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!
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Topic: Greetings from Western NY (Read 697 times)
