5 Ways to Simplify Your Live Rig

The most reliable live rig is the one with the fewest moving parts. Here's how to cut the complexity without cutting the capability.

1. Consolidate Your Presets

If you have 300 presets on your modeler and you use 12 of them live, move those 12 to the front. You don't need to scroll through banks of unused sounds between songs.

Better yet, organize them by setlist order. Preset 1 is your first song's tone, preset 2 is the second, and so on. When you need to call an audible, adjacent numbers mean adjacent songs.

2. Use Sections, Not Songs

Instead of one preset per song, think in terms of sections: verse tone, chorus tone, solo tone. Most guitarists use 3–4 distinct sounds per song. Build presets around those sounds and map them to sections.

This is exactly what Cuelist is designed for — each section of each song sends its own set of MIDI messages, so your rig knows exactly what to do at every point in the show.

3. Eliminate the Laptop

A laptop on stage is a liability. Power cable, display glare, a full OS that can decide to restart itself mid-set. If you're using it only to manage your MIDI setup, find hardware or browser-based alternatives.

The Cuelist editor runs in Chrome and pushes everything to the pedal before you leave for the venue. The pedal handles the rest.

4. Have a Bypass Plan

Whatever complex signal chain you've built, know what happens when it fails. Which pedal do you go around? What's the sound if your modeler crashes? Practice playing through a backup path at soundcheck.

5. Soundcheck Your Full Set, Not Just Your Tone

Most players soundcheck one sound. Soundcheck your transition from song one to song two. Does the MIDI changeover happen cleanly? Is there dead air? Does the FOH engineer need to adjust for the different channel levels between your clean and drive sounds?

Treating soundcheck as a partial run-through will surface problems before the audience does.