Dave Weiner tours with Vai.
And he may not have a choice about amps in his position with Vai.
Actually, I’ve seen interviews where he explains how he chose his amps, and why he’s been playing them for several years; they’re the Friedman BE100s. Claims they’re the perfect amps for him. It’s very clear that his amp choices were not dictated to him.
He’s his own man. Incidentally, Vai doesn’t play Friedman amps.
It’s kind of odd; you see Tim Pierce’s picture on the Kemper site, but when he very honestly says he doesn’t use them - in a web video, no less - unless a film or TV composer wants him to,
because it doesn’t sound as good, that seems to not matter.
You see with your own eyeballs that several of the players whose pictures are also on Kemper’s artist page on their site,
are not using these things on their own or other important sessions/gigs.
But despite this evidence, folks would rather look at some picture on a website of a guy hugging a modeling amp and believe that the player now uses a Kemper instead of a tube amp. They can
see it isn’t being used in the studio, or onstage, or wherever the artist’s main gig happens to be. I guess reality doesn’t sway people.
Fact is, gear companies give stuff to artists to help promote their product, or offer it at very deep discounts, even if it’s not a formal endorsement. It happens
all the time. And the artists will in turn help the company out by allowing their picture to be used on a website to promote the product. It’s only fair. And they’ll sign a piece of paper that allows the company to use their likeness in their promotional materials.
Any tool is nice to have, especially if it’s free, and there are possible uses for it. But in the main, artists put their own money into what they really believe in, which leads me to...Cartage.
The amps are a dime a dozen compared to the costs of shlepping them around the country, unloading, setting up, tearing down, and moving to the next venue.
Cartage is a very big deal. A tour like Vai’s involves a lot of shipping and cartage. He’s not drawing arena crowds, but the expense of traveling and cartage is the same. There are big truck rentals, roadies, freight costs, etc., just for the amps, that can amount to $50,000 - $100,000 for decent US tours. And these folks all have to be put up at hotels, and fed, and given a per diem on top of cartage costs.
That’s a real number, I didn’t make it up. It’s a lot of money to blow if you have a smaller, lighter, perfect alternative that will save money, and you can get by with a smaller road crew, etc.
Why would any artist want to spend that if having real amps on stage didn’t matter? If they could hand a cable to the sound guy and save 3/4 of that expense? You wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it, and most folks would say, “Take the fXcking Kemper.” But. They. Don’t.
Go figure.
