...I want to get this guitar:
It’s a Godin Solidac. Godin is the parent company of several big names in guitars, including Seagull acoustics. The Solidac rocks for a number of reasons, but the most important one as far as I’m concerned is that it is a two-voice guitar. It has electric pickups (two humbuckers and a single coil), but it also boasts an LR Baggs X-bridge pickup that provides about the closest thing to acoustic sound that I’ve ever heard from a solid-body guitar. What makes this so great is that it would enable me to switch seamlessly between acoustic and electric on any song—or play both simultaneously. I could play the intro and verses of a song with an acoustic sound, and then switch to electric for the chorus.
After the guitar will come the effects unit, which will hopefully be either a POD XT Live or the Boss GT-8:
If you’re a decent guitarist and patient enough to spend time tweaking this thing, you can achieve almost any sound you want with one of these. Multieffects processors used to sound pretty ugly (remember that ancient DOD we used ten years ago, Aaron?), but they’ve been steadily getting better and better. Two things I would find quite useful about the GT-8 are its superb amp modeling and the customizability of its effects.
When you’re playing in a worship area that holds about 500 people and reverberates like crazy, you simply can’t crank up your amp to achieve the sound you want. In fact, when you have a stage the size of ours, you might have trouble finding a place to put your amp. So it’s nice to be able to run direct (plug right into the sound system without an amp), especially considering that I use in-ear monitors anyway and would only be able to hear an amp through my phones to begin with.
The ability to customize effects is useful because if I hear a sound on a recording that I really like, and I want to try to duplicate it, I can tweak this thing until I get close enough that I’m satisfied. For example: With a normal amp, I get a gain knob and several tone control knobs (generally low, mid, and high) that I can use to craft my distortion sound. With this, I get 30 different overdrive/distortion models and 46 amp models, each with other settings to tweak. Oh, and by the way, those 30 distortion models are one category of the 44 types of effects on the processor, any 13 of which can be employed simultaneously. And everything is programmable, so if in between songs I want to change the types of effects I’m using, the order in which they are applied, the individual settings on each effect, the amp, and the volume, I press one button. Yeah, it’s cool.
So I’m saving. I’m over half way to the guitar! :)
