Joe Satriani helped design Peavey’s JSX Series
Photos: Steve Jennings
Guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani brought his sizzlin’ licks across the U.S. for a quick six-month tour. Mix caught up with the guitarist and his engineers at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater.
Production manager/front-of-house engineer Russell Giroox is manning a Yamaha PM5DRHV2 board, loaded with MY16-AT cards to archive and multitrack the gigs. Monitor engineer Simon Blanch uses the same model desk, mixing Sennheiser EW300 G2 IEMs that Blanch calls invaluable “because of the frequency options.” All effects/dynamics for both engineers are onboard.
Production manager/FOH Russell Giroox (left) and monitor engineer Simon Blanch.
While Clair Bros. Nashville provided the P.A. package (including SRM wedges, and ML18s and R4s for sidefills), the tour employed local racks and stacks. “We would literally get something different each day, depending on local vendors and venues,” Giroox explains. “We did carry four Clair P2s for frontfills, which were perfect for our application: They’re low-profile enough not to affect sightlines in the front row of the theaters and are full-sounding boxes for their size.” Giroox employed the Clair Lake iO as an EQ for the mains and frontfills. “It was nice having the ability to walk a whole theater and tweak the system — some of those balcony stairs are killer!”
Giroox says that Satriani uses Peavey JSX heads and JSX 4×12 cabs, which the guitarist designed with the company. The rig has a DI/speaker simulator output that Giroox used exclusively as it best represented Satriani’s tone.
