When Rush was done with their sound check, I saw that Alex went into a little area behind some black curtains. Then I decided to try and track down Alex. He was very gracious, it was a pleasure talking with him. When Eric was done with his sound check, I introduced myself and we chatted for a while and I gave him a blue FF. Crest was still doing the Fuzz Face reissues back then, so I brought a couple with me intending to give one to Eric and one to Alex. My wife and I drove up to Rochester, I got my backstage credentials and spent the day hanging around with Rob, enjoying the sound checks. When the tour started I was invited to come see them up in Rochester NY. In early 1990 I spent a couple months building the two main Front-of-house mixing consoles for Rush's "Roll the Bones" tour (Rob Scovill mixed on a pair of Crest-Gamble EX56's linked together). Those old tones are iconic (to me anyway). No way a guy can do that with just his guitar's volume knob.Ģ) With the lack of channel switching Marshalls, is he using a second amp for clean sounds? Maybe a Twin or Super Reverb with an A-B box? It sure sounds like he cannot be simply riding his volume to jump from clean (PS-1 phased for the most part) to cutting dirty. I've heard that Alex didn't start using those H/H amps or the HiWatts until the next tour (after A Farewell to Kings), so the Marshalls were the thing back in the ATWAS days.ġ) Is he just using the Marshall for his dirt, or is there a pedal too? It sure seems like there are times when his dirt goes "up a notch" for parts of songs. And the one effect that seems to be everywhere is that classic Maestro PS-1 Phase Shifter.īut I'm at a loss with regard to his very distinctive dirty sounds, and in particular, what he's doing live on ATWAS. To me, we are talking 335s, 355s and Les Pauls. I think I understand most of the guitar and effects parts of the recipe. I've become a bit enamored with those old tones. I've been listening to the first four Rush albums and the first live album (All The World's A Stage) lately. His tone has changed so much during the years but that era is my favourite as well. That was the first thing that came to mind. the first time I heard my DR-103 through an attenuator, I immediately thought, this is the Hemisheres tone, nailed. I don't know if Alex's are the Canadian Mod versions but I would suspect they are. I've talked to Keith Scott about his Hiwatts and he met the guy in Montreal who was doing the mods, he kept his mods intact and said he liked them. They're not high gain, sort of JCM800 territory but with that Hiwatt clean slicing through the middle. What I can say is that they have more than enough clean headroom. I've never played a non-Canadian Mod version so i can't say how they compare. I have a DR-103 and DR-504, both with the Canadian Mod. Hiwatts must have been quite popular in Canada because I use to see tons of them around and picked up a couple for myself years ago. Take it for a test drive, you won’t be disappointed.They called that the "Canadian Mod", it was done by the Hiwatt importer in Montreal, apparently to compete with higher gain Marshalls at the time. The choices are limitless and it’s fully loaded with all the options you’d ever need. There is great depth and transparency, and excellent imaging that makes listening with in-ear monitoring a wonderful aural experience. The quality of all the effects is superb. He also used tone matching to create a gorgeous acoustic sound for the piezo installed in my Les Pauls, one that our FOH engineer, Brad Madix feels is one of the best live acoustic guitar sounds he’s EVER heard…not bad from a Les Paul! He’d been behind the wheel for a couple of years with the Fractal gear and knowing how lazy I can sometimes be, took the initiative to pre-program the bulk of the songs we planned for the Clockwork Angels tour. My tech, Scott Appleton, had been using the Fractal Audio AxeFX II and was encouraging me to give it a spin. Well, that’s fine for an old, crappy car you might want to squeeze another few thousand miles out of but I wanted to get more out of my gear than a shiny wax. (It’s also true that we at Fractal have great admiration for his music, without which it is quite possible there would never have been an Axe-Fx in the first place!) Here’s what he had to say about first kicking the tires and then really taking off in his new Fractal-powered rig:īeing a creature of habit, I avoided changing my FX gear line up on the last tour reasoning that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Alex Lifeson of Rush, however, really kicked it into overdrive, so we wanted to give it all to you here. Octo– Normally, when we ask an artist for a few words describing how they find using the Axe-Fx II or out other products, we get exactly that: a few words.
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