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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Learn the secrets to achieving your ultimate sound Whether amateur or pro, guitarists live for the ultimate sound. Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies provides the information and instruction you need to discover that sound and make it your own! Written in the characteristically easy-to-read Dummies style, this book is ideal for beginners and experienced musicians alike, and can help all players expand their skill set with effects. Guitarists tend to be gearheads when it comes to sound, and this book provides guidance on topics ranging from the guitar itself to amps, pedals, and other sound technology. Amps and effects are the unsung heroes of guitar music. While most people recognize the more psychedelic effects, many don't realize that effects are often responsible for the unique quality of tone that can become a musician's trademark. Certain effects work on the volume or signal level, others work on the environment, and still others work on the bass and treble content. Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies covers them all, and shows how effects can not only add something extra, but also "fix" problematic areas. Topics include: * Gain-based effects, like distortion, compression, volume pedals, and gates * Tone-based effects, including graphic and parametric EQ, and the wah-wah pedal * Modulation effects, like the flanger, phase shifter, and tremolo * Ambience effects, including reverb and delay The journey to incredible guitar music never ends. No matter how experienced you are with a guitar, there is always room for improvement to your tone and sound. Whether you're looking for the sound of angels or thunder, Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies will help you achieve the music you hear in your dreams.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935506
ISBN 978-1-118-89999-1 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-90000-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-90001-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies
Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/guitaramps to view this book's cheat sheet.
Table of Contents
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I: Getting Started with Guitar Amps & Effects
Chapter 1: The Concept of Tone for Creative Guitarists
The Sound Chain: Your Sonic Team
From Classic Tones to Total Originality
It All Begins with Your Guitar
Variations in guitar designs
Pickups and electronics
Hardware
Amps: Your Tone Machines!
Inside guitar amps
The right amp for the job
Tu-be or not tu-be
Speakers and cabinets
Amp use and maintenance
Effects Pedals: Shift It, Spin It, and Fuzz It Up
Different effects types
Rack and stand-alone effects
Using effects
Chapter 2: Making Your Signal Chain Work for You
Chain of Tools: What the Signal Chain Is
How It All Works Together
Understanding the Building Blocks of the Signal Chain
Electric guitar
Effects pedals
Guitar amp
Gathering Accessories: Every Ingredient Matters
Strings
Cables
Guitar picks
Chapter 3: Aural Delights: Variety in Tone
Classic Tones: Sonic Variety in Legendary Recordings
Spicing Up Your Music with Tonal Variety
Achieving variety in your sound
Sounding like yourself
Gathering the Right Tools for the Job
The Swiss Army knife rig
The beauty of simplicity
There’s no one best anything
Part II: Grab a Guitar: It’s Your Signal Generator
Chapter 4: Understanding the Major Electric Guitar Designs
Finding Your Way around a Guitar
Tracking the Evolution of Electric Guitar Designs
How the electric guitar changed the world
Why the classic designs still work for you today . . . or not
Examining Solidbody Electric Guitars
From rock to twang with solidbodies
Bolt-neck solidbodies
Set-neck solidbodies
Through-neck solidbodies
Working with Semi-Acoustic Electric Guitars
Get bluesy — with surprising versatility
The ES-335 template and solid-core semis
The hidden charms of chambered guitars
Thinline hollowbody electrics
Looking at Hollowbody Electric Guitars
Start choppin’ and boppin’: The jazz box
The carved-top archtop
Laminated archtops
Shaping Your Sound with Different Woods
Classic tones from classic body woods
Some newer and alternative tonewoods
Neck and fingerboard woods
Chapter 5: Guitar Pickups and Electronics
Getting to Know Pickups
An invisible power
Truly electric tone
The Parts of the Pickup
Bobbin
Coil
Magnets
Pole pieces
Cover and base plate
The Major Pickup Types and Their Sounds
Single-coil pickups
Humbucking pickups
Active pickups
Alternative modern pickup designs
Selecting Your Pickups to Suit Your Sound
Buying a guitar with the right pickups
Modifying and upgrading your existing pickups
Working with Controls and Switches
Standard control layouts
Modified control layouts
Coil split, phase, and series-parallel switching
Advice on modifying your guitar’s existing controls
Chapter 6: Guitar Hardware
A Quick Overview
Working with Standard Bridges and Tailpieces
The floating bridge with trapeze tailpiece
Strings-through-body Telecaster bridge
The wraparound bridge
The tune-o-matic bridge and stopbar tailpiece
Other popular bridges
Vibing with Vibrato Units
Bigsby vibrato
Fender Stratocaster vibrato
Other assorted vibratos
Turning the Tuners
Touching Strings to Wood: Nuts and Frets
Nuts
Frets
Upgrading and Modifying Your Hardware
Digging into Guitar Finishes: Pure Tone and Pretty Looks
Chapter 7: Caring for Your Guitar
Keeping It Clean and Sounding Mean
Fighting grime on a regular basis
Deep-cleaning fingerboards for smooth playing
Cleaning and protecting pickups and electronics
Exploring the Setup
Gathering the tools for DIY guitar setups
Checking neck relief
Adjusting your truss rod
Perfecting your action
Measuring and setting intonation
Adjusting pickup height
Knowing when to take it to a pro
Part III: The Amplifier: More Than Just Loud
Chapter 8: Looking Inside the Major Amp Designs
Understanding How Circuit Stages Shape Tube Tone
Plugging into preamp stages
Tapping into tone-shaping stages
Investigating output stages
Probing power supply stages
Groundbreaking Vintage Tube Amps
Classic Fender models
Vox and the “Class-A” sound
Mighty Marshall rock machines
Getting the most from vintage-style amps
Rocking with Modern Tube-Amp Designs
Thank goodness for gain!
