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Below is a fairly high-level breakdown of the six-string equipment Rick uses onstage most nights.
Guitars
There are essentially three.
This is the oldest of the three, bought sometime in the 80’s. Up to this point I’d been playing Les Pauls and now I wanted an axe with a Floyd Rose tremolo. When I saw this axe hanging on the music store wall with those whacked-out mandolin frets way up there on the neck, I knew this was the one.
Interestingly, there was a two-for-one sale going on at the time, so I actually bought two of these guitars. Thus, in addition to the white one, I have a second one that’s black with a red and blue crackle finish in stock condition. As a result, it doesn’t work with my present setup and so never leaves the house. (More about this later.)
The two standard magnetic pickups aren’t used and aren’t connected to anything. Since I strictly use the Roland VG gear, this doesn’t matter. I only use the GK-2a hexaphonic pickup. By the way, the GK-2a internal kit on this instrument was installed by Russell, who did quite a nice job.
This is Carvin’s strat copy, and it’s quite a nice instrument. Generally, Fenders and I aren’t very simpatico. Fortunately, the neck is not Fender-shaped, so I get along with this axe quite well. This kit was assembled for me and finished by Russell, who also installed the GK-2a internal kit on it. I think the mags on this one work, but I never use them. This instrument is easily as playable as the Washburn, and I’d be hard-pressed to pick one over the other as my favorite.
I bought this guitar right after I ordered my VG-8 because I needed a GK-2a equipped instrument to use the VG-8. Basically, I think I bought it because guitar’s price was right and it was immediately available. The external GK-2a wart kits were running about $250 at the time and the RR Strat was only $500, so, in effect, I was getting a Strat for $250.
Of course, it is a Fender, and like most Fenders I’ve tried, it just doesn’t hit me where I live. For this reason, you'll seldom see it with me on stage. I mostly keep it as a backup guitar, though it sounds really good through the VG systems. I have vague plans to replace the neck and the vibrato at some point, which may make it more suited to me.
Pickups
Roland GK-2a Hexaphonic Pickup
Since I exclusively use the Roland VG gear for all my guitar sounds, the Roland pickup is a sine qua non. It’s the little black bar you see on the guitars just in front of the bridge. I’ve always used the internally mounted kit, since dealing with the big ‘wart’ for the external version is just too much trouble. Plus, having all the guts on the outside of the guitar seems to me to be far more prone to problems as well as being cosmetically objectionable.
I’ve had good luck with the GK, but it does have a few kinks. For example, yanking the whammy bar up really far can cause the strings to actually bang into the pickup, killing your sound. Also, the top of the GK is curved to match a Fender Strat with a 7” radius neck. For those of us who use a larger radius (say, anyone born after 1968,) this causes the outside strings to be farther from their pickup point than the inside strings. This results in some output level issues. Still, these drawbacks are minor compared to the unit’s enormous advantages.
Effects
Roland VG-8
This is the box that started the whole modelling craze. It gives me the ability to model different guitars, different amps and most of the effects that I want with a single device. I’ve been using these since the 90’s and I really like ‘em. It eliminates the need to carry around a whole truck full of gear and that’s such a huge plus I can’t begin to describe it.
Not that I don’t love Marshalls and stompboxes and huge pedal boards and effects racks and tons of outboard gear, but until I get rich enough to afford a roadie to schlep all that around for me, the VG-8 gives me 95% of the effect with about 5% of the hassle.
I actually have two VG-8’s – one to serve as a backup in case the primary unit goes down for some reason. It’s pretty much a necessity, since if the VG goes south on me I’m dead in the water. It’s never happened yet, and the V is built like a tank, but in an infinite universe anything that can happen, will happen, and I like to be prepared.
Roland VG-99
Okay, I’m writing this paragraph immediately post-Christmas 2007 and I just received the Roland VG-99 because Santa decided I was such a good boy. I’ve used the VG-8 for years and been very happy with it, but the VG-99 is absolutely awesome! It’s got tons of guitar emulations, amp emulations, speaker emulations, effects emulations and so forth. Interestingly, it doesn’t do emulations of emulations. That is, there are still sounds I get from the VG-8 that I can’t get from the VG-99, at least not yet. Unlike its ancestor the VG-8, the VG-99 is rack-mountable. At this point I’m thinking I’ll take advantage of that, but I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I’ll combine everything.
Roland FC-300
This is the foot controller that goes with the VG-99. Well, it goes with it if you pay for it – it’s a separate piece of gear. It’s actually bigger and heavier than the VG-99 itself. It has two built-in expression pedals, and the company we mail-ordered it from included another expression pedal as lagniappe, so I have lots of options now for real-time control. The cool thing is that the built-in pedals each have a toe switch so you can use them to control an effect (like wah) and use the toe switch to turn it on and off just like you’re used to with old fashioned stomp boxes. It’s also powered by the VG-99 if you like, so you don’t have to deal with batteries or wall warts.
Roland GR-33
Playing in a trio format, you naturally end up performing songs by groups with five or six members. Drummers are always busy just doing the drum thing and bass players only sound like basses, so the guitar player generally seems to end up being the guy that has to cover for the rhythm guitar, lead guitar and keyboards. Oh, and sing, too. Although I can do some pretty kinky stuff with the VG-8, there were still some sounds that I just couldn’t cover adequately. So I finally gave in and bought a GR-33 guitar synthesizer.
This is one seriously fun piece of equipment, and it works wonderfully well with the GK-2a. You do have to take pains to play very precisely or the thing gets confused and produces some very unmusical sounds. But if you’re careful, the rewards are considerable. It’s just unbelievably cool to sound like Jon Lord’s Hammond coming through a Leslie or Dick Parry’s saxophone. Plus, it’s a real treat to see the musically more sophisticated audience members trying to locate that piano they’re hearing.
Boss Looper
I have two, the RC20XL and its big brother, the RC-50. Mostly, I use the RC20XL because it’s physically smaller and with the huge footprint of the VG-8, the GR-33 and the expression pedal, I just don’t have room on the floor for the RC-50. I use the looper for some harmony guitar parts as well as for tracking rhythm behind a lead line. Like the GR-33, this is a piece of equipment that you could get by without, but it’s a whole lot of fun and really enhances the entire musical experience.
Amplification
JBL EON 10
Because I’m using the Roland VG system, I need a full-range speaker system. A standard guitar amp won’t reproduce the acoustic guitar sounds from the VG-8 properly, nor will it handle the extended lows and highs that the GR-33 puts out. For the past several years I’ve used a pair of active JBL EON-10’s. These are extremely portable and do a very creditable job of reproducing the sounds that the VG and GR create. And, with two of them, I can do the stereo thing, although that’s generally overrated in my opinion. The speaker sims in the VG-8 keep the horns in the EON-10’s from allowing the guitar sounds to become fizzy.
However, we’ve been using more synthesizer lately, and I find that the EON-10’s have to work pretty hard when things get down into the really low frequencies. Also, I occasionally find myself in a situation where I need more projection than the EON-10’s are capable of. Although I can usually just run a line to the FOH system, that’s not always an option. As result, I recently picked up a Behringer B215A speaker. This was so cheap that I couldn’t say no. We’ll see how it performs over the next few months.