The Chris Johnson Band

Played this past Saturday night at the Rubicon Ranch in (you guessed it) Rubicon, Wisconsin. All in all a pretty good gig, though it was really loud. It was the drummer’s birthday so we got him a gift of some stick holders – he seemed to appreciate them.

Got a chance to play my 08 strat with the new pickups installed. Wow! They are fantastic. The neck and middle is loaded with Dimarzio Area 58s, and the bridge has a Dimarzio Area 61. The dynamics are outstanding. Every nuance of picking attack or freting technique pulls a new sound or harmonic that I had not heard from the stock pickups. Of course the Area series is noiseless, so I was able to explore most pickup combinations of the 5 way switch in all amp settings: clean, crunch and contour. I found the bridge a little bright with the Delta switched into bypass, but overall the pickups performed excellent.

I also chopped down my pedal board again – most of the stuff is on ebay right now. I’m getting much closer to the guitar->cable->amp construct every day. This weekend’s gig was the strobostomp tuner and the BBE Boosta Grande – that’s it. I normally use the boosta for the clean channel input to my Mesa Boogie F-30 (the only complaint I have on the f-30 is a lack of clean headroom)but this gig I found that the pedal really fattened up the strat in the overdrive sections. I can’t wait to explore some more live sound with the new pickups!

This entry was posted on April 16, 2008 at 1:38 am and is filed under gigs . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.