I've played guitar since I was a kid - played in cover bands throughout the late '70s and early '80s to get through college.. got married, had kids - hung it up.
So... for the past 20+ yrs I've been involved in the US housing industry, which as many of you know has recently completely tanked, sending me looking for something else to do. Kids are out of the house now (college) and I pulled my old G and L F100 II and SG Std. out of their cases . Couple of things have happened since I was gigging in bar bands...
- All kinds of computer-oriented stuff now exists for guitarists (like this site, GarageBand recording, etc)
- Modeling seems to be coming on (Line6, etc) but I'm surprised more people aren't using it live.
- "Back then" I dealt with pedalboards that I built myself with the usual MXR/Boss/EHx stomp boxes attached. Major PITA dealing with batteries, ground loops, cables failing, AC adapters failing, etc. . I also had a Roland Space Echo that I loved but was equally a maintenance nightmare. We were playing 4-6x week and had to carry spares of everything because nothing was reliable enough.
My dream was to get all the controls off the floor and into a rack. I would have thought for sure that those things would be dinosaurs by now, replaced by rack-mount systems... but instead... there's 100x more on the market than there back then!! Mostly take-offs on the originals, but some cool new stuff too. There's some dedicated rack mount stuff too of course, but nowhere near what I would have thought it would have been by now.
So here's my thing... "back then" I designed and built some road cases for our gear that solved some problems for weekend warriors... for instance a road case for my amp that had the pedalboard in the lid, and convenience items like a power strip built in. I could pull the amp out and have the whole rig ready to play in just a couple of minutes. I realize Anvil and others make cases, but not like these. This stuff was focused on quick set-up and easy tear-down. I built a few prototypes that other bands on our circuit used and loved, and I was always going to market some version of that stuff and never got around to it. I was also building a remote switching system that would put all the stomp box controls up in a rack while allowing some pre-programmed footswitches. Back then it was all analog, but today the switching could be done with a CPU and a single run of CAT5 cable- keeping the signal path completely off the floor.
So my question - what's missing out there today in gear land? To those of you who are gigging on a regular basis, what are the problems you'd like to solve where the available gear is either not quite hitting the mark, too expensive, too much hassle, etc. ?
What about pedalboards ? What's missing? What about a better way to utilize existing pedals but get them off the floor - switch them with a separate footswitch system ? I've seen a couple things on the market - is there room for more of that? I'd like to put a few prototypes together and see if there's a market for any of it.
Any input appreciated!
- moucon
