Metallica: A Look at James & Kirk's Guitar Rigs

we are today in Pasadena at the Rose Bowl and I'm just gonna run you through the rig a little bit just kind of show you the stage what's going on as you can see a really wide stage this is about 180 190 feet wide which kind of proposes a challenge with antennas I think it's about 80 feet to the downstage edge of the snake pit so we've got a lot of area to cover and what we've done is gone to the RF venue antennas that are a helical antenna as you can see we've got huge video screens here that emit some a terrible RF noise and stuff it really doesn't help us out at all so that's kind of been the big challenge on this thing other than just getting around the larger size stage doing guitar changes and stuff like that so where we've put the two antennas we have one here and another one on the other side we've got a real wide pattern so we're trying to kind of shoot this one across the stage that way the band use of the whole stage so but we're using the sure you are forty stuff and spend pretty good pretty constant so this is the way the band has to come there's one on stage left and one at stage right so James and I do a lot of changes either on stage or in here or back here where I work so essentially we'll just follow the signal flow we all share one pair of antennas through a sure antenna distribution unit in Iraq over here so one of the things we had to sort of shoot for was low profile out on the stage super clean everyone's done a lot of work on trying to make everything look really nice and with all the white and everything you know we couldn't have a whole like antenna farm up there so we decided to put these in the best spot that we could a little trial and error and we're sharing those for James Wireless Roberts and Kirk's Wireless as well so we just take a split off from there what we do then is we'll come back to the rack we go into the Shuar units from there we go into the small RJM line mixer mini line mixer which you should check out for a little smaller unit it's got tons of ins and outs and and so we use that to sum the output of our wireless basically use two channels on each player so we're flip-flopping between the first channel in the second channel when we're doing guitar changes when we have time to figure that out I'll mute the rig sometimes if I'm on the same channel so what we do is we sum out of there if you don't do that just go through an a/b box you're gonna lose at least 6 dB which as you might know when you're trying to hit the front end of an amp even if it's an axe FX losing 6 DB is wouldn't want to do that so it's important for us to sum those two output signals and before we go into the GC EXO the old tried and trued gcx audio switcher and what i deal with this is i'm basically using just a couple of loops on this to send either to the first fractal or the second fractal and the first fractal I have James main heavy sounds which is comprised of two different amps to mesa/boogie amp and diesel amp to separate cabinets so monitors in front of house and recording they all still get to different to different amp sounds that they can blend the mix together and so what I'm doing that is switching analog into the into the second fractal which has his clean sounds or any kind of sounds that are sort of small fender combo amp II kind of stuff like beginning a page or our straight clean sounds you know like in one and nothing else matters and and all of that so rather than sending signal to both of them and switching and meeting those I'm still kind of doing an analogue style because that it feels good and there's no there's no gaps and that's kind of what we're trying to eliminate is any sort of gaps with switching presets or anything like that so I take out of the second output I send in augs out to the matrix amp which is just a really solid great solid-state amp that just takes a beating and when you turn them up just to the right level they just they jump and they're really nice and we've they've been really hanging in there for so it's a big change using those compared to tube amps which you know get really fussy especially when you're shipping them constantly you know over the road over the air in a sea-can so that consistency and knowing that all the effects we use all the effects amps cabinets everything's coming out of the axe-fx and it's just knowing that that stuff is gonna work exactly the same every day just allows you to spend more time worrying about other stuff like keeping up on guitar maintenance and doing all the other stuff we got to do around here to make the show go yeah so out of the matrix amp then I send up to the two cabinets you may have seen on stage to boogie for by 12 cabinets with vintage 30s in them and I separate it one cabinet for the Boogie one cabinet for the diesel and I turn them up pretty good James I'll sort of get in the zone a sense of such a big stage we have guitar coming out of the monitors of course and all the mic positions which they're I think they're 9 on this and James will kind of when he wants to get in the zone a feel that he'll come in front of the cabinets and and either get sustained a feedback if he needs it or it's just kind of jam and making the guitar active on stage it's moving some hair and so the guy still feels like a real live rig and it just just sounds amazing and what I love about that as well as is with an analog amp once you get past the master volume you're kind of you're a little bit set and as far as tone goes but with the ax effects you know all of your sound is there it's just a matter of turning it up or turning it down and not having the low-end get squishy or not keep up especially when we tune down into D lower frequencies and stuff the axe effects just keeps up and spits it out and the matrix keeps up just spits it right out so it's so much more solid in the low-end and you know James guitars sound you really got to have all the low-end all the pick sound and you know he dislike saw the mid-range still in his face so everything keeps up really well Furman power supplies are just trying to keep a constant voltage which can be difficult with generators and super long feeder runs and all that so we're trying to do what we can to make sure that power is as stable as we can get it especially when you get overseas here in the States a little easier but some of these places you start switching to 50 Hertz you know versus 60 Hertz and when Mick turns the PA up and the kick drum hit soon it's it's just the PA just eats so much of the available power it's it's it's pretty crazy to watch the the current change alright so James guitars on this summer tour starting out giving them the new ESP vulture it's really light fast he has it for the first two songs so he can just kind of go up there and thrash on it and super fast it's light so he feels like he's got a lot of energy when the show starts so he can really rail on this thing and it takes a fair bit of abuse and hangs in there of course so this is kind of the latest newest one so I like to like to get it in his hands right away and give a good feeling right off the bat Gibson V that kind of harkens back to the old days I'll give him that on some older thrash songs battery and stuff like that there's a kind of a spot in the set that allows for early album kind of thrash or so I usually send that out there of course we've got the usual ESP structure shapes white cross from the black stir of course the white snake bite gets a lot of use a little bit more use than it used to with just the way the sets put together on this run of course the Ken Lawrence tried-and-true like to give this to him for you know the real good the clean sound stuff these things have been here since I've been here and can't get rid of them awesome we've got a newer ESP camo snake bite which is pretty cool it was hand-painted