John Hendow

Last night The Dudley Manlove Quartet performed at the Tulalip Casino in Marysville. This was our second mid-week appearance at the casino; it made for a bit of a sleepy Thursday and I hope any future shows there will be on weekend rather than during the week. In order to simplify logistics I carpooled to the show with Jeff, which gave us an opportunity to discuss business strategy and music on the road. Once we arrived at the casino we did the customary check-in with security and were issued badges.

The stage at the casino is very spacious and the room has a great sound and light system. One of my favorite things about this room is that their stage monitors are fabulous-sounding EAW wedges. This means I can have a good guitar mix up front without having to run my amplifier very loud. One characteristic about the Hot Rod Deluxe is that it gets gritty when turned up to its louder settings; it’s a great blues sound when driven hard, and I do take advantage of that when playing with The 1 Uppers. But I prefer a mostly clean tone when playing with DMQ and it’s always nice to have a lower stage volume. A good microphone on this amp provides a lovely tone with rich harmonics, and this means easily controllable feedback.

We performed a number of guitar-centric hits last night including “The Final Countdown”, “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Sunglasses At Night”. I’ve been experimenting with different settings on the Pod XT Live and I’m getting a much more satisfactory tone from the unit, especially at lower stage volumes. Again, this is partially due to the gain stage characteristics of the amp and my usual instinct is to lower the volume and go for a more controlled stage sound. At last night’s gig I was able to verify something that I have been suspecting, but unable to test until now. There have been many times when I’ve thought my amp was distorting or losing clean head room at gigs. I find turn down the gain, lower the volume output from the Pod and yet it still sounds distorted. In our third set last night I began to hear that slight distortion from the amp and I wandered over to it to listen to it clearly. I was unable to verify it was distorting, but from my playing position several feet in front of it I would have sworn it was. The sound was unfocused, slightly dirty and over-driven. However, listening to the monitor feed proved this wasn’t actually happening! The guitar tone from the monitor was clean and sounded great. Apparently what I’m experiencing is some kind of psycho-acoustic phenomenon. I have a fairly high degree of faith in the validity of last night’s experiment since the monitor feed’s source is a microphone directly in front of my amp. If the amp was actually distorting it would have been present in the monitor. So, what does this mean? It’s got to be something that I’m “hearing” on stage that isn’t actually part of my amp signal. Very strange indeed. This might be a question for the band’s patron alien: Dudley, help me with your interstellar wisdom!

I am continuing to plan my new pedalboard, which should take shape in the next few weeks. I’d like to put the Pod XT Live, my wah, wireless receiver, a few select pedals, and pedal power unit all together on a single pedalboard. In addition, I’d like to have a good case for the whole thing. The current top contender for the project platform is the PedalTrain Pro, and I’m beginning to look around for a deal on this system.