2022 MSG April (2024)

A four night Spring run at Madison Square Garden in New York City brought some real excitement to aficionados of Trey’s rig, including details on a new ground-up wet/dry rig, newly plek’d and fretted guitars, and Whammy whale-calls so real that an actual whale showed up. Details below.

Electric Guitar Amplification:

• 2 x Trainwreck Express (1 DIRECT, 1 EFFECTS)
The DIRECT amp has no effects in front of it and the EFFECTS has the full Bradshaw effects rig in front of it. Trey selects between amps by pulling a push-pull knob on the guitar and pressing a floor switch simultaneously. By the fourth night of the MSG run, Trey was down to a single Trainwreck head and the DIRECT rig was just a backup. Both heads have access to reverb via the wet rig (see below).

Electric Guitar Cabinets:

• Bruno 1 x 12. This is the DRY cab. Currently Trey is using a “naked”, i.e., uncovered Bruno cabinet. It matches the woody appearance of the Trainwrecks and also vibrates a little more freely without the extra tolex and glue. It’s loaded with a single G12-65H speaker, as per Trey’s usual preference. When both heads are in use, a custom switch box controlled by the Bradshaw rig permits Trey to select which amp head the DRY 1×12 is seeing at any given time. The amp that is not ON at any given moment is seeing a resistance load from the switch box to protect its transformers. This cabinet is mic’d with a Royer R-122V vacuum tube ribbon mic and a Shure Beta 57a.
• 2 1×12 custom cabinets (black). These were custom made for the WET rig, and only amplify – in stereo – the reverbs created by the Bricasti Reverb. They’re loaded with Celestion F12-X200 speakers, which are neutral, full-range speakers that you might see in an AXE-FX rig. There is no dedicated delay for the WET speakers as there had been in the past, so the WET side is Reverb-only. These cabinets are mic’d with Royer Labs R-121 Ribbon mics.
• Leslie G-37 guitar rotating speaker.

A note on head-switching: there have been several inquiries as to why both the push-pull knob and floor switch are necessary to switch heads. Wouldn’t Trey need just one or the other? He needed both for this run because they were trying to reduce the footprint of the rig and use only one DRY cabinet (in previous tours he used two). The push-pull determines which head the guitar talks to; the floor switch determines which head the single DRY cabinet talks to. So if he engages the guitar push-pull knob to go from the DIRECT head to the EFFECTS head, for example, he needs to stomp the floor switch to tell the DRY cabinet that it needs to make that change, as well, otherwise he’d get silence, as the guitar would be talking to a head that sees no cabinet.

ElectricGuitars:

• Koa 1. A push-pull knob and TRS-out allow Trey to choose his signal path. One side goes to the Bradshaw effects rig and then the EFFECTS amp head, the other goes straight into the front of Jan Marie, the DIRECT amp head.
note: Koa 1 and Koa 2 fretboards were planed, re-fretted, and plek’d before this tour with Jescar 50×100 fretwire, and both got new nuts based on the Koa 1 spacing, which is somewhat narrower.

Electric Rig Effects:

Gain/Overdrive
• 2 x Tube Screamer (vintage TS-808)
• Klon Centaur Overdrive
• Ross Compressor

Voicing
• Digitech Whammy II
• 1 x Electro Harmonix (“EHX”) POG2
• EHX Key 9
• CAE Wah
• Mu-Tron 3 Envelope Filter
• 2 x Line 6 M5 Stompbox modeler. One is labeled “PRE” and the other “POST”, which refers to their effect order in the Bradshaw rig.
• 2 x Boss SY-1 Synthesizer

Time-Based (reverb and delay)
• Boomerang
• Eventide Space Reverb
• 3 x Way Huge Supa Puss atop rack: (1) set to quarter note, (2) set to dotted eighth, (3) set to tapped 1/4 note and low in the mix, a “thickener” they call “SOAR”. All have the Analogman Mix Pot Taper Mod, which removes the R79 resistor from the printed circuit board, allowing for a smoother curve or more linear slope on the mix control.
• Ibanez DM-2000 digital delay
• Digitech Obscura (for reverse delay)

Modulation
• Victoria Reverberato
• Shin -Ei UniVibe
• CAE/Black Cat Super Tremolo (usually for CHOP)

Wet Rack
• Bricasti Design Model 7 Stereo Reverb Processor (this takes a line out feed from the custom switchbox that selects amp heads so that both the DIRECT and EFFECTS head have reverb.
• Fryette LX II Stereo Power Amp (this reamps the signal coming from the switchbox)