The master-volume control
High-gain rock amps
Channel switching
Effects loops
Getting the most from multifeatured amps
Investigating Solid-State Amplifiers
Traditional analog transistor amps
Digital modeling amps
Chapter 9: Choosing the Right Amp for You and Your Music
Understanding How Size Matters
Hitting the sweet spot
Matching power to venue
Moving from Clean, to Crunch, to All-Out Mayhem
Maximizing clean tones and headroom
Achieving great cleans — thanks to tube distortion
Investigating high-gain amps
Digging distortion characteristics
Going fast and punchy or slow and smooth
Deciding on Amp Features
The beauty and benefits of simplicity
Do-it-all amps and their many uses
Shopping Trip: Confidently Hunting the Perfect Amp
Bringing Down the Noise: Cranking It . . . Quietly!
Output attenuators
Voltage-reduction circuits
Isolation cabs and other sound-reduction options
Chapter 10: Understanding Tube Types and Tone
Identifying Basic Tube Categories
Tweaking Your Tone with Preamp Tubes
The 12AX7 and other twin triodes
Pentode preamp tubes
Interesting alternative preamp tubes
Cranking It Up with Output Tubes
Classic American output tubes
Classic British output tubes
Interesting alternative output tubes
You’ve Got the Power: Rectifier Tubes
Finding and Buying Tubes
Testing and matching tubes
Deciding between modern or NOS (vintage) tubes
Changing Your Tubes
Chapter 11: Going from Amp to Ears: Speakers and Cabs
Investigating Speaker Types
Vintage and low-powered speakers
Speaker distortion
Modern and high-powered speakers
Ceramic versus alnico speakers
Using Speaker Size and Efficiency to Suit Your Style
Significance of speaker size
Significance of speaker efficiency
Solidifying Your Tone with Speaker Cabs
The sound of open, closed, and ported cabs
Impact of construction and materials on tone
Single and multiple speakers in a cab
Speaker cabinet wiring and impedance
Chapter 12: Tips, Tricks, and Basic Amp Maintenance
Amp Setup and Use
Turn it on!
Setting controls on vintage-style amps
Setting controls on amps with master volumes
Configuring multichannel lead/rhythm amp settings
Using effects with your amp
Basic Amplifier Maintenance
Replacing tubes
Keeping tubes happy
Performing basic care and cleaning
Replacing speakers
Troubleshooting
Doing some basic user checks
Identifying a bad tube
Deciding When to Take It to a Tech
Signs of major problems
Some common little and big jobs
Part IV: Effects Pedals: Fuzz, Filth, Wobble, and Echo
Chapter 13: Discovering the Major Types of Effects
Getting to Know the Effects Pedal
Using Gain-Based Effects Pedals
Compression
Boost
Overdrive
Fuzz
Distortion
Creating Mood with Modulation-Based Effects Pedals
Tremolo and vibrato
Rotary speaker and vibe
Phasing
Flanging
Chorus
Working with EQ, Filters, and Wah-Wahs
Wah-wah pedals
Envelope filters and auto-wahs
Octave effects
Ring modulators
Graphic EQ
Adding Atmosphere with Delay Effects
Reverb
Analog echo
Digital delay
Exploring and Using Vintage Effects
Early electromechanical effects
Onboard amp effects
The solid-state pedal revolution and evolution
Chapter 14: Rack Units, Stand-Alones, and Multi-Effects
Using Analog Stand-Alone Effects Units
Spring reverb
Tape delay
Rotary speakers
Exploring Rack-Mounted Effects
The digital revolution
Single- versus multi-effects units
Enjoying Many Features with Multi-Effects Floor Units
Chapter 15: Setting Up and Using Your Effects
Putting Your Pedals in Place
Conventional pedal sequence for simple setups
Pedal sequence for more-complex setups
Some creative alternatives
Out in front or in the loop?
