So I’m on most of the well known social media platforms and try to post out as much as I can, I think. I’m still feeling my way around the cadence and timing of posting and what to post and when .. but that’s for another time.
Facebook recently reminded me of a really cool concert I went to about a year ago by bringing back one of those “Remember when . . ” videos. It was Wolf Alice.
Wolf Alice is a band out of England managed by East City Management, an up and coming artist management company.
So I purchased the tickets for this show based on the story found here.
At the end of the show, I kind of hung around the stage to sneak a peak at the guitar pedals. During the show, I was watching the lead guitarist, Joff Oddie do all kinds of acrobatic maneuvers, swinging his guitar, moving around the stage, dialing up sounds on the fly all from two pedal boards worth of stuff. The point is he got some really cool sounds out of this rig. I will go into a more extensive break down into all the pedals later, but you can learn some really cool tips and tricks just by looking at how the pedals and pedal boards are set up.
But first off, please notice left over marker tape from a recent Twenty One Pilots show that they did in The Basement as part of their Tour De Columbus. Really nice guys to do that for their hometown fans. I even told Tyler’s Mom I thought so and to say thanks!
But what else can we learn from this picture and the next one? Btw this is Theo’s board, the bass player, to the right. To the left is Ellie’s board, lead singer.
- Color coding connectors seems to work _Really_ well. The board has it done all over the place.
- There is a central in and out for the pedal board. You can see it in lower left of the pedal board on the right. There are four plugs. Bass In, Clean Amp Out, Dirty Amp Out, and channel switch. In this case this looks like just Dirty Amp out was being used tonight. Theo, you are a dirty bassist!
- Tape is also used for switch directions. The Blue pedal has yellow tape on it with arrows indicating how to dial in the pedal for the correct sound.
- There is some kind of midi controller out in front. Not sure what it does, but it looks like a keyboard, and it glows. Cool!
- The power looks like its a standard 3 prong AC adapter.
It always amazes me that all that stuff goes together the same way every night and produces the same sound.
And then there’s Joff’s stuff.
First this board. I’m gonna guess there’s about 3 grand worth of pedals on that board. The H9 (big white thing with a ball in the middle) by itself is 800 so my guess is probably pretty good. Many of the other pedals are stereo. Stereo pedals are more expensive, usually about double, depending on the manufacturer. There’s also a pedal switcher – not sure, but it’s probably MIDI interface which is a fancy way of saying it uses computer signals to communicate.
And this is just the first pedal board. Here’s number two….
Same color coding of ins and outs, lots of cables everywhere, and that weird keyboard shaped thing with what look like piano keys, but have letters in random places, or what appear to be random places. I’ll have to ask him what those are. And then what looks like a 12 band EQ pedal. Again the tape is on top calling out the settings.
So I’m just gonna say, that very few guitarists are going to have more pedals than this guy. (Maybe Cold Play? Certainly, The Edge, whose rig dwarfs the next two or three “effects” guitarists together. )
This starts to make sense when you consider the varied sounds Joff gets out of those amps and guitars. All of which come together to give Wolf Alice a pretty awesome live sound to go with their impressive stage presence.
I’ve been following Joff on Instagram and every now and the, he’ll post a little hint about settings. If you are a guitarist, it’s worth checking into.
If you have a chance to go see them live, you should. You just might be witnessing the early career of rock music’s next great architect, Joff Oddie!
Just my .02!
Have a great day
-Just a Dude
Just a Dude 