My Guitar Rig
As a follow-up to my recent article about rewiring my rack, I’ve finished assembling a new snake to connect between my rack and floor pedal. It contains three 1/4″ unbalanced guitar cables and a 2 conductor power cable that will eventually provide remote DC for my floor pedal. I need to do some testing to determine the correct DC power supply that will provide the necessary voltage / amperage via the 30 foot cable run. It took me a few hours to put it together, using loops of heat-shrink tubing. As much as I love duct tape, it’s the wrong tool for building cable snakes. Ditto for cable ties, which always catch on each other and often have sharp edges. Heat-shrink tubing doesn’t leave adhesive residue, is very low-profile and if you ever need to repair any of the cables, you just snip the loops to separate the cables. The resultant snake is easy to handle and coils neatly.
My guitar setup is fairly straight forward. Click the image below for a larger view.
I have 2 transmitters for my Audio Technica wireless system, so both my main guitar and my backup guitar are ready for action. The good news is that I can select from hundreds of channels, so I can always find a clear frequency at any venue. The bad news is that my UHF wireless setup transmits within the soon-to-be-auctioned 700MHz frequency band, and I’m not certain what will happen once that part of the spectrum is sold. Quite a lot of professional wireless equipment runs in this part of the spectrum. Chances are the music industry will need to find a new place to broadcast our signals.
The big excitement of yesterday was the purchase of a new Rock N Roller R8 equipment cart, which neatly transports my entire rig in a single trip. This will make my load-in much easier, and will be especially important when I’m moving my own gear. I’ve noticed that it sits pretty level in “cart” mode, so I may even set up my guitar rig right on top of it when I need to move it onto the stage for quick change-over between bands.