Rigged: Within the Ruins Guitarist Joe Cocchi

March 8th, 2013 at 2:00pm
MetalSucks

I’m Joe from Within The Ruins and this is our live rig! Keep it simple, or things fuck up!

These are my three Acacia Custom signature models. The green is my main. They are all 27.5 inch scale baritones that handle the drop G tuning very well. I have a few others axes, but I generally travel with just these three. EMG 85 (bridge) and 81 (neck) has always been my go-to configuration as far as pickups are concerned. The bolt on neck and maple fingerboard play a huge factor in tone for me as well. These things take a beating on the road but they are built to last!

I just recently picked up an Axe-FX II and decided to pair it with a Mesa/Boogie Simul-Class 2:Ninety power amp. Unlike some players I love having the stage volume from my cabinets and hate relying on most venue monitors, so I run the Axe-FX as a preamp/effects unit. I run this rig in stereo since I am pulling double guitar duty. The thing that’s great about this setup is that it allowed me to get rid of the two guitar amps I had been lugging around as well as eliminate other problematic issues like a/b/y stereo splitter (to run two guitar heads), pedals, patch cables, buzzing noises, batteries etc. All this nonsense is taken care of by the Axe-FX II now. As far as controllers/pedals for the Axe-FX, I am using a Mission Engineering EP-1 spring-loaded expression pedal for wah and whammy effects. Our MacBook Pro controls my patch changes for the Axe-FX via midi, which I will get into in a bit.

We use Protools 8 and a Macbook Pro to play our click track/samples/effects/bass drops etc. At the start of the set it is as simple as hitting the space bar and we’re off. The Macbook is of course not stock; it has a quad-core processor and we added two solid state hard drives and 16gb ram to eliminate any lagging/crashing problems during the performance. As I mentioned, I set up midi program changes through out the protools session wherever I need my Axe-FX to change presets during a song, so they happen automatically. Midi foot controller, you can fuck off!

“Drummer” [Kevin McGuill] uses a Digidesign DIGI003 firewire interface with Protools. Out of the interface we can send him whatever mix he needs for his in-ears (click, guitars, samples) and we can send whatever else to the PA, whether it be song intros, samples, bass drops, or backing rhythm guitar tracks. Also in the rack is Drummer’s head phone amp, a DM5 trigger module, a D4 (for back up) and a 4 channel DI which is patched to the DIGI003.

This is my old pedal board that I keep for back up! If for some reason the Axe-FX shits the bed, I resort to this mess of cables and pedals. Whammy pedal, Morpheus Drop-tune pedal, wah and tuner.

This is the back up Macbook. If for some reason the main Macbook is not working, we are f*cked without the back up!