The virtues of purity (of the guitar signal path)

At my jazz quintet’s last rehearsal, I screwed up my courage and did something I hadn’t tried for about 20 years… going straight from my jazzbox (Ibanez AF105FNT) into my amp (… ’80s solid-state Marshall 1×12″ combo!) without any intervening pedals… not even my required volume pedal!

While I did it for speed, I hoped to be wowed by the purity of the sound compared to my extensively modelled selection of sounds out of my Digitech GNX3 all-singing all-dancing pedal board. In fact, it was… good enough. I realised that I could get away with most of the songs in our set (mostly “lounge jazz” sometimes veering into MOR) without changing guitars (I normally use my Variax to do some songs on a “strat” or a “335″).

We’ve got a gig this afternoon, and I don’t think I’ve got the guts to follow through and do the gig direct. The main reason is the much tighter, clearer bass response I seem to be able to get from a modelled 15″ cab going straight into the Marshall’s power stage. Maybe I just need to spend some more time on tweaking the EQ on the amp… but not before this afternoon…

This entry was posted on 08/09/2007 at 09:24 am and is filed under performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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