jeff lang played at yuyintang a few weeks ago, on saturday 1st august. despite the fact that jeff is currently touring as a drummerless one-man show, he tore the place down. broadly speaking, jeff is a blues guitarist. but his style has many more facets to it than just the blues. he is a wizard with the slide guitar and his fingerpicking is impeccable. lang references australian (and irish?) folk music and is so convincing that it would be easy to imagine him in a tavern in sydney harbour 150 years ago.

he has toured and recorded with many great artists, both australian and foreign. i saw him (and shared the bill with him with my old band, the ancient marinators) a few years ago at the cockatoo island festival playing with ethno-guitar freak, bob brozman. these guys were hot – lots of hawaiian slack tunings and heaps of resonator guitars.

no resonators tonight though. just three guitars, all made by Victoria’s David Churchill. two six-string guitars- the sunburst one seen here has a spruce top and the natural finish guitar below has a cedar top.

the other guitar he brought with him is a lap-steel – a slide guitar designed to be played sitting down with the instrument on the player’s lap. the action (distance between the strings and the neck) is much higher on these than on regular guitars meaning it is impossible for the frets to touch the strings – this is a good thing for playing slide guitar.

from a little table next to him on-stage, jeff takes full control of his sound. in the first two photos above you can see two cables coming out of each guitar. this is because he has two different sources in each guitar – a regular magnetic pickup under the strings in the sound-hole and a neat microphone pickup in the body, called a dynafield. the signal from the pickup goes to the fishman pro EQ platinum pre-amp/DI, the grey box with knobs and faders in the photo below. the dynafield’s signal goes to a rupert neve portico 5032 mic pre-amp sitting to the right of the fishman. you can see it more clearly in the second photo below.  it’s the box on the right with eight red, grey and white knobs. along with jeff and his fingers, these two boxes contribute heavily to making his guitars sound great. to the left of the fishman preamp is a black box and a red box – both with pictures of loved ones. there seems to be very little information on the web about almach, save that it is a boutique amplifier manufacturer in victoria. apparently alen kelly makes great amps and possibly this black box is a preamp of some sort. or it’s something else with one of almach’s stickers on it. the red box looks like some kind of mixing/switching box to make it easier to switch quickly between three multi-input guitars. but i’m not really sure. both boxes look handmade. above the fishman is a great modelling overdrive pedal with stereo output – the digitech eric clapton crossroads. it looks like jeff has it set on model number 2 which means swirly stereo rotator guitar Mmmmm.

at his feet is an awesome piece of gear – the line 6 M13 stompbox modeller. essentially this box contains excellent digital recreations of every effects pedal from history that you could ever want as well as some more invented by the line 6 team. you can use them in a billion different combinations and recall a gazillion different settings with your feet. it also has a 28 second loop sampler. this is the shit. for sure. to its left is an unexcitng boss FV-50L volume pedal.

a lot of this information is  on  jeff’s website which is worth checking out.