I just realized that I never posted a decent summary on my guitar rig. Here and there I uploaded some information, but the whole stuff has never been collected so far. Well, it’s probably because I don’t use a proper guitar rig: I have five guitars, but my small amp (actually a Line6 Spider V20 guitar combo) is used only for practicing purposes, while everything you hear on the records is purely digital.
First of all, I use two guitars most of the time: for riffs I prefer my modified ESP LTD EC-256 (FM See-Thru Black Cherry Sunburst) with two high output Seymour Duncan pickups (Pegasus and Sentient). This small singlecut, fixed bridge guitar equipped with Elixir Optiweb (010″/046″) strings is capable to produce the fattest and most brutal sounds when needed. However, for guitar solos and experimentation I use my Jackson JS32Q Dinky DKA (AH Transparent Green Burst) superstrat with a Jackson-licenced Floyd Rose tremolo (to be honest, I’m not a frequent tremolo user, but sometimes it can be quite useful if you have one on your guitar). Also, I’m in love with the neck profile of this instrument (it’s actually the Speed Neck from the Jackson’s Soloist series with a shape somewhere between the “C” and the “D” neck profiles: a fast and comfortable one!) – that’s why I use it pretty often, despite the constant struggle of correctly tuning a Floyd Rose-equipped guitar. For the acoustic parts I play my Fender Redondo Player dreadnought electroacoustic guitar with a comfy “C”-shaped neck profile and a built-in Fender-exclusive CD-1 Fishman pickup/preamp system, while for the bass parts I use a budget-friendly, but solid LTD B-10 bass. And as a bonus, I have a very old friend in the family too: my old Harley Benton S-620 TR Rock Series is still with me, although I don’t use it too often anymore. I keep it mainly out of nostalgic reasons: when I moved abroad and back I had to sell my instruments and stop playing the guitar for a couple of years – and this old Harley Benton was my first guitar, when I came back and had the chance to play again.
And now comes the boring part. Everything that comes out of my guitars is routed into a Focusrite Scarlett Solo 3rd Generation audio interface, which directly sends signals into a Mac computer equpped with a Steinberg Cubase Digital Audio Workstation (I still use Elements 12.0 but in the long run I think I’ll have to invest into an upgrade to the Artist version, due to its higher versatility and premium features). The guitar sounds are produced in one of my two virtual amp-and-effects processors that turn the computer into a fully customizable guitar/bass rig. Until now I mainly used Positive Grid’s Bias FX2, but recently I started to quite heavily use the Archetype Nolly plugin from Neural DSP – both are great plugins and I plan to use them in a parallel way, according to my current needs.
