Wireless with effects pedals

[thommyboy]

I was watching a concert on TV the today and was struck by something.
The guitars and bass are all running wireless, but they all have their collection of effects pedals under their mic stands. My question is how is that normally done? Do they simply place the receiver for the wireless on the ground right by the ground and then run a cable back to the board...seems a bit odd. Do they have 2 sets of wireless? Is it folded back using a an aux feed to add the effects? I figure if anyone can get me a good answer it is here.

[mbenonis]

If I had to guess, the signal from the receiver is routed to their pedals, and then to the console (probably through a DI Box).

[Eboy87]

As with all things; it depends. If you watch The Eagle's Farewell I DVD, Joe Walsh has his receiver built into his pedal board. Glen has his receiver back by the amps, but there are two cables that run out to his pedal board and back.

Most of the time, if the receiver is behind the performer, there's a cable run (either on the stage, or sometimes below it) that goes from the receiver, to the pedal board, and back to the amps. You can also go real fancy and get rackmounted, MIDI controlled effects processors that live in the same rack as the wireless receiver. Steffan Lessard of the Dave Matthews Band goes this route, unless my information is off.

I've never heard of someone using an aux feed off the board to drive their effects. As a guitarist, I want total control over my tone (to the point that it doesn't interfere with the mains: read, volume) coming out of the amp. From there, it's the engineer's game. Plus, certain effects create different sounds when used with an amp. Take my Vox amp. It has a tube in it that "creates" the overdrive. If I slightly overdrive the amp, and put a distortion pedal in line between my guitar and amp, I get a really crunchy sound (think "Elevation" by U2). Add a delay pedal inline, and your first repeat will be overdriven, but the repeats get quieter the more they repeat, which means they go from overdriven coming out of the amp, to an almost clean signal.

It's not really an easy question to answer. Plus you then get into situations with multiple amps and wireless that you have to split and combine. But that should give you a bit to go off of.

[soundlight]

Some large touring guitar rigs use a midi-style pedal board or proprietary control system, often with a rack mount processing unit and a multi-button pedal board with an expression pedal to the far right. So they just run the control cable out to the pedalboard and they're set. This is only when virtual stomp boxes and effects are used, this can't be easily used for actual stompboxes. In this case, the wireless receiver is often mounted over in guitar world in the touring rig. Also, some of the larger tours actually don't use the amps that are upstage, they are just for show. They either use amp modelers in to a DI or have iso boxes offstage in guitar world or backstage.

[TimmyP1955]

Possibilities:

1) Receiver is on pedalboard.

2) Receiver is with amp. Cable 1 runs from receiver to pedalboard, cable 2 runs from pedalboard to amp.

3) Receiver is with amp, and feeds amp. Amp's loop out feeds pedalboard via cable 1, pedalboard feeds loop return via cable 2.

[Chris15]

I've seen the receiver is RF land with all it's friends and then run to whatever wherever. It then also gets reliable RF off the master antennas and splits. This also means the other half of the receiver can be used for something else and that the RF reception becomes the RF tech's problem, the person most able to make it work one would hope...

[cjthedj]

If I had to guess I would say they used the Insert jack for the channel the guitar is plugged into to feed the pedalboard. That gives the guitarist the freedom from cables while getting the control of a pedalboard.

[TimmyP1955]

Originally Posted by cjthedj

If I had to guess I would say they used the Insert jack for the channel the guitar is plugged into to feed the pedalboard. That gives the guitarist the freedom from cables while getting the control of a pedalboard.

This would work only if the house mixer were on the stage. In anything bigger than a bar gig, it won't be. Most everybody uses one of the configurations I mentioned.

[soundlight]

Also, all of the guitarists that I know and/or have mixed for have an mic'd amp or an amp modeler in line before the board (you'd need a good instrument DI otherwise), so you wouldn't want to take that signal from the insert for the effects pedals, because the effects pedals are for the guitar signal, not the amp'd or post-modeler signal. You also have to think about signal levels with effects pedals. The instrument level that comes out of a guitar is rather different than line level.