Chalice live in the West End
Chalice's first proper gig will be a lunchtime session at the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, Tuesday 24 November 2026 1-2pm. All proceeds go to the church, which runs a great programme of creative music in the heart of London's West End. It's a beautiful, resonant space that should complement our sound perfectly.
Secure your ticket here! If you can't be there, please share this post (or the link) to anyone who may be interested -- as usual, we are innocent of the dark arts of marketing and rely almost entirely on word of mouth.
I thought readers of this blog might be interested in some discussion about the setup I'll be using, so for the rest of this post I'll break with my usual practice and do -- horror of horrors -- a rig rundown.
The defining constraint of this setup is portability. I have a combo amp stashed away in London but everything else needs to go on a trolley that I'll take on the train, a journey that requires jogging over a bridge with reasonable alacrity. So bear that in mind. Also you'll have to excuse the potato quality of my phone's camera.
We may as well go nose-to-tail, the nose being the affordable Gretsch which I've adopted as my #1 guitar in recent years.
I haven't made any modifications to it; it's fitted with flatwound 10s (Thomastik Infelds) and I only really use the neck pickup because I like to pretend I'm still a jazz cat.
The guitar goes into the board, which is the fun part:
It's still a work in progress -- I promise it will all get tidied up before the gig.
The guitar first goes into a Hudson Broadcast set up so the low gain side is very clean and always on to buffer the signal. The other side is set pretty gainy (with the internal trimpot set not quite all the way up); it doesn't get used a lot but is a great thing to be able to pull out when needed. Despite having more bougie options, the broadcast is still my favourite overdrive and has resisted multiple attempts to oust it from that position.
Next in the chain is the WMD Geiger Counter Pro. This is an absolute indulgence -- on any given gig I might not turn it on at all. But despite its reputation for all-out aggression I love its ability to make the guitar sound fragile and broken, and everything in it has obviously been designed with a very careful ear. At the secret gig I had some CV signals modulating the patches, which is fun but I needed to reclaim the space so that's off the board for now.
(I then go into the tuner, because that's where it fits.)
Next stop is the Strymon Iridium, which does two important things. First, it lets me bypass the amp's front end and go straight into the effect return, which should be kinder on a sound that isn't really a traditional guitar noise. Second, it comes out in stereo. Since I'm playing a mono setup, that means it acts as a signal splitter.
One side of that stereo signal goes straight into the LEEM 4-channel mixer in the middle of the board. The other side goes there too, but takes a detour through the Anyma Phi. This is very new to me but my intention is to use it mostly for resonance-based effects. I'll say a bit more about it in a sec.
The third channel of the mixer comes from that Volca FM at the top. This is a small, lightweight way to lay off the guitar occasionally and add some synth sounds for a bit of variety. I make my own patches in Dexed, load them into the Volca, discover they don't sound right and then tinker with them in the box, although its interface isn't a fun programming experience. I'll be bringing an Erae Touch to play the Volca and also perhaps the Anyma Phi.
We come out of the mixer into the Endorphines Evil Pet, which is amazing for turning assertive playing into gentler, more ambient textures. Because it's on the output side of the mixer I can grab both guitar and synth sounds into the buffer and then scrub around it by hand, which is a great way to play it responsively. Or I can just let it run and create a pad underneath the other things that are going on.
From there to a Prussian Blue reverb (which will probably be turned off, since I expect the church to have more than enough reverb) and out to the amp. The board packs down into a briefcase-sized flight case which, along with the Touch and the guitar, get ratchet-strapped onto a sack truck and that's my portable rig.
A lot about this setup is different from the one I used at our secret gig, although the core of it is pretty much the same. The main change is the addition of the Anyma Phi, which for this I'm hoping to mostly use as a multi-effect covering ring modulation, resonator effects and maybe some delay. It's not the easiest thing to programme but I'm hoping to get some unusual sounds out of it. I might even ditch the Volca if I can get some synth sounds I like, although initial investigation suggests that might be harder than it sounds and I do like my FM patches.
I hope to see you on the 24th -- as I said, please help spread the word if you can, it should be a very atmospheric experience and a change from whatever else you're doing on a Tuesday afternoon.
