About Marius A. Schmidtke Expertise U2`s sound and equipment! I metU2`s Edge and his guitar tech already personally in real life.
Experience I met Edge's Tech Dallas Schoo once and he was quite amused about the design of the webpage. He laughed, when he saw the little VOX images there.
Expert: Marius A. Schmidtke Date: 10/23/2003 Subject: some equipment setting suggestions
Question Not sure if you're still doing this anymore, but I actually have a couple of questions. One, I recently got a vox valvetronix 2x12. I've got a Boss dd-5 delay, an ibanez ts9 tubescreamer, a boss eq7 equalizer and a boss compressor, plus a seymour duncan pickup booster. I play out of a les paul custom and a 60's fender strat. I've got the guitar settings figured out i think for the most part. I was wondering what kind of settings to have on the eq of the amp, the pedal, and the settings for the compressor pedal for both edge's heavy sounds (particularly until the end of the world, new york and beautiful day) and his clean settings(streets, wowy, etc.) If you're still helping people, i'll be more than glad to help you out with a good rating. Secondly, are some of edge's effects(e.g. mysterious ways) and combo of mod effects, or are they special algorithms from processors like the A3. I'm looking to get into some special effects and was wondering if it was just possible to combine effects to achieve the same thing. Thanks a lot.
Answer hi david!
thanx for your question! yes, of course i'm still here helping out. but as your question is more focussed on your own equipment it's difficult for me to answer. i mean, your equipment differs from edge's and this is the problem in answering. but i will give it a try anyway...
i would suggest that you don't use too much compression. edge uses it for the slide parts and for some of his sounds. but the main sounds, especially UTEOTW and NY are without a compressor. the sustain you hear comes from his fngers, the guitar, the strings and his amp! okay... in beautiful day there is some compression. in general i would suggest to use slight compression there for all songs. edge uses one setting too only! he doesn't change it live. try to set the filter in a way, that it doesn't eq the signal too much.
about the eq: i would try to boost the mids around 2,5 khz a bid. also try to boost the lower mids a bid. this should work perfectly when using the eq behind the ts9 tubescreamer. make sure to play dynamic on that song! and also don'et get frustrated with all the tons of overdubs in the song UTEOTW! there are many. you will hear more than three guitars at one time and you can't play them all simultaneously.
for the cleaner sounds you can use the compressor a bid like a little booster. add some signal and only a little compression and it should work fine with your strat.
about your last question: the mysterious ways setting is definately a good example. here you really need the special processor... in this case the korg a3... as edge uses one special preset from the spc-01 card which uses exactly this korg a3 algorithm. i know this is a bummer... but i haven't heard any other unit in the past years which doubles this sound in any way. even not the expensive lovetone meatball. of course it will sound cool too... but not 1:1!
i hope i could help you with my hints, if not mail me again! make also sure to check out the latest new u2 newsgroups and also my private website about u2's effects. it's www.u2sound.com ... and thanx much for offering me a good rating! :-)
