Two-Voice “Stereo” Guitar: A Primer

I’ve been wanting to post this “article” for a while, I wrote it and posted it on the “Praise and Worship Forum“.

I’ve been doing two voice (acoustic AND electric) guitar for about a decade (actually for a little while I did 3-voice, with a guitar synth… but I don’t do guitar synth right now), and I feel like I’ve really gotten it “right” in the past 4 or 5 years. So I thought I’d share my experience and find out if anybody else is doing it. First… my church, the view of the stage…

 

Stage View

 

My rig is toward the right, all amps and monitors are “down in the pit”, so they don’t clutter the stage. This series, btw, even though it features a rainbow, has nothing to do with contemporary uses of the rainbow. That’s all I’m sayin’ about that, and we won’t discuss it… Here’s some closer-up views of my “station”.

 

Rig View

 

 

Pedal Board View

Guitar runs stereo… Acoustic side goes to a Yamaha AG-Stomp (any decent acoustic preamp will do) with an expression pedal for volume. I use a touch of compression on this, too. The eq and compression (as well as the PHENOMENAL Condensor Mic modeling) in the AG-Stomp absolutely MAKE my acoustic tone. You can get similar results from a Baggs preamp or Mama Bear or what have you… Electric side goes to tuner, then to volume pedal, then to gain pedal (BB), then to compressor (keeley 4-knob), then to boost pedal (Nobels), then to Chorus (Danelectro 18V original release “Cool Cat”), then to Tremolo pedal (Rocktron Surf from mid-90s), then to Analog Delay (Carbon Copy, used for ONE ambient setting only), then to tap-tempo Digital Delay (Line6 DL4), then to amp (Dr. Z MAZ 38 Sr. 2×10 Reverb). The amp, as you can see below, is out of sight and earshot, and miked with a Blue Ball (I like it WAY more than an SM57). You can use something like a POD or ToneLab and get great results, too without the amp. I did until about 6 months ago. I sometimes add a wah before the gain pedal.

 

Guitar Amp View

Here’s where it gets tricky.

 

Monitor View

I do NOT send the signals separately to the board, as the sound man will (I know this from experience) always muck up my balance between the “sides”. So instead, I run the Mic from the guitar amp AND the signal from the AG-Stomp (through a direct box rather than running balanced direct – sounds better for some reason) into a mixer (Mackie 1202VLZ) and mix the sound for the sound man, sending one balanced line-level signal to the board. Then I monitor on-stage not through the avioms and the floor monitors, but through my own, separately controlled monitor amp. A keyboard amp works great for this, or, in my case, an acoustic amp, a Fender Acoustasonic Junior. I don’t actually monitor from the electric guitar amp at all, which is why a high-quality emulator will work well (especially in smaller spaces where you can’t use much volume… I have to run an attenuator in fact, even though our house seats about 500). I also run a noise gate (MXR Smart Gate) on the mic from the electric amp, so that when there’s no music, and the pastor is preaching, he can’t hear the amp noise (there’s always some). It takes me about 20 or 30 minutes to set this up, but since I work at the church, during weeks when I play (2 or 3 out of every month at least) I just leave it set up most of the time.

As for how my guitars connect… My US Masters strat, my two Tom Andersons, and my PRS all have a TRS stereo output. Tip is electric (so if you run a mono cable it’s electric only), Ring is acoustic, sleeve is ground. I have several TRS to dual TS cables for those.

Also, the PRS automatically switches to “mono output” when you connect a mono cable. The Anderson Crowdster Plus switches to mono when you engage a switch on the guitar.

The Cobra and the US Masters have no switch, and no facility for combining electric and acoustic sounds in one cable (which I NEVER do anyway, since I find that useless for my purposes). In short, with these two, there is NO way to send the acoustic sound down a mono guitar cable. This means when you plug them into a guitar amp with a regular guitar cable, they basically behave like a normal electric guitar. This is the way I want them to behave, and the system I prefer over the “auto-switching” of the Ghost system on the PRS.

The Godin, however, has two outputs, one electric and one acoustic. I use a dual (stereo) TS/TS to TS/TS cable. Basically two guitar cables combined into one.

Anybody else? Any thoughts? Discuss!