Guitar Rig - Gig Setup

I have been using GR as a home practice rig, and am considering doing some gigs with it. But I need to get a laptop of sorts and somehow integrate it into my amp/stage setup.
I have the RigKontrol, so the laptop doesn't need to sit in front of me, but I am not sure where or how I will mount the laptop.
I would like it to be something that is gig ready, not just a laptop sitting on my amp.
This seems like a big step when going from pedals to a software/laptop driven effects setup.
Going to a rack seems a little excessive.

Anyone have any examples of how they run their setups?
Pictures? Links? Problems they may have had?
I saw one person who had a laptop sitting on a music stand in front of him while he played.
I thought it looked pretty cheesy, but couldn't come up with any good ideas
of how to do it myself.

Ideas?

 

"laptop sitting on a music stand in front of him while he played" - I don't think that it is good idea. YOu not at a big scene where you need to here only your part.

 

Hiya,

Thinking along the same lines myself - GR4 w/RK3 and a hardy laptop making it super mobile, but how to setup at a gig?

I've spent a lot of time watching house/trance DJ's at work (using mixers & laptops) and a few VJ's - and the professional ones can setup their 'performance layout' on any flat surface - I'd definitely have my laptop available for emergency reboots/tweaks when live. Space allowing, I'd have Rig Kontrol somewhere where I can interact w/audience.

I've seen a few guys trying to rock out guitar solo's behind a desks or in cramped area and it was just boring (imho). However recently saw a jazz guy sitting behind a laptop mellowing out backround tunes and that worked.

Guess it depends it you are performing as 3-4 piece Rock band, Solo Entertainer, Electronic DJ/VJ entertainment. I've had a little experience with all three and I'd setup differently for each.

Here's a youtube clip that made me think :: Steven Jones doing guitar w/French Bank - Air. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEu-IyztvG8.

His setup & laptop are tucked away, but accessible. And since he is a supporting member, Air are doing most of the crowd entertainment.

 

I'm playing in a rock band with 4 other guys. On our last gigs, I had my laptop on a stand at the side of the stage. This way, you can tweak the sounds if needed. Also, since I use many different presets, I could use the preset browser as a setlist.
Rig Kontrol in front of me/the stage, so I can control the sounds and interact with the audience. (This may only be an option for small stages, since you are limited by the length of the USB-cable)

If possible, I connect the RK outs directly to the mixer. This way, I don't have to carry an amp around with me.
If there are no stage monitors available, I use an active speaker (instead of a traditional guitar amp) .

This surely doesn't look like old school Rock (visible laptop, no amp), but it works and sounds good. If your music is good, most people don't care about a laptop on stage. And I don't care about the others.

 

first off, you can buy USB cable extenders for relatively cheap $$ if you need to put some distance between your laptop and the rig kontrol. Beyond that, I personally have found using guitar rig to be functionally no different than my traditional amp/rack of doom/midi pedal setup. The rig kontrol stays located front of stage next to my vocal mic.

Certainly one needs to be mindful of the laptop not getting trashed by some drunken idiot, or just by some sort of accident, and there can be audio issues with electrical wiring and such. But, going from guitar > cable > Rig Kontrol > Laptop , and then RK to a powered speaker (or to a small mixer which splits the signal to send 1 feed to the PA and another feed to stage monitor/powered speaker) is not that big of a deal IMO.

My rule of thumb is that if it works on the gig, use it until it fails you and leaves you twisting in the wind, in which case it is time to re-evaluate to eliminate the problem so it doesn't happen again.

Guitar Rig 3 w/Kontrol pedal has done fairly well for me in the last 6 months or so. It allows me to travel very light without a stage amp if I so desire, without necessarily compromising the sounds I like to hear.

Here's my setup (I'm a bassist):

Laptop in soft road case
Rig Kontrol Pedal, small tabletop mixer, cables/stands in road bag
Powered 15" subwoofer
Powered 12"x horn wedge

replaced my previous setup:

5 space rack:
- rack compressor
- rack multi effects processor
- rack tuner
- rack outlet strip
road bag for cables, stands, Sans Amp bass driver, & direct box
combo bass amp or bass head/speaker cabinet
Behringer FCB1010 midi pedal in soft road case

Although physically there is not much difference in the amount of gear, I will say that the rack setup seemed to set up much faster than the Guitar Rig/Laptop setup, and of course responded much better to power brown-outs and blackouts. Unfortunately, I've had to remove the battery from my laptop in order for the audio to work properly. Otherwise, running the laptop on battery power would eliminate the problem of system crash due to electrical outages.

