The rehearsal went great, but with a major bonus: At one point, Brian thought the guitar wasn’t loud enough (imagine that – being a guitarist and having a bandmate say “it’s not loud enough, turn it up!”) so I cranked the volume on the Bose L1 a bit more. To my shock and delight, that slight volume boost turned it into a controlled feedback monster. And I mean controlled.
If you’re not familiar with the L1, it’s a system where the bass cabinets are down on the ground, while a tall column with lots of small speakers handles the midrange and highs. Bringing the Digital Les Paul in closer to the column gave the sweetest feedback you’ve ever heard; there was no “squeal,” and due to the location of the bass speakers, there was also no bass feedback that took over from the overall sound.
This was big, really big, and added yet another dimension to the guitar. Not only was the divided pickup doing really cool things, but now the standard magnetic pickups, going through the DigiTech GNX3000, were producing a pretty amazing sound on their own.
The vocals were also starting to sound good, too, as I was sending my voice through a DigiTech VL2 to generate automatic harmonies. Between Brian singing, and my being able to sound like two vocalists, we were starting to get a big vocal sound to match the instrumental sound.