Q: What is your current home-recording setup?
Chris Greatti — Guitarist/Producer
Photo by Gianennio Salucci
A: I do all my sessions at my house in L.A., so it's fully set up to track any instrument quickly while still retaining a super casual vibe. I just got the Adam A77X monitors (which I'm loving). The vocal chain is a Peluso 22 251 mic into a Universal Audio LA-610 pre/comp into an Apollo x8p. As for guitars: 2020 Fender Ultra Jazzmaster (which I use on everything), Gibson '61 reissue SG, my custom Carbonetti Strat-style, Gibson Firebird and Hummingbird, some old Silvertone acoustics, etc. The amp situation du jour is a Kemper (for quickness) with a Dumble preset from Top Jimi. The pedalboard features some classics from MXR, EarthQuaker, and Strymon. I prefer my Fender P bass with flats. The synth setup just got upgraded, too: Moog Sub 37, Roland Juno-106, Mellotron M4000D, and some terrible toy Yamahas. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, I just bought seven sunset lamps and they're improving my life drastically.
Current Obsession:
Caroline Polachek, Lewis Taylor's Lost Album, Teenage Fanclub, Portishead's Dummy, Yves Tumor, perpetually a little Lady Gaga, and Van Halen. I've been getting back into the Strokes, too. Their guitar parts are always so creative and they're insanely tight and unique as a band. But to be honest, I've been crazy busy this year producing albums for Yungblud and Palaye Royale (not simultaneously, but in quick succession) and have mainly been in the headspace for those projects, deliberately trying not to take in too many outside influences.
Portishead - Wandering Star (Official Video)
Daniel LeSaux - Reader of the Month
Daniel LeSaux
A: My recording setup is small, but I was able to pack a lot into a tiny space. I built my own cabinets to maximize the use of the room. My pedalboard is at lap level to make tweaking easier. My studio is called "Moose Tracks," a nod to the state of New Hampshire, where I live. In my digital workstation I use a PreSonus Studio One with a PreSonus 1824c interface and a PreSonus FaderPort II. I have KRK Rokit 5 monitors, KRK KNS 8400 headphones, a Mackie Micro Series 1202-VLZ Mixer, and a Mackie Big Knob Passive Monitor Controller. My outboard effects include: Klark Teknik EQP-KT Passive Tube Equalizer, Klark Teknik 76-KT FET Peak Limiter, Klark Teknik KT-2A Opto Electrical Tube Leveling Amplifier, PreSonus Studio Channel strip, and a Samson S-Patch 48-Point Patchbay. I have way too many pedals to list!
Current Obsession:
I've been chasing the perfect on-the-verge-of-breakup clean tone, similar to the tone Larry Carlton has been using in his recent releases. That tone is so alive and expressive. It takes high gain and a gentle touch to achieve it. And as soon as you dig in a little bit, the notes explode! It allows so much tonal variation depending on the pick attack, the pick angle, and whether you use upstrokes or downstrokes. It also makes it easy to switch from rhythm to lead just by varying the pick attack. To get that tone, I'm playing a stock Epiphone Dot using a blend of both pickups into a Custom Tones Ethos Clean II running into a Two Notes C.A.B. M+ with a 1x12 Electro-Voice open back cabinet sim. I have an MXR Carbon Copy in the FX loop and an MXR M300 as a send on the Mackie board. I'm currently working on an album of original tunes using this setup.
Rig Rundown - Larry Carlton
John Bohlinger - Nashville Correspondent
John Bohlinger
A: I've laid down all my dough on recording rigs four times in my life. A few years back when the Mac tower that drove my Digi 002 died, I shifted from my Pro Tools rig to a streamlined Universal Audio Apollo Twin/Logic combo. Although the old system was primitive, I knew it well, could work fast, and get decent results. After this last change, I feel like I'm relearning the rig every time I turn it on.
Current Obsession
Letting go.
Shawn Hammond - Chief Content Officer
Shawn Hammond
A: To track myself (guitar, vocals, keys) and Connor, my drummer, live together, I use a 4-input Audient iD44 and a 2-input Apogee Duet feeding GarageBand. Guitars (and keys, which go through my guitar rig) are miked with a Royer R-121 (sometimes also with an SM57). A Shure KSM32 large-diaphragm condenser is the drum overhead, a Rode M2 dynamic is on snare, and an Audix D6 is on kick. For bass, I often go direct into a Warm Audio WA-2A tube compressor, in addition to miking the amp with the Audix. For vocals, I use a Shure SM7B. Monitors are a pair of KRK Rokit 7 G4s.
Current Obsession:
Using all the aforementioned stuff—and getting back to gigging!
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Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if you’re not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an “intelligent pitch-changer” that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ’80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. It’s essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is ±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and it’s also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the device’s guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days it’s not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000’s capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymon’s “shimmer” effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what you’ve won!)
“If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.”
But there’s another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. It’s easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which they’re mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isn’t always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offer—and I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, that’s a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions don’t quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) It’s all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists won’t be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations exist—Eventide’s own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhere—and you’ve got the time—fire it up, wait for the distinctive “click” of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