Setting Up Your Pedalboard
Prebuilt pedalboard products
Planning and setting up your pedalboard
Pedal power: Adaptors versus batteries
Preserving Your Tone
True bypass versus buffered effects
Cables and your tone
Using Multi-Amp Effects Setups
The stereo rig
The wet/dry rig
Part V: The Part of Tens
Chapter 16: Ten Classic Rigs
Jazz Incarnate: Wes Montgomery
Classic Rock’n’Roll: Eddie Cochran
Early Blues: Hubert Sumlin
Surf Guitar: Dick Dale
’60s Blues-Rock: Eric Clapton
Late ’60s Heavy Rock: Jimi Hendrix
Contemporary Blues: Stevie Ray Vaughan
New Country: Brad Paisley
Contemporary Alternative: Jack White
Heavy Metal: Dimebag Darrell
Chapter 17: Ten Iconic Tone Recordings
Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”
Kenny Burrell, “Midnight Blue”
Albert King, “Born Under a Bad Sign”
The Beatles, “I Saw Her Standing There”
Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, “Act Naturally”
Van Halen, “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love”
AC/DC, “Highway to Hell”
Neil Young, “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) (Live)”
Metallica, “Master of Puppets”
Dinosaur Jr., “Start Choppin’”
About the Author
Cheat Sheet
Guide
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Introduction
You’re a guitarist, right? So your first priority should always be to play the guitar. Next in line, though, are achieving a great sound while doing so and understanding how to get a variety of sounds that are appropriate to the style of music you play. This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s no lie: The better you sound, the easier playing your guitar becomes — and ultimately, the easier it is to just forget all the distractions and make music. And the more you unlock sounds that express your creativity as a musician, the easier you’ll find it to make rewarding music.
Guitarists, embrace the necessities of your craft, and dive in here to begin a thorough grounding in all the knobs, switches, circuits, woods, wires, and other technicalities that otherwise hold your precious guitar tone at their mercy. With just a little thought and effort, you can become a fully informed participant in the sounds you create, and that will result in sounding distinctively and consistently like you. And that, in turn, will not only make you a happier player but also be far more likely to get you noticed, too. Have fun!
About This Book
The trick to achieving the great, expressive, and distinctive tone that every guitarist seeks is that you have to scale a veritable obstacle course of technical gear to do so. No problem; Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies is your road map to that potentially baffling journey, providing all the shortcuts, rest stops and off-the-beaten-path attractions you need to walk the walk and talk the talk like a long-time gearhead.
This book is broken down into the three main categories that comprise your rig: the electric guitar, guitar amps, and effects pedals and units. These all work together to create your sound, so if you feel you’ve got more of a handle on one than the other, dive right in where you need. Each part, and even each chapter within each part, is totally independent of the others and unveils a wealth of information on its specific subject. I like to think you can benefit from the accumulation of advice and techniques that comes from reading several sections one after the other, but those don’t have to be approached in the order in which they are printed here. You can definitely dive into just one chapter today and come out the other end of it with a thorough grounding of, for example, guitar pickups and electronics or the amplifier.
Even if you don’t yet have an effects pedal or an amp — or even an electric guitar! — each part explores the wealth and variety of each part of the overall rig in the kind of detail that arms you for your shopping trip. Peruse the appropriate chapters, and you’ll emerge with fixed and informed ideas of what you’re likely to need to play your own preferred genre of music. Although the makes and models evolve pretty quickly and often can’t be detailed successfully in any book with a long shelf life, the features and applications of the most prominent (and plenty of more unusual) designs are thoroughly covered here. As such, Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies makes a great buyer’s guide, but that isn’t even my primary intention with this book. Instead, I aim first and foremost to help you explore how to use this equipment to make music and how to bend it to a wide and infinitely variable array of tones. So jump in where you like, get your hands dirty, and employ your newfound abilities at tone-crafting in the worthy venture of making beautiful music!
Foolish Assumptions
First and foremost, I wrote this book with the assumption that you are seeking to better understand the functions and applications of all parts of your guitar-effects-amp setup, with the goal of playing more expressively and making better music.
I never at any point while writing this book assumed that you, the worthy reader, are foolish! That said, the gear guitarists use to make music can often be dauntingly technical stuff, and I have worked with and spoken to many, many successful professional players who still only have a basic grasp of how their rigs function — and would love to know more, if only they had time. With that in mind, I assumed throughout the writing of Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies that you were a guitarist who liked the idea of better understanding how to create different sounds — both classic and original — using what gear you have on hand, and also that you might like some exploration of what else is out there, if what you already own proves to be not quite right for you.
Although I have tried throughout this book to find a way into each and every topic that will be suitable for the raw beginner (hey, we were all there once), I haven’t assumed that every reader wants to cover ground he or she already knows. To that end, each part, chapter, and section should be thoroughly dip-innable, if you will: Skip sections that smack of something you already know, and jump in where you feel you’ve got the most to explore. If you feel you don’t have the first clue about how any of this stuff works, however, rest assured that you can read Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies from cover to cover and come out being significantly better equipped to use your gear more creatively than the average guitarist is. Hopefully you will find yourself well entertained along the way, too.
Icons Used in This Book
In the margins of Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies (as in all For Dummies books), you find icons to help you maneuver through the text. Here’s what the icons mean:
This icon points out expert advice to help you better understand how to use your equipment.
