Miscellaneous > Introduce Yourself

Greetings from Western NY

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Hambone:
Hi everyone! I'm John from Jamestown NY, USA, home of Lucille Ball, the National Comedy Center, and the 10,000 Maniacs. For the last 20 years, I've been playing guitar professionally in a retro-pop band called Two For Flinching. I'm also a member of IATSE Local 266 and do a lot of work as a sound engineer, lighting engineer, and stagehand. I'm a technology and electronics geek, as well as an all-around handy-man - any gear that breaks in the band falls to me to repair, from trailer breakdowns to completely refurbishing control boards on lighting equipment, and anything in between...

My guitar rig currently consists of the following:

2 Ibanez RBM-1 Voyager guitars, one black, one red
Shure PGX-4 Wireless system
ADA MP-1 Preamp V1.38 with a bastardized rear input jack mod
ART SGX2000 Multi-Effects unit
Peavey PV260 Stereo (130Wx2) solid state amplifier
Mesa Boogie 4x12 slant cabinet run in stereo
Controlled by an ART X-15 Ultrafoot MIDI controller

That's been my active touring rig for about 17 years, and has been pretty rock solid. It gets ridden hard and put away wet 100+ times a year and just keeps ticking... That is until the MP1 committed suicide at the end of a show last Saturday night, but that will be a post in a different section of the forum  :)

The MP1 is S/N 803856, and I picked it up for $25 USD at a yard sale a fellow sound engineer was holding. He claimed that this unit was owned by a "famous guitar player" but wouldn't explicitly say who. Based on his work history, I've narrowed it down to two possibilities of who that player could be: the highly unlikely but not impossible option of Adrian Vandenberg (the sound guy toured for a long time with Whitesnake as either their monitor engineer or Vandenberg's guitar tech, I don't remember which), or the much more likely choice of Rob Buck, the original guitar player for the 10,000 Maniacs - he toured with them too, and we all lived near each other. I've talked with members of the Maniacs (I'm friends with several of them) and they vaguely remember Rob having some rack stuff, but memories are a bit, um... fuzzy LOL Needless to say, it's a story that I'll probably never be able to verify one way or the other, and frankly I don't really care, as it's been MY unit for almost 2 decades now, but it's still a fun little anecdote :)

The unit has always been a touch flakey - it doesn't like to boot if it hasn't been allowed to warm up enough, and the chorus only works when it feels like it, which is maybe 15% of the time. Besides that though, it's been a fantastic unit and a key part of my tone!

Dante:
Welcome to the Depot, Hambone!

Sounds like a perfectly capable rig - one preamp, one FX device, one amp and one cab (running stereo). I ran my MP-1 with a Quadraverb and a B200s for about 10 years, then bought an MP-2. I ran through some other MP-1s that I found cheap, but always kept using the MP-2 until one night at a gig when it made more noise than tone. I ran that whole gig with a Tubescreamer and a Crate Powerblock amp....4 hours of cover tunes, one tone. Man, that sucked.

It also pissed me off enough to stop using my rack gear at gigs. I bought an MP-1 Classic just to try it, and I do love it. I just don't trust anything in the rack for gigs now, and I really am not the guy to fix them so....they are for sentimental reasons only. I practice with my Classic all the time, but I gig with my little Peavey 20w lunchbox head or my H&K combo

That's a pretty cool story about the origins of you MP-1!

MarshallJMP:
Hey Hambone

Welcome to the depot. Start a new topic in the "let's get techinical" section so we can help you out with your MP-1 issues.

rnolan:
Hey John, welcome to the depot  :thumb-up: .  Sounds like your MP-1 needs a 150,000 mile service LoL.  Obviously there's a bunch of good things for you to do to it to get back working well again (even better given the chorus issues).  Hey not a bad investment for $25, I think I paid around $1500 AUD for my MP-1 (new) back in the day. 

And interesting story of where it may have been.

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