3/9/2023 0 Comments Treys guitar rigI hear a lot of feedback about Trey’s tone from my readers, and there’s sometimes an unspoken assumption that the sounds of the mid-1990s are the gold standard against which others might be judged. The new rig has cleaner power, brand new cable runs, at least one noise gate (to quiet unwanted noise from the Boomerang Phrase Sampler), and a much more comprehensive set of controls over the effects palate that really allows each individual aspect of the signal to shine. ![]() (4) The CAE Rebuild: the magic of Bradshaw’s rebuild is the secret ingredient here. It was quite something, particularly when combined with the envelope filter. Standing in the room on December 28th, I noted that the POG 2 was rattling the chairs. The POG 2 also has an independent volume control for each octave, allowing Trey to dial in a full “mix” of octave sounds (including up to two octaves below or above the input note), plus its own built in effects. While the Whammy II is indispensable for its pitch bending capability and its harmonizer, it doesn’t track notes as well as the POG 2, leading to undesirable distortion in the low end (Trey seems to like the distortion the Whammy produces in the high end and has used it to interesting effect). (3) Octave Eeffects: the Electro Harmonix Polyphonic Octave Generator 2 (POG 2) - arguably the Effects MVP of the year-end MSG run - is a much better pure octave effect than the Whammy II, which Trey had used for most octave effects previously. As a result, the guitar’s “dry” signal can truly sound dry - you don’t hear audio artifacts where Trey doesn’t want them, which makes the signal less flabby and tidier overall. (2) Speaker Cabinets: The Komet Ambikabs - the speaker cabinets that first appeared during Summer Tour this year - are designed to reduce the clutter created by “time-based” effects like reverb and delay by giving those effects their own set of speakers separate from the non-effected tone. The tone stack at MSG included one high gain Tube Screamer, one lower gain Tube Screamer, the Klon Centaur and the Ross Compressor, each in separate loops so that Trey can engage them each separately or together for maximum flexibility and control. But the rig at Madison Square Garden last week had that loop removed, and Trey’s “tone stack” - the pedals that control the core of his gain structure - reverted to a more familiar setup. ![]() A few key points will be discussed below.įirst, for fans of Trey’s ‘90s tone, one of the more exciting elements of the early December rebuild was a loop in the RST-24 called “TREY 94,” which engaged a loop with a Tube Screamer set to “full scream” running in to Trey’s much-loved Ross Compressor, which squashed the howling signal down for that classic “squeezed” Trey sound from the ‘90s. ![]() This latest revision of Trey’s rig - including the CAE rebuild in early December and the tweaks that have occurred since - was notable and markedly significant. Indeed, Bradshaw came in to consult Trey and his team on tweaks to the rig just before the December 29 show at The Garden, indicating that they continued to dial this system in even after the curtain went up on the 2017 New Year’s Run. But part of Bradshaw’s re-working of the rig in December involved replacing the RS-10 with CAE’s new state-of-the-art RST-24, a 24-channel switching system Trey can use to engage or bypass the vast array of effects at his disposal.Įver the tinkerer, Trey continued to tweak the newly built RST-24-based rig throughout December, setting the rig up in his home and consulting with Bradshaw and his techs in the weeks before the Madison Square Garden New Year’s Run. That RS-10-based system would remain the centerpiece of Trey’s primary touring rig for over two decades. Bradshaw is a well-known rig maestro (he’s planning a rebuild of Warren Haynes’ rig in January 2018), and his team worked with Trey on the 1990s rig build that featured CAE’s RS-10 foot switcher as its centerpiece, in addition to building a backup rig for Trey later that decade. Readers who regularly follow the workings of Trey’s rig will remember that, in early December 2017, Trey and his team spent a few days at Bob Bradshaw’s Custom Audio Electronics (CAE) workshop in Rock Lititz, Pennsylvania. It’s a mass of circuits and techniques, vintage and new, cutting-edge and age-old, analog and digital, rack- and pedal-based, covering a wide spectrum of effects and sounds and some of the most celebrated tone-shaping tools in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. ![]() Phish’s Trey Anastasio’s guitar rig is an ever-evolving instrument unto itself.
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