Be careful! This icon helps you avoid doing damage to your gear or yourself.
Brace yourself for some technical facts and information that may come in handy some day. If you want, you can skip over this stuff — and still not miss a beat.
Certain techniques are worth remembering. Take note of the information that’s highlighted by this icon.
Beyond the Book
This book provides a solid foundation for learning to get the most from your electric guitar, but you can find many more resources on Dummies.com:
You can download the book’s Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/guitaramp. It’s a handy resource to keep on your computer, tablet, or smartphone.You can read interesting companion articles that supplement the book’s content at www.dummies.com/extras/guitaramps. I’ve even included an extra top-ten list.Where to Go from Here
As with all For Dummies books, you can start at the first page of Chapter 1, or dive in anywhere the subject header grabs your attention. From there, you can move forward or backward as you like, skipping around or proceeding in sequence, and get everything you need from what’s in store here.
The obvious way to get your feet wet, if you don’t plan to read in sequence from cover to cover, is to select the part that covers the subject you feel you need to explore most urgently — Part II: the guitar, Part III: the amp, Part IV: effects — and soak that up. Then dig into other sections that probe subjects you feel you know pretty well, and very likely you’ll discover some new tips and techniques (or so I hope). If you’re really not sure what you hope to get from this book but know you could use some time coming to grips with your gear, start the old-fashioned way: Chapter 1 gives bite-sized overviews of just about everything else in the book, providing you with jumping-off points for the information deep dive contained farther along through these pages.
Part I
Getting Started with Guitar Amps & Effects
Visit www.dummies.com for more great Dummies content online.
In this part …
Examine the concept of great tone from a guitarist’s perspective.Discover the guitars, amps, and effects that work together to achieve different sounds.Explore classic tones that have become building blocks for original playing and find out how to achieve variety in your own sounds.Chapter 1
The Concept of Tone for Creative Guitarists
In This Chapter
Exploring the art and science of great tone
Crafting your sound as a creative force
Diving into the workings of guitars, amps, and effects
When guitarists talk about tone, they don’t just mean the balance of bass, midrange, and treble frequencies that an amp’s tone knobs give you access to, or, that is, the general timbre of your sound. They’re referring to the quality of a guitar sound comprised by its depth, richness, texture, and harmonic-overtone content. In short, a player’s tone is the quality and character of his or her instrument’s voice, as projected via any effects and amplifier(s) in use — which themselves are very much a part of electric guitar tone.
Tone is the most-discussed concept in the guitar world today, yet every guitarist out there has a slightly different notion of what great tone really is. And perhaps that’s as it should be: Like anything experienced through your senses, the subject is, to some extent, subjective — we all hear things differently and want to hear different things in our playing. Yet there are also, I firmly believe, some objective standards of quality tone. Although any number of different great tones exist, each should exhibit superb depth, dimension, and harmonic content — its sweetness or richness — even if the end results have very different sonic personalities.
The concept of tone is so fervently discussed because it’s very hard to get a grasp on, and for most guitarists, it is constantly evolving, constantly improving, or is at least part of a never-ending quest for improvement.
This is where Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies comes in. This book lives to talk tone and to help you narrow down the many great yet extremely different tones that can be achieved with different types of guitars, amplifiers, and effects pedals. You can peruse the rest of this chapter for an overview of what I discuss in detail throughout the rest of this book, or jump in where you see fit for the information deep-dive that gets you into the nitty gritty.
The Sound Chain: Your Sonic Team
When you play an electric guitar, your sound is never just about that guitar; it’s an amalgam of everything else that contributes to the sound. In that sense, although your hands manipulate the guitar itself to make music, that first piece of the chain isn’t really an instrument all on its own. The full instrument includes your amp and any effects pedals or units you use to further manipulate your sound. Each piece of gear you use together to make music, therefore, is part of a sound chain.
The elements in the sound chain aren’t just individual components; they all work together and affect each other’s performance. To understand how any one change in your setup will affect your overall tone, you need to be familiar with each piece of the sound chain, which is one of the major goals of this book. For now, just know that every type of guitar affects the sound of effects pedals differently, and both guitars’ and effects pedals’ tones vary depending on the type of amplifier used.
In other words, this whole sound-chain thing is a game of infinite variables. You’re only going to get a handle on what the end results will be — as opposed to shooting for random sounds every time — by understanding both the individual stages and how they interact with each other.
If you’re fairly new to the concept of working with amps and effects to get the sounds you’re looking for, this all may sound fairly confusing at first, but each section of this book breaks down this reality of the electric guitar into essential and easily digested pieces, so you’ll get the hang of this kind of thinking pretty quickly. Open your mind to the big picture right from the start, and you’ll find it a lot easier to take in the theory of interplay and interactivity between not only guitars, effects, and amps but also between the smaller interdependent components of each of these individual pieces of equipment.
