Loud and Clear

I rotate instruments for our various praise bands at my church. Electric guitar, bass guitar and acoustic guitar.

Of the three roles, I have the most trouble with acoustic guitar. Not from a performance perspective. From a monitoring perspective. Actually, bass comes in pretty close although my bass rig allows me to get more than enough level on stage. I use a 5-string American Fender Jazz with an Ampeg SVT-3PRO head and a 2×10 + tweeter cabinet from SWR’s professional line. I crank the bass loud enough to hear it from the back wall and the sound folks don’t like it that loud. But at least I can hear it.

Not so for the acoustic. The stage acoustic guitar I use is a Taylor C314CE. And I use a 40-watt Fender Acoustasonic guitar amp. I can barely hear myself on stage which makes finesse playing techniques, such as arpeggios, almost impossible.

I tried out in-ear monitors yesterday.

Unbelievable.

We had a fairly small setup given the summer schedule: two keyboards, two vocals, one electric guitar, one acoustic guitar, one bass guitar and drums.

I had the sound engineer send me a stereo mix of just the keyboards, lead vocal and acoustic guitar. I have never, ever had such a great experience with on-stage monitoring.

We will be introducing the Aviom personal monitoring system into our church setup soon. And, based on my experience, not soon enough. For acoustic, I am sold on in-ears. I will be trying in-ears with the bass next week.