We recently made a great purchase at my church. One of our electric guitar players had played at another church and used a product called Axe Trak. He’s a very good musician and picky about gear, so he was skeptical at first, but after playing through it, he had to admit he thought it worked great. He came back and told me about it. We bought one the next week, loved it and bought a second one this week (we often have 2 electric guitars).
What does an Axe Trak do? It allows your electric guitar player to have their amp beside them on the stage, but via the Axe Trak, there is no stage volume. We had been putting our electric guitar player’s amps in holes we built into our stage. The holes (with the lids on them) reduced the stage volume, but were a pain to set up, mic and needed a fan constantly blowing on the amp, which means we had to crack the lid open and caused a danger on our stage (one of our vocalist fell in one of the holes while walking backstage and hurt her leg pretty bad). We’ve had several other people (including myself) that almost fell in the hole, when the lid was left open or not fully closed. With the Axe Trak, we have closed the lids for good.
Here’s some more info from the Axe Trak website: “The warm sound desired by most guitarists can only be created by the speaker of a good sounding guitar amp being mic’d in the right environment. Direct amplifier outputs sound fake, fuzzy and extremely harsh. The AxeTrak® alleviates this problem by allowing the user to connect directly from the speaker jack of their guitar amp to the input jack of the AxeTrak®. The output of the AxeTrak® is then plugged into a recording console, mixing board or computer soundcard using a standard low impedance microphone cable. This method of recording allows you to get a direct signal that includes the preamp tubes as well as the power tubes if using a tube amp. This is very important if you are a tone freak like most guitarists.” Check it out HERE.