From Classic Tones to Total Originality
Some guitarists — like artists in any field, really — jump right in and find both original sounds and original ways of playing when they are still virtually beginners on the instrument. Many others work their way toward originality by chasing the sounds of notable guitar stars. Some of them never achieve anything you’d call particularly original in their own sound, but that’s absolutely fine too. Whatever works for your own music, and whatever makes you happy with your own playing is absolutely okay, and you can’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
Whatever types of sounds you ultimately make your own, exploring the sounds of many classic and contemporary artists as well as the gear that helped them achieve them is a great way to expand your own tone palette. When you hear a song you like, give some specific thought to the guitar tone and then see if you can identify what was used to create it. Plenty of the acknowledged classics (along with some fun alternatives) are dissected throughout the course of this book. I also provide a lot of info online to help you get to the bottom of what’s behind different hit-making guitar tones. After you peruse several of these setups, a light bulb often pops on upstairs: “Ah, combing the Fender Telecaster with the Vox AC30 sounds like this, but adding the fuzz pedal and playing it through the Marshall stack sounds like that!” It’s a process of discovery, and the more variety you throw into the mix, the more flexible and creative you’re likely to be in your own tone crafting.
It All Begins with Your Guitar
Whatever kind of sound you’re after, it all starts with your guitar. Make no mistake, an electric guitar can’t make any sound without the rest of your equipment, other than a thin, soft jangle. But when you plug it into an amp (and any effects you use in between), it feeds a signal to the truly electric parts of your rig, and that signal determines the fundamental nature of the sound that comes out the other end, however much it’s shaped along the way.
The signal that your guitar sends farther up the chain is determined by what goes into making that guitar in the first place — as well as, of course, how you play it. But the woods, hardware, electronics, and even the strings you use play an enormous role in shaping the little low-voltage electrical signal that comes out of your guitar and goes into everything else down the line, and the shape of that signal determines the core of your tone.
In addition to what goes into your guitar, its condition, setup, and action (its playing feel, determined by the height of the strings from the frets) have a huge impact on its feel and tone. These details are covered in detail in Chapter 7, where you can explore plenty of DIY care and maintenance issues.
Variations in guitar designs
The sound of any electric guitar is established largely by the fundamentals of its design and construction and the ingredients that go into making it. The following blueprint elements determine the tonal ballpark of the instrument, which is only tweaked or enhanced — but not drastically altered — by whatever else goes into it:
Body style: Solid, semisolid (that is, semi-acoustic), and entirely hollow electric guitars all have different personalities.Scale length: Guitars of different scale lengths (the length of the part of the string that vibrates when you play) have somewhat different characters.Neck attachment: Guitars that have necks attached with wood screws sound somewhat different from those with glued-in necks, all else being equal (not better or worse, just different).In addition to these basics, the woods used to construct a guitar’s body, neck, and fingerboard all play an important part in shaping its sound. A lot of detail is required to cover this topic, and I address it in-depth in Chapter 4, but the density, weight, rigidity, grain, vibrational characteristics, and other factors all play a part.
Pickups and electronics
Your guitar generates the fundamental sonic characteristics of every note you play, but the pickups are the part that makes it electric. Pickups are simple, passive electromagnetic devices, motion sensors essentially (in the early days, many guitar makers even called them mics). They consist of magnets and coils of wire, which produce a low-voltage electrical signal when the movement of a steel string interrupts their magnetic field.
There are many, many different types and makes of pickups out there — the field is huge and really has been booming lately — and different types of pickups offer their own very different sonic personalities on top of the fundamentals generated by the guitar’s body design and woods. A simple change in pickups can make a guitar sound brighter, darker, deeper, bigger, hotter, and all sorts of other things. I cover all the possibilities in detail in Chapter 5, but just keep in mind for now that your electric guitar tone options expand exponentially depending on the pickups you put into it.
Hardware
By hardware I mean the metal components that are attached to your guitar, most of which play some part or other in keeping the strings anchored and keeping them in tune.
Different types of hardware — most notably, guitars’ bridges, tailpieces, and tuners — clearly have an impact on the functionality of the guitar in question: how you tune it up, how you adjust its playing feel, and so forth. Because they are the contact points for the strings, and that’s where your sound originates, these components also greatly affect the sound of your guitar. Different designs of bridges, for example, and those made from different materials (such as steel or wood) contribute to very different-sounding guitars.
There’s a whole big, wonderful world of guitar hardware and components out there that you may not have considered previously but which needs to be accounted for if you want to dial in your tone. Well, Chapter 6 accounts for it in all the detail you need, so dive in there if you want to get to grips with electric guitar hardware.
Amps: Your Tone Machines!
A guitar amp, by definition, is there to make your guitar louder — to amplify it — but the part that these units play in your sound is far greater than one of simply making your instrument audible.
Since the first jazz or blues guitarist in the 1930s turned a tube amp up a little past the point where it sounded entirely clean and undistorted, players have realized that amps are as much about generating tone and texture as they are about making guitars louder. Guitar amps, and tube amps in particular (but also solid-state and digital amps that emulate the way tube amps perform), add lots of depth, dimension, and harmonic overtones to each note you play on the guitar, making it a much bigger, richer sounding instrument in the process.
