Canadian Music Trade - December/January 2019 | Page 46

ENDORSER UPDATE
Regarded as one of the best guitarists in the jazz fusion and world
music genres, Al Di Meola has joined the Hughes & Kettner artist
roster, choosing the Era 1 acoustic amplifier for live shows. A prolific
composer, Di Meola has amassed over 20 albums as a leader while
collaborating on a dozen or so others with the likes of Return to
Forever, the celebrated acoustic guitar trio featuring fellow virtuosos
John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia, and The Rite of Strings trio with
bassist Stanley Clarke and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.
“I need an acoustic amplifier I can trust to completely and accu-
rately reproduce my pure acoustic tone on stage night after night.
As soon as I played the Hughes & Kettner Era 1, I knew I’d found my
match,” says Di Meola.
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CANADIAN MUSIC TRADE
RICHARD FORTUS & SLM PRES. MARK RAGIN
Alvarez Guitars has welcomed Guns N’ Roses member Richard Fortus
to its roster of artist endorsees. Fortus has been a member of Guns N’
Roses since 2002 and also has deep ties to St. Louis Music. His father
was a member of the early management team at SLM and Alvarez Brand
Manager J. Hayes was Fortus’ first guitar teacher.
“I remember coming into the SLM in Ferguson and playing Yairi
guitars in the office when I was young,” says Fortus. “I’ve been collecting
Yairi for many years, and when J. Hayes invited me to come in and try the
new Honduran Series, I was really impressed with the unique voice and
character. I’m really excited to take it on the road.”
Producer and
Canadian Music Hall
of Famer Bob Rock
is a lifelong user of
Celestion guitar
speakers and has
recently begun using
the Celestion Impulse
Responses – the dig-
itally downloadable
versions of classic Ce-
lestion tones meant
for use in modern
profiling amps, mod-
eling software, and
convolution-process-
ing audio plug-ins.
“For most guitar
sounds, whether it’s
been for James Het-
field of Metallica or
Mick Mars of Mötley
Crüe, the drivers in the amps have been Celestion,” says Rock. “I first heard
about the Celestion IRs through my friend Alexander Dumble, who
makes the boutique Dumble amplifiers. I then learned more about them
from Rick Skillman at Celestion, and loaded all the IRs into my Kemper
Profiler amp. I have go-to sounds, and with the Impulse Responses, I
always find something that makes it more real.”
Keyboardist Michael
Whittaker, previously
part of the Jimmy
Kimmel Live! band
and staff composer
for Fox Television,
recently moved from
L.A. to Nashville and
is now balancing
studio sessions with
live performances
with his jazz/funk
group, The Bottom 40,
plus other projects.
Working in so many
diverse situations, Whittaker is now using Deskew Technologies’ Gig
Performer software.
“When I tried it, I was very pleasantly surprised at how efficient
it was. I was using Gig Performer to enable and disable pretty hefty
sounds in my laptop with the push of a button on my keyboard
controller, and using just two keyboards to control VIs that would
crash the computer with other software,” he says. “I’m running
Spectrasonics’ Keyscape and Omnisphere, and the East West
Hollywood String Library. There’s no way I would have gotten away
with that using the software I had before because it would push
the CPU level way too high and simply not be reliable.”