in Japan and he's been abusing this quite a lot lately so this is the I've got this tuned down to d4 sad but true so at the end of that song he kind of gets down on the ground and smashes it on the stage and the wedges and does a lot of terrible things to a guitar that you don't want to see well that's getting some good use and each guitar of course we kind of have a backup on our on our second channel so that if he's out there playing and something goes wrong I can pick up a similar shape guitar on the other frequency turn it on as I run up there and do a switch without sort of any other kind of interruptions or anything the other thing we're doing that's a little tricky is the digital acoustic thing on this tour so this has the auto-tune the ATG guitar chipset in it and so we took a line six electronics out and and put that in so takes a little programming of course and what I'm doing is since James wants to play both the six string sound and the twelve string sound what I have to do is send a MIDI program change message to it while he's playing it so I do that via the little MIDI jet Pro which is Wireless MIDI unit so there's a there's two units to talk to each other on a private network and the MIDI is bi-directional but I'm just kind of sending out program changes up to the guitar out on stage so that he can do like I'm fade to black he'll do the intro on the six string sound until it kicks into the you know the verse part it's big huge 12 string sounds so there's no other way to do that basically then then how I'm doing it right now one last thing for me to cover I think is just using the Petersons app for a tuner on ipad it's just you know with so much stuff going on lights and distractions and stuff it's so great to just have a huge display you know just I can't look at these small displays anymore with small letters and we've kind of been enjoying that it's you know with aging eyes it's probably a good idea I recommend it if you're tired of squinting at a tuner and I guess that's that's about most of it and we'll turn you over to you Justin's this is my world very similar to what you've seen on the other side of the stage obviously all these guitars a cook's largely ESP and LCDs this is a fun little guitar we got in the summer just a loser go ghouls with all this and we have other guitars that have no whammy bars have a just a cherry V and they these are mainly alternate tunings a slide guitar for Paige probably the first we'll start with tonight is the mummy which she's had a long long time 96 I think then we'll probably go to this one which is a newer one which is a purple Sparkle and tonight I'm experimenting with a slightly different front pickup this is a 68 compared to normal 60 but from AMG this will be the other major to touring rotation tonight so white zombie same thing EMG pickups ESP Guitar ernie ball strings Kirk's own straps this guitars kind of unique because it's very original this used to be Goering laws there used to be included greens completely back Gary Moore from Fiddler's he and on his own and it's it's a very well known guitar one of Kirk's most original guitars that was this brandy rose Jackson I think this is an 84 I'm sure there are people out there all correctly and that's tuned to be for sad but true and if you want to come around to the right here very similar looking back to what the other two guys have wireless receivers - different I have to cry baby these are the dunlop crybaby rack units stop as you were by him in a store because he has five petals around the stage and we have to tear them on and off and although the fractal has built-in why was when you don't have a way of running five petals from it easily gcx once again i use loop one to turn the wires on and off and i'll come back to this but basically if you walks away from a while and hasn't quite turned off i can turn it off from the pedal ball very quickly and then reset the axe-fx same as the other side we're using one for crunch sounds one for clean sounds and make allows us to switch very quickly then songs like one you're switching very very tight fade Unforgiven it's very very tight and can't have a slightly cup as the animal model changes so we looked at it and we figured this is the best way of doing it matrix amps solid as a rock really really guitar friendly coloration if you like you do have to turn them up a little bit to make them work this certain point when to them up right about one o'clock or two o'clock look all of a sudden it all comes to you it just opens right up so will tend to turn down the input and let the amp tried a little hot and then that feeds those two speakers we point it out on the stage the audio guys pick up my excel ours out of here so they get a balanced signal or balanced signal here so they're not making up speakers wet cardboard or dry cobble depending on the conditions it's identical everyday and when we have boutique you know handmade amps by the likes of Mike bought of everything because they're they're all slightly different they all have this a slightly different character they're never identical and by the time you get to the fourth system on the spare it's kind of like the bait the eighth best and you have but here we have the same thing every day and it allows big mate concealing with a whole new environment every day it allows recording trucks just to set layer controls flat and we've set it all up with Mike Billy's previously so they can just pretty much set up flat kind of left-to-right 0db and the guitars are coming into them it allows them to focus purely on the vocals and the drums this is how we control the fractals and the gch this is the while loop I was telling you about earlier this is hot right now but if he walks away from the wire I can quickly pull it out of the circuit step over to the crybaby rack controller reset it and then let it back in now it's turned off these presets allow me to corrupt me several different effects in one go there's a reverse delay where with a normal reverse delay you have silence whilst the delay loads but because of this I've been able to get a delay that goes forwards and cross fades into reverse so there's absolutely no difference the signal never stops which I couldn't do with this analog pedals with my I couldn't I'm sure somebody can I couldn't so I just put the end of Puppets I'll hit that it'll start playing into the reverse and then we'll take turn it off at the end and I mean to another song this is my main bread and butters preset this covers most of the songs that we do in this worldwide set hello allows me to add a certain amount of pics change for some phrases it's basically just a lower octave Drive which is kind of halfway between a rhythm and a solo sound and I kind of use that show when James and Kurt playing harmonies so that it doesn't overpower James but still gives Kirk a little more sustained as he's playing single notes without lifting the volume so much that Big Mike has to do too much out front to keep them even dissappear dissappear it's just used for a small doodle yet Robert and Kirk do write the very front of the thrust there and that if you listen to the song this a huge filter sound bump Wow which I also bring this pedal out just for that to do that it's so quick that I can't really do it via MIDI it's just simpler for me just to do this and that goes straight to the expression port of the fractal that turns on the filter Chad makes up all these for the mic slams pick holders Hetfield black bangs a couple of City picks which is act mates with every city on I know Kirk Hammet jazz 3 special shape with the little cutout B in the back I'm probably going through about 100 of the black fangs per show just due to the number of mic stands up there and how many they throw at everything so we use a lot of them [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Metallica