Or, guitar amps should do this, at least — when they are right for the job and set up correctly. That’s where Part III of this book comes in: Probe the information and advice there to learn how to make the most of your amp, how to set it for the best sounds for your music, and how to make your guitar sound better and more expressive as a result.
Inside guitar amps
You don’t need to be an electrical engineer to achieve great guitar tone, but understanding a little something about what makes different types of amps sound the way they do helps you to identify the best amp for your music as well as use that amp to its full potential.
A guitar amp is far more than just a black box that takes your guitar signal in one end and coughs some sound out the other. Any amp contains several internal circuit stages that work together to shape your tone as it moves from input to output. Chapter 8 gives you a detailed look under the hood of many classic amp designs to show you how these stages — preamp, tone, output, and power supply — craft different sounds that are ideal for a wide range of music styles.
Many new amps are still built following templates that were established in the 1950s and ’60s, and plenty of old amps are still running strong and making great music, so an exploration of all the groundbreaking vintage tube designs is essential to any understanding of the guitar-amp world. Chapter 8 gives you this, too, as well as information on the ins and outs of contemporary amp designs.
The right amp for the job
With all the very different amps you’ll find out there, finding the perfect one for your music can be a veritable minefield. Chapter 9 is designed to cut through precisely this confusion by investigating the several factors you need to consider to identify the right amp for the job.
Major considerations include:
Finding an amp that hits the sweet spot — that is, the ideal ratio of clean to distorted tone — for your type of music and playing.Realistically assessing how much power (that is, potential volume) you need for your playing situation and understanding how much is too much.Assessing the optimum feature set for your playing, considering multichannel amps, different tone control options, overdrive and sound-shaping controls, and extra features. Do you need it all, or is simplicity better for your music making?In short, you can make great music with any amp if you play it with attitude and conviction, so using a design that is theoretically wrong for your genre shouldn’t stop you from getting on with it. But finding an amp that really works with you rather than against you can make playing feel a whole lot easier and more expressive.
Tu-be or not tu-be
A tube amp is one that uses vacuum tubes to make a guitar single stronger, in several stages that ultimately make it powerful enough to drive a speaker. In the good old days, tubes were used in everything from TVs to radios, but they largely fell out of favor in consumer electronics when solid-state (transistorized) technology took over in the late 1960s. Tube amps still rule the roost, tone-wise, for the vast majority of guitarists, although more and more players are also enjoying the vast improvements that have been made in solid-state and digital modeling amps in recent years.
Understanding something about how different types of tubes function and how they sound helps you be a more tone-conscious guitarist. Many tubes are somewhat specialized in their applications, and to some extent at least, several classic guitar tones are based around a very specific type of tube that was or is used in a specific amp design. These issues and more are covered in Chapter 10.
Tubes are replaceable parts, and some of them do weaken or burn out entirely with time, so knowing something about what to look for and how to replace them will make your playing life easier.
Speakers and cabinets
Because they carry your guitar sound from the amp to you and your listeners’ ears, speakers and the cabinets that they come in (cabs for short) are another essential part of any electric guitar setup.
Much like amps, speakers do more than simply project the sound of your guitar. Many add distinctive characteristics to your tone, and they’re often specialized for a great variety of performances and sounds. Different speaker considerations include
Vintage or modern designs: These often vary from softer and warmer to brighter and punchier, respectively.Low and high power-handling capabilities: More powerful amps need speakers that can handle the punishment, but lower-wattage amps sometimes sound better through speakers that aren’t expecting all the bluster.Low and high efficiency speakers: Different speaker designs convert your amp’s output into decibels (volume) at different rates of efficiency. A high-efficiency speaker can make a seemingly underpowered amp a lot louder, or a low-efficiency speaker can tame and amp that’s too loud.If you’ve never given much thought to your speakers, Chapter 11 opens up a wide world of variables to help you further perfect your tone. And even if you already know a bit about speakers, it’s packed with information and advice that are indispensable to most guitarists.
Amp use and maintenance
Even when they are simple designs with relatively few controls, many guitar amps can provide a broad range of different sounds with fine-tuning of the knobs. As for others with control panels that look like the flight deck of the Star Trek Enterprise, well, they definitely need some study to get the most from.
Tips and techniques for using your amp are covered in detail in Chapter 12, from simple starting point control settings, to more involved tone-crafting, to the use of effects and special features with your amp.
Guitar amps are sensitive electronic devices running on high voltages, so most do occasionally need to be serviced by a qualified technician. You can do a lot yourself, however, to keep your amp working as it should, and Chapter 12 gets you there. After you have uncovered the best control settings for you music and developed the ability to keep your amp in top running condition, you’ll be better equipped to put the fiddling and tweaking behind you and to just make some music.
