A four night Spring run at Madison Square Garden in New York City brought some real excitement to aficionados of Trey’s rig, including details on a new ground-up wet/dry rig, newly plek’d and fretted guitars, and Whammy whale-calls so real that an actual whale showed up. Details below.
Electric Guitar Amplification:
• 2 x Trainwreck Express (1 DIRECT, 1 EFFECTS)
The DIRECT amp has no effects in front of it and the EFFECTS has the full Bradshaw effects rig in front of it. Trey selects between amps by pulling a push-pull knob on the guitar and pressing a floor switch simultaneously. By the fourth night of the MSG run, Trey was down to a single Trainwreck head and the DIRECT rig was just a backup. Both heads have access to reverb via the wet rig (see below).
Electric Guitar Cabinets:
• Bruno 1 x 12. This is the DRY cab. Currently Trey is using a “naked”, i.e., uncovered Bruno cabinet. It matches the woody appearance of the Trainwrecks and also vibrates a little more freely without the extra tolex and glue. It’s loaded with a single G12-65H speaker, as per Trey’s usual preference. When both heads are in use, a custom switch box controlled by the Bradshaw rig permits Trey to select which amp head the DRY 1×12 is seeing at any given time. The amp that is not ON at any given moment is seeing a resistance load from the switch box to protect its transformers. This cabinet is mic’d with a Royer R-122V vacuum tube ribbon mic and a Shure Beta 57a.
• 2 1×12 custom cabinets (black). These were custom made for the WET rig, and only amplify – in stereo – the reverbs created by the Bricasti Reverb. They’re loaded with Celestion F12-X200 speakers, which are neutral, full-range speakers that you might see in an AXE-FX rig. There is no dedicated delay for the WET speakers as there had been in the past, so the WET side is Reverb-only. These cabinets are mic’d with Royer Labs R-121 Ribbon mics.
• Leslie G-37 guitar rotating speaker.
A note on head-switching: there have been several inquiries as to why both the push-pull knob and floor switch are necessary to switch heads. Wouldn’t Trey need just one or the other? He needed both for this run because they were trying to reduce the footprint of the rig and use only one DRY cabinet (in previous tours he used two). The push-pull determines which head the guitar talks to; the floor switch determines which head the single DRY cabinet talks to. So if he engages the guitar push-pull knob to go from the DIRECT head to the EFFECTS head, for example, he needs to stomp the floor switch to tell the DRY cabinet that it needs to make that change, as well, otherwise he’d get silence, as the guitar would be talking to a head that sees no cabinet.
Electric Guitars:
• Koa 1. A push-pull knob and TRS-out allow Trey to choose his signal path. One side goes to the Bradshaw effects rig and then the EFFECTS amp head, the other goes straight into the front of Jan Marie, the DIRECT amp head.
note: Koa 1 and Koa 2 fretboards were planed, re-fretted, and plek’d before this tour with Jescar 50×100 fretwire, and both got new nuts based on the Koa 1 spacing, which is somewhat narrower.
Electric Rig Effects:
Gain/Overdrive
• 2 x Tube Screamer (vintage TS-808)
• Klon Centaur Overdrive
• Ross Compressor
Voicing
• Digitech Whammy II
• 1 x Electro Harmonix (“EHX”) POG2
• EHX Key 9
• CAE Wah
• Mu-Tron 3 Envelope Filter
• 2 x Line 6 M5 Stompbox modeler. One is labeled “PRE” and the other “POST”, which refers to their effect order in the Bradshaw rig.
• 2 x Boss SY-1 Synthesizer
Time-Based (reverb and delay)
• Boomerang
• Eventide Space Reverb
• 3 x Way Huge Supa Puss atop rack: (1) set to quarter note, (2) set to dotted eighth, (3) set to tapped 1/4 note and low in the mix, a “thickener” they call “SOAR”. All have the Analogman Mix Pot Taper Mod, which removes the R79 resistor from the printed circuit board, allowing for a smoother curve or more linear slope on the mix control.
• Ibanez DM-2000 digital delay
• Digitech Obscura (for reverse delay)
Modulation
• Victoria Reverberato
• Shin -Ei UniVibe
• CAE/Black Cat Super Tremolo (usually for CHOP)
Wet Rack
• Bricasti Design Model 7 Stereo Reverb Processor (this takes a line out feed from the custom switchbox that selects amp heads so that both the DIRECT and EFFECTS head have reverb.
