Monday, February 27, 2017

Jake's Pedal Set Up

If any of you have ever wondered how Jake gets that amazing wall of sound out of
a single ukulele, the following video posted on REVERB.COM will be quite insightful.

The typical player will almost always have a reverb pedal and a delay, those two are a must.

However.....
Jake elaborates on his addition of a Tube Dreamer, Octave Pedal, Volume Pedal and
Looping effects.

His set-up no doubt is the result of 100's if not 1000's of hours of experimentation with
electronic pedals, in his quest for the perfect tone / sound. The most inventive players
all seem to have this obsessive drive in common when it comes to trying out
the greatest and latest gear.

Like his guitar playing contemporaries, the use of pedals helps him create a sonic
palette that is quite diverse in its range of dynamics from great big rich chords on the
octave pedal to volume manipulation on his Hilton Volume Pedal....there's a wide
variety of effects being used in his on stage shows to great success, especially
given the limitations of a small acoustic instrument with nylon strings and the ever
lurcking menace of feedback that can be inherent when plugging in
ukuleles.

I've personally built a style of early blues, ragtime, folk and old time
string-band based repertoire on resonators where good microphones and
their placement in relationship to your fretboard and sound hole are supreme.
But when i perform in my blues quartet for my Jews N Blues Show i
do plug in and have spent alot of time trying to figure out how to get a good
blues tube sound out of my wood bodied ukuleles. But this is a whole different
beast so we'll save it for another post.

Never the less, it interests me, to know what one of the most visible ukulele pros is
using to get the sound he gets.

There's no substitute for good technique and Jakes sound is based as much on
his agility, expertise, rhythmic pizzaz, wide variety of strums, picking patterns,
single string lead style, chordal melody playing and inventive arranging as
it is on effects pedals.

Bottom line....the effects pedals are the icing on the cake!

Check out this very informal and intimate patter on his pedal effects...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbiotIXpi1M


                        America's Hardest Working Uke Star- Jake Shimabukuro


Here's a link to Jakes Sitehttp://www.jakeshimabukuro.com/home/ 

Hear some of Jakes Newest Record Streaming on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Nashville-Sessions-Jake-Shimabukuro/dp/B01JO9LT02/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1488227679&sr=8-2&keywords=jake+shimabukuro


Hope you enjoyed this blog post,

Lil Rev (C)(P) Fountain of Uke 
2-27-17
www.lilrev.com 

No comments:

Post a Comment

                                                                   Lil Rev @ Sam Ash in Clearwater, FL                                      ...