VOTA is dead set and determined to find out.
For this exciting new season of VOTA’s 20 plus year career, VOTA’s lead singer and guitar player, Bryan Olesen, has custom designed new guitars to help make as much sound as possible.
“I had this idea to want to make a guitar that was a bass and a guitar in one instrument. There was nothing out there quite like I wanted so I decided to build one myself.
I had a special pickup installed that is designed to only pick up my low E string. Then I installed a separate output jack on my guitar just for that pickup. I send that pickup to a series of effects that lowers the octave of the E string to give me a pretty sweet bass sound. Then I run the normal guitar jack out for my guitar.
But to really make this work I had to come up with a special tuning of the guitar to maximize the bass and guitar sound at the same time. This required me to relearn all our VOTA songs with this new tuning.
It’s a lot of work but it’s been exciting and inspiring to play and even write new material with this new setup. The only downside is I have a lot more amps I have to set up on stage… but when the amps are roaring it sounds huge so its really not a downside!”