• Fryette LX II Stereo Power Amp (this reamps the signal coming from the switchbox)







Great stuff as always. I’m unsure if this is similar to what he ran in Mexico but his tone sounds like it has a lot of its harder edge back (like 2017, early summer 2018), even when he’s on the dry setup for rhythm. I also emailed you about his shelving Koa 4 in favor of Koa 1 since the middle of 10/28/21 (you saw and responded to me, don’t worry about looking for it!), which could very well be to let the guitar age a little, similar to why I think Ocelot hasn’t gotten much play with Phish lately.
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This is just, BUT I feel this “harder edge” might be due to the fact that it looks like he’s running EL34 tubes VS 6L6’s???
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I miss that 2017-2018 sound. To me it sounded like it filled the bands overall sound. I think having the Ambikabs/Komet amps gave it a more throaty-thick with depth and growl tone. This run I thought the rig was improved upon compared to Summer. I love how we can see the evolution of the rig over the years! Take 2015 for example. That had a crisp/ clean tone which was more clear, bright and raw. I’m excited for what’s to come!
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For modern-era, I’m especially fond of the Fall-NYE 2013 (I miss the Bogner!), NYE 2017 and Mexico 2019 tones.
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I’m especially fond of Trey’s tone during Fall-NYE 2013, NYE 2017, and Mexico 2019
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Why would he want the guitar to age?
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No particular reason for “shelving” 4.0… Koa 1 is just that special one for him so when we took some time and dialed it (re fret/ plek) it just re kindled the relationship 🙂 ahah
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I’d imagine by the Fall 2022 tour (hopefully), Trey is back to the Boogie Mark III and Vintage 30 cabinets. His level of complication is now off the charts.
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I’d imagine by the summer Trey will be back to the Boogie Mark III and his Vintage 30 cabinets. The level of complication in this rig is off the charts.
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It’s not complicated to him. I think it sounds awesome. It 2022 – losing the plywood with wall insulation is way overdue.
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Did Trey play the “4.0 Guitar” at all during the run? I thought he did night 1 of the run.
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no. Koa 1 was present for the entire run, as far as I know.
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I watched all 4 nights on webcast. He used Koa 1 every night.
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It kinda sounds like he’s got a boost on the entire time, which I suspect is the Klon, as opposed to last summer where he had a very sparkly clean tone. It sounds cool, but I enjoyed the cleaner sound last summer more.
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Trey was pushing Jan Marie pretty hard the first 3 nights of msg, which we talked about it sounding a bit too aggressive for the rhythm and clean parts. If you compare those 3 nights to the 4th night you’ll find it’s right back into the realm of the summer tone with more lush reverb
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How does the push-pull knob and floor switch setup work? Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn’t one of those be able to switch between wet and dry? Is there more to it?
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I’ll clarify this above, but the short version is this: the push/pull determines which head the guitar talks to; the floor switch determines which head the DRY cabinet talks to. If there were two dry cabinets (one per head) as last year, the floor switch would be unnecessary.
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Wow- thanks!
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Hey deuce,
There are boxes that allow trey to take a single out from his guitar and send to two different heads/ one cab. However, he wanted one of the amps to be completely uninterrupted ..meaning … guitar out straight into an amp. This is why he needs to switch both with a push pull and a floor switch
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Which preset on the Bricasti is Trey using?
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This is super cool! Thanks for the write up. I do have to say it feels like we’re slowly drifting over the edge here with complication for the sake of.
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This is great info… not sure I follow the push-pull on the guitar… The guitar doesn’t have a selector… As far as I remember seeing, he has a Lehle switcher on the floor, but it is one cable that comes from the guitar that either goes straight into the dry amp or into the wet rig. The push-pull on his guitar is a push-pull potentiometer and that spilts his pickup coils… I don’t think there is a remote to switch amps on his guitar.
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The pickup selectors are mini-switches. The push-pull is a new addition as of a few years back. He wanted a way to select between two amplifiers without having to use pedals in-line. I wrote about it extensively here after some conversations with Trey’s team: https://treysguitarrig.com/2019/12/31/2019-2020-nye-msg/
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