Wireless Guitars

Among Mr. Skaff’s credentials are stints as Shania Twain’s FOH engineer throughout her several world tours.  Shania’s live show was always so unique because it was in the round, bare stage, heavily tracked, and everyone in the band minus drums were wireless.

I asked him for advice regarding the challenges to tone that come from a wireless stage since we can get such pushback from musicians on the degradation of their tone when we add a wireless transmit/receive path to their signal chain.  He suggested the most important thing for success is clear artistic vision from the producer.  In Shania’s show, that was Mutt Lange – everybody knew what Mutt wanted and it was assumed wireless was for the greater artistic good of the show.  Because of this, the guys in the band spent plenty of time in rehearsal dialing in their rigs so they could be wireless and still get what they needed for tone.

Is it as true as a cable between the guitar and pedal board?  Obviously not.  But it was refreshing to know that there was no magic smoking bullet I’ve missed to suddenly make wireless sound exactly like a cable.

The one piece of gear we’ve found at Kensington in the past 6 months that has made somewhat of a difference is the Radial Dragster.  If you ever do wireless guitars, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  From the Radial website, the Dragster restores the full rich tone you lose when you plug your guitar into a wireless transmitter or other types of buffered inputs like those of effects, mixers, sound cards or recorders.  Dragster’s exclusive Drag™ control makes passive pickups think (and sound like) they’re connected directly to a amplifier input by allowing you to precisely dial in the correct amount of impedance loading.  Result? Your guitar tone regains it’s warmth – it feels ‘right’ again and your performance sounds great!

While not perfect, this little thing makes a big difference in just about every case we’ve tried it with.