on a banjo (which I don't have and don't really want to!). Anybody know of a way the Pod can make a guitar sound like a banjo?

 

S

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A Variax can sound a lot like a Banjo! For that reason I haven't really tried to make the POD make that sound. If you are playing a wide variety of music (which I guess you are, playing in shows) you might want to try out a JTV.

 

As for the POD, a clean tone with the trebles boosted might start sounding 'banjoy' ?

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