November 9th, 2007
Loving Our Axe Traks
Posted by Church Video Ideas under Audio, Greg's Favorites, Ideas, Intros and Announcements, Products, Reviews
We recently made a great purchase at my church. One of our electric guitar players had played at another church and used a product called Axe Trak. He’s a very good musician and picky about gear, so he was skeptical at first, but after playing through it, he had to admit he thought it worked great. He came back and told me about it. We bought one the next week, loved it and bought a second one this week (we often have 2 electric guitars).
What does an Axe Trak do? It allows your electric guitar player to have their amp beside them on the stage, but via the Axe Trak, there is no stage volume. We had been putting our electric guitar player’s amps in holes we built into our stage. The holes (with the lids on them) reduced the stage volume, but were a pain to set up, mic and needed a fan constantly blowing on the amp, which means we had to crack the lid open and caused a danger on our stage (one of our vocalist fell in one of the holes while walking backstage and hurt her leg pretty bad). We’ve had several other people (including myself) that almost fell in the hole, when the lid was left open or not fully closed. With the Axe Trak, we have closed the lids for good.
Here’s some more info from the Axe Trak website: “The warm sound desired by most guitarists can only be created by the speaker of a good sounding guitar amp being mic’d in the right environment. Direct amplifier outputs sound fake, fuzzy and extremely harsh. The AxeTrak® alleviates this problem by allowing the user to connect directly from the speaker jack of their guitar amp to the input jack of the AxeTrak®. The output of the AxeTrak® is then plugged into a recording console, mixing board or computer soundcard using a standard low impedance microphone cable. This method of recording allows you to get a direct signal that includes the preamp tubes as well as the power tubes if using a tube amp. This is very important if you are a tone freak like most guitarists.” Check it out HERE.
November 9th, 2007 at 7:28 am
We bought one of those a few months ago, but our guitar players didn’t like it. They felt that it was “thin” and “blatty.” I think there may be a little resistance to change. Is your audio guy using any special EQ in the players’ ears?
I’m really trying to get our stage volume down as low as possible. We have four electric players who rotate. We use two almost every weekend, and two of our guys use the Line 6 Pod, but the other two are cabinet stalwarts, and one of those guys doesn’t seem to understand that we can’t make him sound good in the house unless he turns down his cab.
Any suggestions? Are your players paid? Ours are. I’m trying not to play the “You’re a paid musician, an employee, and since you take a check, you do what I say” card.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Interesting. Never heard of this before now. I’m using a Line 6 Pod. It works decently well and of course is very easy to carry around and setup. I’d want to mess with it before I spent $400 on one. Would be nice to have bit warmer sound.
November 9th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Yes, our guitar players love it and love getting to have their amps next to them, so they can make adjustments (they used to be in a hole in the ground and they couldn’t make any adjustments). We have a monitor world and a monitor engineer mixing the mix that they hear in their ears and they all seem to be pleased. I think the sound is similar in their ears as before, but with the added bonus of getting to have their amp on stage.
By the way, all our musicians are volunteer. We have 4 rotating bands and singers that rotate. The band rocks and is made up of amazing musicians. Our church, our staff and our ministry philosophy is to equip and engage volunteers/servants in ministry. People like myself and other paid staff must be equippers - I don’t do anything hands on on Sunday. I simply oversee the volunteers that serve.
November 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Any insight on how I can make (or encourage) our paid guitarists try the Axe Trak again? I’m one of the two bass players, and we used to have an amp on stage. We went with a SansAmp about a year ago. We both love it, as does our PA engineer. We were a little worried that we’d lose some low-end presence, but our two dual-18 subs are handling it just fine.
I don’t know if I’ve ever sent you a link to the church website. It’s http://www.mycrossroads.org. The song on the North page is one of our recent specials, and it changes every week. I do all the post audio for TV/Web, except for the sermon mixing/processing. Let me know what you think! That goes for anyone else out there too!
November 11th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
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June 30th, 2008 at 5:32 am
You’re not if your guitarist is experiencing what people on the gearslutz.com message board experienced:
“So, I went and bought a Marshall TSL 60 amp head and an Axe Trak isolation cab. I thought that this would be it. Good satisfying roaring Marshall tones. At last I could just play music instad of hours of tweaking.
Alas, after a day this has not been the case. In fact my Vox Tonelab sounds better.
Either the hype and reviews about the Axe Trak are wrong or I’m making a mistake somewhere down the line.”
and
“I’ve tried AxeTrack with at least 5 different heads, from Bogner to Epi Valve. It doesn’t come anywhere near a miced amp, actually it’s very far away.”
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/instruments-guitar-bass-amps/130974-help-needed-recording-marshall-head.html