Madcat's Equipment

Harmonicas

During the last 42 years I've used a lot of different makes and models of harmonicas... I'm currently using a full set of Hering Harmonicas, and a Hering Special 48 model chromatic. I also carry with me Hering 1923 Vintage Harps and a few of Joe Filisko's customized harps, which use either Hohner or Huang reed plates

Click here to visit the Hering Harmonica site.

Amplification

Currently I'm using 3 different rigs when I go to play a gig:

My electric rig when I drive to the gig:

  1. I use a Shaker / Madcat harmonica microphone.
  2. The microphone is plugged into a Samson Airlines, AG1 wireless transmitter and AP1 receiver.
  3. The output of the wireless receiver is plugged into a Peavey Transformer 112 guitar amp. The Transformer is a user-friendly modeling amp with loads of built-in effects.
My old electric rig when I drove to the gig sounded great but was alot more baggage to haul around:

  1. I used a Shaker / Madcat harmonica microphone.
  2. The microphone was plugged into a Audio Technica ATW-R10 wireless transmitter and receiver system.
  3. The output of the wireless receiver was plugged into a rack mount Boss RGE-10 graphic EQ. I usually notched out a bit at 1kHz, and 2kHz., (this eliminated feedback problems before the signal was amplified) and sometimes I boosted a bit of 4kHz or the 8kHz just a tad for a bit of zing. These settings changed from room to room, and even song to song.
  4. The signal was then sent to a rack mount Peavey TubeFex. There I set up and stored various patches which used the noise gate, hum filter, reverbs, delays, pitch shifters, rotating speaker sounds, and phase shifting in various combinations. I had about a dozen programs saved in it's memory.
  5. The signal was then sent to a rack-mount Blue Tube pre-amp, which had one 12AX7 tube. This pre-amp is much more harp-friendly than the tube pre-amp in the TubeFex. (Harp players don't need as much gain as those heavy metal guitarists.) The Blue Tube has a Gain control and a Master Volume control, so it is easy to dial in a clean tone or a distorted tone, or anything in between. It also has Bass, Mid, and Treble controls which can be set fairly flat, or used to enhance the tone for a particular song.
  6. The line out of the Blue Tube went to a Crown D-75 solid state power amp which drove a:
  7. JBL 12" speaker in a closed back cabinet.
My electric rig when I fly to the gig:

When I fly to an "electric gig" these days I take with me a Shaker / Madcat harmonica microphone, and a Boss, Blues Driver stomp box. I plug the output of the Blues Driver into whatever big, clean guitar amp I can borrow, something 50 to 100 watts. I dial in the amp's cleanest setting, and then control my tone from the drive, tone and gain controls on the pedal. I usually have to cut the middle and treble on the guitar amp a little bit, and sometimes boost the bass. Recently in Japan and in Brazil I was playing thru Marshall Valve-State (solid state) amps. I know it's not "politically correct" to play a harp thru a solid state amp these days, but do it I anyway, and it sounds great...

No rig at all

A lot of my gigs these days are with Triple Play, or Madcat and Kane, and for these gigs I usually don't bring any microphone or amp at all... I play thru whatever vocal mike they have, quite often a Shure SM-58.

I change my equipment from time to time, but I'm happy with these three setups these days.

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