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Tom Lemmons
New Life Christian Center // Turlock, CA
Electric Guitar
I usually play thru a dual amp rig. A marshall plexi reissue and a vox ac30. I use a weber mass attenuator on the marshall to keep volumes in check.
Pedal Board: Pedal Train Pro with hard case
Power: Two Voodoo Labs pedal power 2 plus
Wireless: Line 6 Xd2 wireless
Signal Chain: JHS Mini Foot Fuzz, Dunlop Q95 Wah, Walrus Audio compressor, the Tim Pedal, Analogman K.O.T., Exotic effects pre, Ernie Ball VP Jr. modded by T1M buffer/LED, tuner out to my boss tuner, signal out to a Morley ABY box, A side to my Dunlop Jimi Hendrix univibe, Line 6 DL4,Strymon Timeline, Strymon Bluesky, TC Electronics Flashback and out to the Vox. Morely B side is out to the front of the Marshall w/o the wet effects. I can run the A side which is the full chain to the Vox, the B which is the overdriven signal only to the marshall or Y both. Or I can run the A side only, but run the out put from the last pedal in the chain, to both amps for a true stereo configuration. I get lots of options this way. I could run the B to front of house and skip the second amp to give the sound guy a dry signal to mix to kind of buffer the heavy effects driven signal and even out the mix for a bigger 2 guitar sound.
I have two Gibson Les Pauls, and a fender tele deluxe. I rotate these in the set depending on the set list.
I am currently enjoying a few things pedal wise. I have a favorite ambient setting with the Shimmer setting on the Blue Sky that gives a kind of Keyboard pad thing behind my guitar signal sound and similarly and Ice cloud setting on the timeline.
Volume swells with these settings really fill up the space.
Also enjoying Some of the anthem like solos with bigger overdrive and some shimmer in the back ground to make the solos bigger and sound like more than one instrument is playing with me. Almost mimicking a multi tracked part of a song. Many song have so many guitar parts and I have to try to get as much of that down and recreated as one guitarist, this type of effect allows me to do that to a certain extent.
As for two amps, the marshall has a lot of low and mids, and the Vox is chimey and more trebly, great separately for certain sounds, but combined, its a much fuller and fatter sound.
How could someone start building a rig like yours?
Start with one amp and the effect you like to use, slowly add and experiment with the second amp and figure out if its right for you. For me the combining of the two amp sound is a much bigger sound. We usually have one keyboardist, drums, bass, acoustic and one electric guitar. I try to cover so many electric parts as one guitarist, the bigger multi amp sound layered with some effects can really fill in the gaps.
What do you do to become a better musician?
I love playing with different musicians, and watching what others are doing and be inspired to try new things and mimic what they do and incorporate some of that into my own playing. Also sometimes playing with different players brings something new out of me. Oh! and lots of practice. I need to get the muscle memory of certain parts down. Repetitive practice seems to be the only way to do that.
Bigger sounds are great, but don’t forget that sometimes in worship music……LESS IS MORE. Don’t be afraid to have all the sounds you need but use them sparingly. to much of a good thing will become boring to the listener. We are leading people in worship, we need to be active in the worship, we don’t need to dominate it.