Effects Pedals: Shift It, Spin It, and Fuzz It Up
Effects pedals really are the icing on the cake, sonically speaking, for many guitar sounds. Although you can achieve great clean and juicy natural distortion tones with a guitar straight into an amplifier, effects pedals — connected between guitar and amp, in most cases — can add a phenomenal world of sounds to your, uh, sound.
Different effects types
Whether you use just a pedal or two or string together as many as a dozen different effects, these units can be extremely powerful and versatile sound-crafting tools. Some of the sound effects achieved with these nifty boxes are
Delay, also known as echo: This effect is pretty self-explanatory. It has a great, atmospheric effect with guitar.Chorus, phasing, and flanging: These swirly sounds, from subtle to space aged, can make you sound like an entire chorus of guitars playing together, or the attack of some alien life force, depending how you use them.Tremolo: This effect is a cool retro pulse-pulse-pulse of the volume that creates several evocative moods.Wah-wah: From funk to psychedelic rock, this expressive, vocal-sounding effect has been a favorite since the ’60s.And yes, overdrive, fuzz, and distortion: These give the sound of a cranked amp, in a small foot pedal, to fatten up lead and rhythm tones alike.Explore what these and other pedals can do for you in Chapter 13.
Rack and stand-alone effects
Many effects come as larger units that are either mounted in a standard-sized rack or simply set on the floor or desk or table top. Many of the earliest effects were built this way, and some that require more involved circuitry and/or more powerful processing still require this format. Most common among these are
Spring reverb: The large “spring pan” that creates the atmospheric reverb effect, and the tubes that are often use to drive it, require a larger enclosure than would work for a foot pedal (or, as is often the case, you find this effect mounted right in your amp).Tape echo: The original echo effect, produced by a tape loop continually running past record and play heads, is still a favorite with many players, but it demands a big box.Complex digital multi-effects: Some budget units are compacted down into floor-standing foot pedals, but many of the top multi-effects units require a rack-mounted enclosure.In Chapter 14, you can not only investigate many variations on these rack-mounted and stand-alone devices but also uncover bounteous information on how to best use them in your setup.
Using effects
Effects pedals and stand-alone units offer endless configurations for use and connectability, and an exponential number of sonic variations along with that. Chapter 15 explores myriad ways to set up and use these devices to expand your music making.
Beyond just “plug and go,” these pedals can often be used in either mono or stereo, split off into separate amps from your main amp, or configured in several alternative ways. In addition, because they interact with each other just as the rest of your sound chain does, you can achieve different sounds by putting one effect before another than you do by connecting them vice versa. Chapter 15, therefore, also explores many permutations of both traditional and alternative pedal set-up orders.
Many guitarists like to mount their effects pedals together on a pedalboard for convenience of transport and setup, and I provide info on these handy devices, too.
Chapter 2
Making Your Signal Chain Work for You
In This Chapter
Exploring the signal chain
Discovering how all parts of the chain work together
Investigating the interdependency of guitar, effects, and amp
Considering the significance of accessories
Every player with even a modicum of experience learns pretty quickly that his or her electric guitar sound is comprised of far more than just an electric guitar. Even when you’re just plugging a guitar straight into a simple amplifier (or amp for short), several factors are at play. In more complicated setups, the number of ingredients that contribute to creating your precious tone can be vast and truly mindboggling.
In this chapter, I unboggle your mind by laying out the building blocks that, when chained together, work hand in hand to make the sound of your music. When you understand the influence of each little step along the way, you can craft a sound that best suits your style — one that most fluently translates your creative expression. In short, you’ll be a better and happier guitarist.
Chain of Tools: What the Signal Chain Is
Your signal chain is the sequence of elements that work together to get the electrical signal that carries your guitar sound from its starting point to its end point. It can also be referred to as a sound chain, because its sole end is to make a sound. The starting point is your guitar pick’s or your fingers’ contact with the guitar string to play a note, and the end point is the speaker from which the amplified sound of that note eventually emanates.
Although you may think of your sound happening instantaneously, exploding from your amp when you hit the guitar strings, it really is the culmination of an electrical signal that travels along a path and which is influenced by many factors along the way (see Figure 2-1). It happens very quickly, sure, but the reaction is far from instantaneous. Some stage and components are influenced by several factors that act on your signal simultaneously, but most of this occurs in series: The signal generated at your electric guitar goes through each effect pedal in turn, and the culmination of that treatment goes into the amp, and it’s likewise conditioned by various stages through that internal journey before coming out of the speaker as sound. These big players in your signal chain are examined in a little more detail elsewhere in this chapter and in a lot more detail elsewhere throughout the book.
Illustration by Rashell Smith
Figure 2-1: The signal begins with your guitar, and then it’s treated, conditioned, and altered in any of a number of ways as it makes the journey through pedals and amp.
How It All Works Together
What gets a little tricky is that the guitar, amp, effects pedals, and even the cables don’t just do what they do individually and get stirred all together to produce your tone. The way that each individual piece performs very often influences the performance of several other individual pieces, so that in fact your sound chain is really one big mess of variables. But that’s where this book comes in: By dissecting each major stage of the signal chain, I help you explore how they all work together and how changes in one ingredient lead to alterations in the performance of another.
