Guitar

As you start to practice the guitar, it is important to have a good posture, which can prevent you from injuries and allow you to practice longer. In this article, we’ll talk about how to hold a guitar and a pick. How to Hold a Guitar When you play a guitar sitting down, the waist of the guitar (where you would see a curve) should rest on your thigh—the right thigh if you are right-handed and the left thigh if you are left-handed. Next, the guitar is held by the right arm, with the left hand only for fretting. Of … Read more

The reverb effect pedal is used to mimic natural reverb and to create a sense of depth and space in your guitar tone. Without a reverb effect, your guitar tone can often sound like it’s too up close and “dry,” which sounds unnatural as reverb exists in natural spaces. Reverb, in essence, is the persistence and continuation of a sound after it is produced. That persistence of sound is created by sound waves reflecting off surfaces in a room. The eventual decay of the sound occurs when the sound waves get absorbed by objects in the environment, including things like … Read more

Delay pedals will almost always be on every guitarist’s pedalboard. If you’re looking to create lush soundscapes fitting for worship music, or if you’re looking to recreate the guitar tone of The Edge from U2, a delay pedal, or maybe even multiple delays, will be necessary. Perhaps the coolest characteristic of a delay effect is its ability to create a very full guitar sound with only one guitarist. If you’re unfamiliar with what a delay pedal does, it simply records an incoming signal and replays it several times. Some delay pedals aim to replicate an incoming signal as accurately as … Read more

Before attempting any new tasks, it is important to make sure your tools are working properly. For auto mechanics, car tools in good working order are essential for a successful repair job. For guitarists, a good setup makes the guitar—brand-new or used—easier to play and sound better. For brand-new guitars, many manufacturers ship the guitars with the nut and saddle higher than necessary, allowing later adjustments for different climates. If you are unfamiliar with the names of different parts of the guitar, take a look at this article and video about the anatomy of guitar. For used guitars, it is … Read more

Now that you’ve bought a guitar and been getting ready to start your first lesson. What’s next? If you don’t have proper vocabulary, it would be hard to know where to place your hands or talk to your fellow guitarists about anything. Therefore, one of the first things you need to learn is the names of different parts of the guitar, so you can follow video lessons more easily and accurately. We’ll go over parts that are common to all guitars, parts specific to electric guitars, and finally string numbers and names. If you are interested in learning about terms … Read more

What sound do you imagine when you think about jazz guitar? Smooth mellow tones? Crunchy fusion sounds with copious amounts of effect pedals? Jazz is such an experimental genre that there are too many sounds associated with it to really pinpoint ‘one correct sound.’ So what we will discover in this article is what affects the sound of the guitar and what helps us achieve that jazz sound. The way I approach achieving the guitar tone I want is to think of it like baking a cake. You start with fresh ingredients and combine them until you get the final … Read more

Compression will almost always be used on any instrument, regardless of whether it’s  guitar, bass, vocals, or strings. When it comes to mixing music for mass consumption, a compressor will also always be used on the overall music track to tame the peaks and dips in volume. However, this article will focus more on compression pedals for guitar. When it comes to guitar pedals, I tend to avoid ranking them in a top 10 list, or something akin to that, as guitar pedals are a very subjective topic. Instead, I will provide a list of five commonly used compressor pedals … Read more

Overdrive pedals are often the first guitar pedal that guitarists buy. I remember that my first guitar pedal was a Fulltone Full-Drive2 Overdrive and my second was a Paul Cochrane Timmy Overdrive. I’ve since bought and traded countless other overdrive pedals. You really can’t get enough of them, and I can say pretty confidently that overdrive pedals have the most number of different models on the market compared to the other categories of pedals. With such a large number of models on the market, it’s easy to get confused and overwhelmed when looking to buy your first overdrive pedal. In … Read more