But the primary benefit of Guitar Rig is that I have many, many, MANY more sound flavors available (for example, multiple splits with amps and different compression schemes for each amp split) with Guitar Rig which generally cannot be achieved by my other rack processors due to physical or design limitations of the rack units themselves (4 non-programmable rack compressors? I don't think so!).

 

I didnt know it could be used this way sounds brilliant if thats what you want to do!

 

Many Thanks jimfist & GroovyG,

Going Digital Audio only is a steep learning curve, (and painful from all my forum reading =). But I wasn't getting results with my traditional setup (Amp, Line 6 X3 Live + ext pedal board), it was reliable, but not flexible (Damn, jimfist, 4 compressors!). Heh, I'm loving the modifiers - can't wait to plug the bass in & get a live, gated trance saw sound.

I feel I do need the flexability because I enjoy playing (badly, at times ;-) a variety of instruments (acoustic, electric guitar & bass) in differing genre's (folk, rock, electronic-a). Buying seperate rigs isn't feasible for me, and imho, no-one makes a all-in-one solution. FMR (from my reading) GR was the closest 'out-the-box' solution I could find.

Previously :: When w/DJ - I've always sent the outs from my X3 Live to a mixer and let the DJ control the mix (EQ & Vol) - used a set of 'monitoring' headphones (Sennheiser HD380 Pro's) to hear myself think - in addition to the monitors on 'stage'. When rock band, the 'sound guy' took a DI from the X3 Live and I used the amp as a monitor. When acoustic, I mic'ed up the acoustic (not my favourite).

Going to be interesting to work out the best methods w/GR4.

 

v8, LOL Yes, 4 compressors! LOL.

My bass compressors of choice are non-programmable. In my traditional rack setup, I run a generic compressor found in my multi-FX unit (and there is only ONE in that processor) for patch specific gain control, and then the whole shooting match of my processed sound goes to a dedicated non-programmagle rack comp/lim for overall compression. And because its an excellent compressor, I'm able to do some pretty radical squashing to the sound without any of the undesireable artifacts found on other less quality compressors. It is a fundamental part of the sound, really. And that is my old-school analog live rig.

Now, I use GR3 b/c of the SNAPSHOT feature. I've found that you can get a great fretless sound using multiple compressors. And since rack components in GR only use cpu processing power when they are active, I can load up 4 Tube Compressors into a preset and only activate one or 2 per Snapshot, depending on what I'm trying to accomplish with compresson-based changes within a preset. I never have all 4 running (maybe some day), but 2 on and 2 off is realistic. Think in terms of switching between a fretless bass in a verse, then a very heavy metal sounding bass with lots of attack and top end in the chorus.

The point being, my live rack would be very LARGE and COMPLICATED if it were to consist of processors that I would actually like to have in real life as dedicated rack pieces - even for my basic core sounds. This is the primary benefit IMO (obvious, no?) of Guitar Rig software.

My biggest gripe for components is that the quality of the red Pitch Pedal is nowhere near up to snuff. The further the transposition, the more artifacts and audio glitches you get. Just doesn't sound very good to me compared to the original Digitech pedal.

 

Grin jimfist, being a part-time bass player, my bass fx consisted of a Zoom B2 + crybaby bass wah, then upgraded to X3 Live w/bass wah. Sound was ok(ish) to gig through crap PA's but since I'm playing more organized venues with 'bigger sound', sound quality became an issue. (getting consistent results)

When you say non-programmable compressors - how does that work? No settings, aside from output volume/gain? I've never really learned how to set a compressor aside from using 'factory settings' in the multi-fx units. I've read through the component reference of GR4 (done some online reading & played with the presets in GR), but I'm stuck at the basics of - "it should even out my poor bass playing so sounds/notes are of the same/similar output level'

But something I didn't expect was the bass to sound so good through GR4 - damn. Highly inspiring, and the single note effects were much better (imho) then on the guitar. Even though there is only one dedicated bass amp (they all are really flexible) the array of sounds was impressive - far exceeding what I managed with the X3 Live.