Views: 1,605,349

Rating: 4.9222913 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: P6k2ghtbhoU

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SaltyMilkAndCoins]

HOLY SHIT, I never would've guessed they would talk about this stuff. This is hard core pornography for me. I fucking love all the technical details that make Metallica work. The deeper details about the rig they share in this video are awesome, I never expected this from them.

[u/GoGoGodzillaaa]

This was really cool and neat to watch! I enjoyed it.

James’ guitar tech seems like a nice guy.

[u/jsdarkness]

Words cannot describe how happy I am that they posted this. I've been trying to convince my dad that they switched to Axe FX LONG ago, but he just refuses to believe it. Glad to have some confirmation from the crew themselves ;)

[u/ahamm95]

Working backstage and loading dock security at a lot of concerts, I always see the rigs getting torn down and never get to see them all set up. This was very cool and even though I don't understand a lick of what they've said, I appreciate the fact they show us fans how they set up their rigs for such a huge stage and tour!

[u/gmb0051]

The first guy that is James guitar tech pretty sure is the same guy that comes out on stage just before encore on cunning stunts. He’s tuning or soundchecking the green flame hot rod Flying V from the mid/late 90’s.

[u/eliassvard]

I wonder what Peter Green's guitar is gonna go for if Kirk sells it someday.

[u/Feel_the_McIlrath]

It was cool to see but I would have preferred more talking about the guitars and hearing them than listening to him talk about wireless switching.

Hearing them would have been cool, or some close-up shots and stories about the Ken Lawrence and the Mummy.

[u/sicaccount]

Anybody else surprised to see Axefx? I'm glad, just a little surprised. Guess I figured they'd be diehard with the Diezels and Mesas and stuff

[u/ceaguila84]

I'm surprised there aren't tuning room videos of this European tour