The old (not vintage) solid state Princeton65. Your days are numbered, my friend.

If I keep this up, I’ll have a category for each post.  But if I stuck to one subject that would betray who I am.  I think I’ve brought new depth to what “Jack of all Trades” can mean.  At any rate this is but one of my many interests.

Since the 9th grade I’ve been leading worship in one capacity or another.  For all but the last year and a half that has been with an acoustic guitar.  Electic guitars were to complicated and honestly, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Enter:  Jason Day

My beauty: the Epiphone Sheridan II

Jason came to Life Church to be the Worship Pastor (now he’s that and the host pastor, but that’s a separate and very long story).  He’s also been a worship leader for a long time.  He plays a lime green Gretsch (oh so sweet).  Like a drug dealer, he offered to let me borrow a Fender Telecaster to try out.  Innocently, he told me, “Hey try any of my stuff.  Go on, do it!”  And after that, I was hooked.  Now I have a full rig of effects, a new electric guitar, and I’m looking to replace my old (not vintage) amp with a low wattage tube amp.

Using the borrowed Tele I began assembling an FX rig, mainly buying whatever Jason was selling.  It’s a great gear relationship that we have.  He likes buying new, and I like trying things out before I buy them!  Once I had saved enough pennies I bought an Epiphone Sheridan II.  It’s a semi-hollow body electric with dual humbuckers.  It’s almost too sexy for church.  As far as effects goes, I’m only one pedal away from having a “complete” rig.  I put complete in quotations because, like any eletric guitar player will tell you, it’s never complete.

Currently the Sheridan goes through the rig like this:

• BOSS TU-2 Tuner
  

  My blank canvas

• Carvin A/B switch…
  • A goes to the rest of the fx chain
  • B goes to an IMP2 direct box to the house system (for my Taylor acoustic)
• Visual Sound Route 66 Compressor/Overdrive
• Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive (Distortion/Overdrive)
• BOSS TR-2 Tremolo
• BOSS CE-5 Chorus Ensemble (which I have set to color the signal with a vintage recording sound)
• BOSS DD-5 Digital Delay with FS-5U tap tempo
• Line6 DL-4 Delay Modeler
• Fender Princeton65 Amp mic’d with an Audix Instrument Microphone

All I need now is a reverb pedal.  Right now I’m looking at the Line6 Verbzilla.  This summer I’ll also be purchasing a Fender Blues JR, which is a sweet 15 watt tude amplifier that is great for small venues (like churches) and it has great tone.  After that all of my new purchases will be upgrades of what I already have.  Thanks to Jason I have a new expensive and addicting hobby.  But it has revolutionized the way I lead worship and brought back my feeling of inspiration and zeal for worship music.