However I do find that GR4 is highly intolerant of dodgy hardware. Where the pedal board/X3 live would put up with cheap cables/iffy pots/switches, GR justs doesn't seem to work with dodgy hardware (similar to upgrading the strat stk pickups to 'kinman noiseless' - had to replace the whole wiring harness - pots, switches, wiring - to get the quality sound)

The GR documentation does mention setting pickup hieght - what I may be missing was how it differs from a traditional analog setup? My strat is 'on spec' and sounds okay, while my 2xhumbucker guitar benefitted from a relatively major raise in hieght. The bass (also 2xhumbucker) also needed a jump in pickup hieght - although it was also 'on spec'.

Aside from the obvious tonal (inc output) differences between pickups on guitars & basses, is setting up a guitar/bass for GR any different than a traditional rig?

Have only demo'ed the digitech pedal - great fun! Just for interest, I tried a -1oct/+1oct sweep on the expression pedal(s) - The model on the X3 was (imho) slightly better than the GR one - but I'd use neither =(. As you say - 'artifacts'.

 

v8,

what I mean by a "non-programmable" rack compressor is just a typical 'old school' piece of equipment, such as the dbx 165, dbx 160 or 160x, or my recent favorite - the Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor. They all have rotary knobs and buttons, which is great for a sound mixer or engineer to manually dial in different sounds, or to literally work the compressor during an actual performance passage, but is definitely limited if you'd like to do some more drastic things to your sound, and the compressor is "set and forget" in your stage processing rack.

The reason I might use 2 compressors for a sound in Guitar Rig is b/c I have not found a single compressor that sounds the way I'd like it to given the varied musical styles I commonly play. For example, I may want to use one compressor for a general 3:1 ratio for leveling of the signal, but then also add a full-on limiter at a 20:1 ratio that only engages for the passages where I may be bludgeoning the crap out of the bass (drastic measures for drastic music!). This keeps the equipment from freaking out and distorting or blowing up. Again, the benefit of Guitar Rig is the ability to have programmable settings for multiple compressors, if needed, or even the ability to control the rotary knobs in REAL TIME (via controllers).

Compression and limiting are techniques that are just as much an art as they are a science. It can be explained well at this link:

http://www.barryrudolph.com/mix/comp.html

With practice, compression can be used almost as an envelope with which you can shape the sound. For example, you may all but eliminate the attack of a guitar in order to soften the sound, or at an extreme, achieve a psuedo "backwards tape" effect. The reverse is true, where you can allow the attack of an instrument to pass, while the meat or sustain of the sound is heavily compressed, with its gain reduced, creating a very percussive sound which is great for staccato or marcato playing styles. Just as the nuance, volume, and dynamics of a song are constantly changing, so will the compression scheme, depending on (of course) what it is you're trying to achieve in the end.
---
and regarding the whammy pedal function, it may be asking just a bit too much of Guitar Rig to nail the sound and quality of the Digitech Whammy pedal, it being a piece of software that does so much for only a little bit more money than the Digitech Pedal costs, which is limited to specializing in just one function.

I commonly use the whammy/pitch shifter programmed to an expression pedal to do everything from 2 octave sweeps/dive bombs to portamento shifts from a maj 4th (toe up) to a major 5th (toe down). Although the Guitar Rig whammy pedal does more or less work, it pales in quality to so many other units (including the original from which it is based) that are not necessarily all that expensive. Of course, there are some excellent high end processors out there that do this well, as you'd expect for the much higher price tag.

Perhaps a feature suggestion for the Whammy/pitch shift components would be to have an "optimization" setting, which would help force the input sound into the range that is preferred by the whammy effect. Also, a "bass" or "guitar" mode would help the processor deal with the differences in frequency that challenge pitch shifters, especially with bass guitar.

 

Holy crap, i learned alot from reading just a mere 60% of what was said here.

 

Mr fist,

Many thanks for the info you've posted thus far. I've hit my first GR speedbump, after two hours troubleshooting (with no result), I reinstalled O/S, drivers & GR. Now back up 'n running - I managed to spend a few hours the weekend past reading, tweaking & re-reading that excellent Mix article on compression you posted.

Could you give me an idea of what low/medium/high settings for threshold, attack and release would be? The ratio I'm coming to understand (thankfully!) - but the article had no db/ms value to tinker with for those setting.

