Richie Kotzen & The Winery Dogs (Pittsburgh, PA October 21, 2013)

Last night I went to see The Winery Dogs (featuring Richie Kotzen, Billy Sheehan & Mike Portnoy).

There were two opening acts. And being the guitar gear cork sniffing lunatic that I am, I paid careful attention to what the various guitar players were using and how they sounded.

The first band's guitarist was playing a Les Paul standard with a Floyd Rose (albeit no trem arm). That was going into a H&K head and a Kustom 4x12 cab. He had gobs and gobs and gobs of gain. Total Nu-metal sound. You couldn't hear any clarity whatsoever. Just a total mushy pile of monkey feces.

The second band (Sixxis) was an interesting prog band from Atlanta (Rush-meets Sound Garden-meets Dream Theater). This band had two guitarists. The one guy was using a Fuchs OD-100 head and a Fuchs speaker cab (couldn't tell what was in it, but given the size, I'm thinking a 1x12). He then put a plexiglass baffle board in front of the speaker. He was playing a Les Paul (regular bridge), and had a Pedal Train filled with a mixture of standard & boutique pedals. His sound was pretty good...but he could've been a lot louder. Part of it was his use of a baffle board. And part of it was the mix. The second guitarist was playing a Vigier Excaliber and then going into a Fractal AxeFx2 (with the midi foot controller) - going into a PA speaker. He had a lot of really interesting textural sounds, and a really smooth lead tone - which you could hear - although I thought he too could've been mixed a bit better through the gazillion watt house PA. Plus, I personally would've bumped up the high-midrange so it cut through. Both guitarists volumes were dwarfed by the bass - which was so goddamn loud, I thought I was going to suffer a cardiac arrhythmia.

Then Kotzen and company got up. 

Guitars: Richie played his Fender signature Tele all night. (Dimarzio rails bridge pickup; flat radius fingerboard, jumbo frets; maple neck; maple capped swamp ash body). It's stock except for the addition of an N-Tuner (onboard electronic tuner which mounts underneath the volume control). He also had a drop-D thingie (which I don't think he touched at all). He also played an acoustic for one song.

Amps consisted of a Fender Bassman and a Fender Vibro-King (with a Vibro-King extension speaker cabinet).

Effects consisted of a Dunlop Wah, the Sobbat Overdrive & Tech 21 Delay. And that's it.

Richie's not using a pick anymore, btw. He's got pretty developed fingerpicking, and applied it to shreddy licks too...which was very interesting.

His tone was excellent. Very raw & in your face with a lot of punch & clarity. (As opposed to the tone of the opening acts - who's guitarists were using a ton of effects and their sound was getting all mushy and lost in the mix).

Richie CUT through the mix like a hot knife through butter. It was loud, yes, but he was also very mid-high spikey...and a very very unprocessed sound. Even with Billy Sheehan playing with him (and if you've ever seen Billy, you know what I'm talking about), you could hear every note from Richie.
 
I'm not a sound engineer. But I'm starting to believe that for live applications you need to focus on high midrange in order to cut through the mix. I'm also noting that Richie was using a lot of 10" speakers...and I wonder how much that played a part of this.