I liked that ! What's more important than spending time discussing about harmonica technique is to write a cool song that has harmonica in it, and have a life !
Last Edited by on Oct 10, 2010 3:43 PM
I bought the album right when it came out several years back (a new one will be out this spring) and LOVE it. I love everything about it!!! However, I have not really dug the live clips I've heard.
There is a lot of overdriven harp and harp with a rotary effect (and cool use of delay and loops). He was using a Motion Sound amp live for many years, but I dunno about currently.
Sometimes, and not so much on this album, he has a phaser or flanger type thing going that makes the harp sound like it is underwater. I hate it. It especially isn't cool live. But on this album he sticks with the rotary thing a lot.
In fact, look up the song Everything (not the live cut). I am obsessed with that rotary sound and got kinda close with a DLS Rotosim.
I wasn't using the effect much and now just have the Line 6 model on my M9 which is ok for live stuff, but not awesome. ---------- Mike VHT Special 6 Amp for Harp Blog
Last Edited by on Oct 10, 2010 5:36 PM
There's been over a half dozen Blues Traveler albums since Four. He also has a solo album out alongside the Popper Project. Then there are numerous sit-ins with other bands.
Besides harmonica playing John Popper is one of my favourite vocalist along with Chet Baker and Jao Gilberto ---------- Excuse my bad English. Click on my photo or my username for my music.
@ HarpNinja-I recorded on an album about 13 years ago in the same now-defunct studio that BT had a couple of weeks prior. The engineer told me about the setup Popper had-it included a Mesa half-stack, a huge rack of effects, and a vintage Leslie cabinet. So, at least then, he did use an actual Leslie. I believe this was during the Straight on Til Morning takes.
The engineer also offered one of Popper's SP20s that he used to record with and left as a souvenir at the studio to me to play...ewww. No, I didn't play it. ----------
Crescent City Harmonica Club Todd L Greene, Co-Founder
Last Edited by on Oct 11, 2010 7:26 AM
"His harp rig is quite the setup. He had an accident a few years ago and we did a tour when he was in a wheelchair, so I had to figure out how to get all those [foot]switches for his rig. I ended up attaching them all to a SM58. I was sitting in the hotel room, duct-taping crap to this microphone trying to make it work. We had this company build a molded metal one and he didn't like it. So he uses this old beat-up, duct-taped mic. I've got a panel on the back of his effects rack that splits all the inputs for his microphone, but for a while, I used to stand on the side of the stage and have an ulcer hoping it all would work! So it's a little more reliable than it used to be.
I send the SM58 into a Behringer Dual preamp which I split and goes to an amplifier - like a regular guitar setup - a Mesa Boogie Tri-Rectifyer that goes into four 4x12's. One of the switches on the mic changes the channels in the head - there's a clean channel, a dirty channel... He's got a split from the preamp that goes to his effects rack that we send to the monitor console and it comes back into his monitors, which are controlled thru a MIDI controller. There's also a slave out of the head that goes to a Mini Goth Leslie cabinet that I run offstage. And he's got a volume pot which sends to the Leslie, is miked and returns to the monitor so he can control how much Leslie there is. I have another switch on the mic which is the speed switch for the Leslie, too!
As far as harmonicas, John uses Hohner Special 20 Blues Harps - it's the only harp he feels comfortable with."
"As for the nine tracks of harmonica - distortion harp, clean harp, Leslie harp, effect harp and phase harp are among the Popper choices - Shoemaker had her hands full. "He would step on pedals, but he would send them through different processing units and ultimately different outputs," she recalls. "So that's why we had to have a whole section of the console dedicated to it. And John would say, 'It doesn't matter, because this harp track will be just a scratch track.' I thought, 'Baloney, you're going to play really great, and then Matt Wallace is going to be looking at me like, 'You got that, right?' So I just made sure even though he said we'd never use any live harp tracks, we used all live harp tracks, almost exclusively."
If anyone can explain the above, that'd be great, lol. It sounds like he keeps the clean, dirty, Leslie, and effects all separate...like running three different amps.
If I was playing stages and cool enough, I would run a small dirty amp, large "clean" amp, and then run my effects through the house. I could do this now if I had a three input amp switcher.
A simplified setup would be getting a distortion pedal as part of an effects rig. Then, you could run that into the board. So you'd split your signal twice. One going into your amp and then another going to the house/monitors that you'd use for effects. ---------- Mike VHT Special 6 Amp for Harp Blog