Reading the article also resulted in a Homer Simpson 'DOH!' moment - I was wondering why, when recording, I occasionally noticed a drop in my recorded levels for a few seconds, then it returned to the 'normal' level. After reading that article it occured to me I was preventing output clipping by using the 'limit' button to the right of the output bar, because I was too lazy to properly set my input/output levels...This 'limit' (from my reading) was acting as a 'Peak Limiter' and doing exactly what it should be - DOH indeed

So I have a lot more RTFM(s) to do! I was thinking/hoping 'non-programmable' meant 'pulg 'n play' with no settings aside from setting the output volume and the 'magic box' would sort out the rest - haha, that would be the day!

I had a stompbox compressor long time ago (a cheap ibanez) that didn't do much for me (but I was playing 80's metal guitar - Metallica/Slayer) and since I have learned that the MetalZone was acting as a pseduo-compressor? So I understand, I was already limiting the dynamics of the signal by the nature (and how I had setup them up) of the effect(s) (Metalzone + Wah) I was using at the time.

I've set up a little learning exercise for myself on GR 4 for learning the basics of using compression/limiting, because I'm not exactly sure whether I'll be focussed on bass or guitar or the style I'll be asked to perform in ::

1. Clean guitar (Tweedman) with a tube compressor. Goal : retain a dynamic guitar sound, but limit the highs (pinch harmonics/hard picking) so nothing jumps out dramatically.

2. Heavily distorted guitar sound (Ultrasonic + MeZone). Goal : tone shape using compressor/limiter (eliminate a little of the boomy lowend) and keep the peak levels from jumping out when using pinch harmonics.

3. Clean fingerstyle bass patch (Bass Pro) for noodling walking jazz style bass lines. Goal : even dynamics for poor fingerstyle technique.

4. Slap bass patch (ala Flea - haha). Goal : even dynamics for terrible technique & limiting the output when I get it completely wrong!

So far the guitar is sounding ok-good, but the bass patches are awful, seemingly sounds better with the compressor/limiter off! But I have a lot of tweaking/experimenting still to do.
--
Honestly, I've never used a Pitch Pedal in anger (musically) - Typically I'll set it up for a 1&1/2 step drop so I can play a little Carcass without having to drop my tuning from 'E' to C# and fit bass strings to my metal guitar! . Hardly the proper use of the tool! I've found it useful w/modifiers for making glitchy/random/warbly sounds - but still playing around with that (compression/limiting is far more important to know!)
--

Many thanks again, & the virtual beers are on me!

 

mmm...virtual beer...

I'd be kidding myself if I thought I could say this stuff better than others who have stuff published online, so please forgive me for standing down and rather give you some online references:

http://www.tunemybass.com/bass_effects_guide/bass_compressor_settings.html

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/document?doc_id=88262

http://azwebpages.com/bass/basscompression.htm

Much of the time, good compression is not really very audible unless it is desired as an "effect" unto itself. Thus it can be an elusive beast to get the hang of. My best teacher has always been personal experience with many, many, many compressors of all flavors and quality levels.

The dbx 160x (or 160A) was a great compressor from which to learn since it has a rather large input/output level and gain reduction metering section (but there are no attack or release knobs).

http://www.proaudiostar.com/media/c...ab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/d/b/dbx-160a_1.jpg

The input level, GAIN REDUCTION, and output level are all used interactively, since heavy compression may stand to reduce overall volume which you'll need to "make up" or add at the compressor's output. So, IMO here is some starting advice:

- pay attention to how the GAIN REDUCTION meters react at various settings.
- use your ears

For example, a very low threshold of say, -50db at the input, in conjunction with a 20:1 ratio SHOULD totally squash your sound. Notice then what happens to the GAIN REDUCTION as you bring up the THRESHOLD incrementally up to 0db, and back down to -50db again. Then, leaving the threshold at -50db, bring the ratio back from 20:1 incrementally down to 8:1, 4:1, 2:1, 1:1, and then back up again to 20:1. Repeat this process with the Attack, Release, and Knee settings. You should begin to understand that some settings are more noticeable than others, and HOW they start to effect the levels of the sound running through the compressor. Also, it has been my experience using GR's Tube Compressor that it "breaks up" in an overdriven way quite easily and in a manner unlike most compressors I've ever used. This compressor may work well with guitar, as sometimes a little extra tube saturation can really help to warm up a sound. I'm not sure what the responsible parameter(s) culprit is, but IMO this simulation may not be a very good starting point for someone learning about creative and/or technical compression, thus the necessity to use your hearing. The excessive distortion gets distracting. JMHO.

My best advice is to spend the time learning from experience, trial and error.