RIGGED: CHIMP SPANNER (PAUL ORTIZ)

MetalSucks is sponsoring the Intrinsic 2012 Tour featuring The Contortionist, Jeff Loomis, Chimp Spanner and 7 Horns 7 Eyes and kicks off this Saturday! Loomis walked us through his live gear setup in a Rigged column a couple of months back, and The Contortionist’s vocalist and keyboard player Jonathan Carpenter just delivered his last week. Today, Chimp Spanner (his daddy calls him Paul) takes us on a step-by-step breakdown of all of his gear, live and in the studio. Next week, 7 Horns 7 Eyes’ Aaron Smith.

Instruments

Both in the studio and live, I use Ibanez guitars. My main 7-string is an old RG1527 with… *drumroll* … stock pickups. I don’t know why, but they sound great. I guess because they’re not too hot, and they don’t seem to feed back on stage. I also use the RG2228 with EMG 808 pickups, but truth be told I would’ve liked passive pickups instead. I’m told it’s a bitch to install those so for now I’ll keep the 808’s and remember to turn the volume down a bit on stage; these things squeal like a stuck pig! I also have an RG7420 which I use for recording – I like that it feels a lot thinner and faster than my 1527, but at some point I need to get some new pickups in it as they’re a bit weedy. I really only use it for jangly/spanky cleans and the odd solo.

Ibanez RG1527

My bass… well, on At The Dreams Edge I was using an H&S 6-string (nope, I’d never heard of them either). It was weird as hell and had a wooden nut but I kinda miss it. For the EP I was using a Yamaha RBX775 (tuned to F#) and my LTD B-155 (tuned to B). Now I just use the LTD, still in B. It feels and plays like a large guitar (which is how I was able to get the groovy tapping bits in “Mobius Part 3”) and clean it almost sounds like a General MIDI bass, which, of course, I like. To get an octave lower than the 8-string I either use an octave effect or I program in some MIDI bass and run it alongside the real bass. Seems to work fine.

Effects:

I don’t own any amps! For a while I had a Line 6 Vetta II HD which was in essence an X3 Pro strapped to a 300W solid state power amp. But eventually I ended up using just an X3 Pro, and then, more recently, an HD Pro direct to Front-of-House and back out into stage wedges. It’s not the ideal scenario as monitoring varies so wildly from venue to venue, but for the most part it’s not bad. The sound out front that the audience hears is consistently killer. It’s just us poor saps on stage that have to suffer!

Line 6 HD Pro

Initially I was using the HD Pro and the X3 Pro together (keeping the X3 in the effects loop of the HD, allowing me to access my old patches if I needed them) but now I just keep it simple. Everything comes from the HD Pro. Same goes for Jim’s [Hughes, guitar] setup, too. Swanney [Adam Swan, bass] still uses the X3 Pro for bass, as it has some killer models that haven’t quite made it over to the HD yet.

Tones:

Seeing how there are no amps to speak of, I might as well talk a bit about the signal chain of my tones so you guys can have a crack at doing the same thing with real gear. I have two main rhythm tones; one is kind of aggressive and percussive, while the other is more suited to chords and tapping.

For the aggressive low tuned stuff I’m using an Engl Fireball model (or alternatively the ‘Treadplate’ or Dual Rec model). The signal chain goes:

Gate -> Wah -> Parametric EQ -> Gate -> Amp -> Gate.

The first gate is to tidy up the signal early on, and is pretty mild. Enough to eliminate background hiss. The wah (a Crybaby model) is fully open, with a 50-70% mix. The parametric EQ is dialed into the dominant frequency of the wah and then pulled back to about 30-40% gain, so you get that slightly OTT distressed sounding attack, but not so much that it pokes out in the mix too much. The next gate is to kill any noise re-introduced by the wah, and the final gate is to get rid of any hiss on the tail end of staccato riffs. The actual amp settings aren’t too important as it varies from song to song and mix to mix, but the gain is only ever at halfway. I like tones where you have to push them harder to get more gain, as you also get a cool detuning sound effect going on, or “bwow” as I like to call it! This patch is especially cool on 8 strings.

My chordal/tapping patch is way simpler.

Tube Screamer -> Noise Gate -> Amp -> Noise Gate

Both of the gates here are set to as low a sensitivity as possible. Low enough to allow the quietest deliberate noise, and mute everything else. The Tube Screamer is at 10% gain, with the bass pulled down to about 40%. The bass is rolled off completely on the amp, and the mids are up full. Drive is once again halfway. Cab and mic choice are entirely to taste.

For clean tones I’ve started bypassing the amp block entirely and just using a bit of tube compression, a subtle pitch vibrato and a nice long stereo delay + reverb. Seems to work well for most scenarios, and it’s a little less cheesy than my old “Jazz Clean + heaps of analogue chorus” patch on the X3.

Lead-wise I’m getting really nice results from the Fireball model (on the X3 I used to use the Powerball). Drive is at full, bass at zero, mids at full and treble and presence about halfway. It’s a really silky tone but definitely requires some gating on stage to prevent it from feeding back.

Studio Setup:

Just a quick word on my studio setup as I also get asked about this a lot. It doesn’t differ at all from my live setup except that I run everything into an M-Audio FireWire 410 and then I monitor it all through Cubase 6.5. I get about 3.5ms of latency this way, and it means I don’t have to commit to a set amount of reverb or delay, as I can add/change it afterwards and even track with it (complete with automation, panning and everything) without recording it.

M-Audio FireWire 410

I have the HD Pro connected to the FW410 by stereo XLR for the wet/effected amp tone. It’s also connected via SPDIF to send a dry signal into my sequencer, so every track of guitar also has a dry version which can be fed back into the HD Pro for re-amping. It’s a great solution as it doesn’t require any impedance trickery or additional re-amping hardware. I’ve also got POD Farm 2.5 installed for re-amping. It doesn’t sound quite as good but the benefit over hardware re-amping is that you don’t need to run the song in real time to replace your tones.

We’re hoping to add MIDI automation for patch-changing in the near future. Currently we have to do a little tapdance with our FBV foot controllers and run the backing track off an iPod. But in the future we’ll use some kind of laptop/soundcard/MIDI interface contraption. Not quite ready for that yet though!

– Paul Ortiz / Chimp Spanner