For now, simply be aware of this fact: One type of guitar can often make many effects pedals react quite differently from another type of guitar, and the combination of a certain guitar and certain effects pedals can react very differently as it progresses through the circuit stages in any given amplifier than a different combination of guitar and pedals might react. To complicate all of this, the very same combination of guitar and pedals comes out sounding considerably different through one amp than it does through a different type of amp. Beginning to get the picture? The variables are infinite, but you can get a sense of all the possibilities by delving into the basics of the individual stages and how they interact with each other.
Understanding the Building Blocks of the Signal Chain
The signal chain that works to create any electric guitar sound is made up of several major building blocks, each of which has lots of smaller building blocks within it. These main ingredients that influence your sound include
Your guitarAny effects pedals you useYour ampNote that I examine each one in far greater detail in subsequent chapters that are dedicated entirely to each specific link in the chain. This section is just to get you up and running regarding the symbiotic nature of all parts of your setup.
Note that different types of guitars, effects, and amps tend to excel at making different types of music. In this section, I discuss more about how, in a generic sense, each of these items is linked with the others, but later chapters go into detail on what specific sounds you can expect to achieve with different guitars, amps, and effects.
Electric guitar
In addition to being a musical instrument in the pure sense, your electric guitar is a signal generator: It produces the small electrical signal that carries the “sound” of your playing all the way to an amplifier (see Figure 2-2). Notice how I put sound in quotation marks there? That’s because without the help of the other parts of the chain, an electric guitar doesn’t make much of a sound on its own, or at least not one that anyone would consider great music.
Photograph by Dave Hunter
Figure 2-2: This is where it all begins: a musical instrument, yes, but very much a signal generator too.
I discuss the electric guitar in detail in Part II, where you also find a photo that introduces you to all the important components that make up the instrument, but for now, just focus on it as the first stage in a journey of sound.
Try to start thinking of your electric guitar as a device that produces an electrical signal. Now envision that signal as it travels down the wire from stage to stage, being treated and conditioned by different circuits along the way. What finally comes out the speaker is likely to be very different than what came out the guitar’s output jack when you first picked a note. Still, this is where it all starts, and the way in which your guitar generates its signal influences everything else down the line, in addition to everything else influencing it.
Effects pedals
Effects pedals are relatively compact, individual boxes housing circuitry that treats — or effects — your guitar signal in one way or another. They generally have a few knobs with which to control their parameters and volume levels, and a footswitch that you step on to turn them on and off (see Figure 2-3). They also require some form of power to make them work, which is often supplied by a 9-volt battery or by an adaptor that plugs into the wall.
See that guitar signal entering your first effects pedal? No, because it’s invisible. But for our purposes here, picture a clean, bright, pure beam of white light entering the input of, for example, your overdrive pedal, which is switched on. Now, what do you see coming out the output? The light beam is a little denser, somewhat grainier, with more texture; it’s thicker, if you will, and now it also has some slight coloration. Your guitar generated one type of signal, but this is now the signal that is headed on down the chain.
Photograph by Dave Hunter
Figure 2-3: Effects pedals contain independent circuits that apply one type of sonic treatment or another to your guitar signal.
If your freshly overdrive-fattened guitar signal (that light beam again) now enters another effect, say a tremolo pedal, you can imagine it emerging from that box as a segmented or wavy beam that now represents what the tremolo (a pulsing up and down of the signal level) has done to it, but the pulses still have that added texture and thickness and color from the overdrive. And whatever other effect your signal may go through, it is changed according to what that circuit does, while still retaining, underneath it all, everything that has already happened to it along the way.
As such, between guitar and amp, anything you apply to the signal regarding effects is layered up with the sound of each subsequent effect, one atop the other, until your signal hits the amp as the accumulation of everything that has happened before it got there.
Guitar amp
Your amp (see Figure 2-4) is where it all gets louder — in effect, where the signal is translated back into sound waves in the air that your listener can hear — but even at this seemingly final stage, plenty more happens to your sound than just the “gets louder” part of the equation.
Photograph by Dave Hunter
Figure 2-4: Most guitar amps do a lot more to your signal than merely making it louder.
The circuitry within most guitar amps contains several stages that shape your guitar signal in a variety of ways, one after the other, and much of this alters and enriches your guitar tone, above and beyond merely amplifying it (as I explore in much, much greater detail in Part III). After your signal goes in through the input in the front of the amp, it hits:
Apreampstage: This stage increases its strength and also, in some cases, adds some slight distortion that enhances its texture, the way an overdrive pedal does. Many amps have multiple preamp stages.Atonestage: This stage alters the signal’s frequency content somewhat, according to how you set this stage’s controls.Anoutputstage: Here the signal is ramped up even further, ready to be pumped through an output transformer that blasts it through the speaker, but where additional body and texture is also added.Aspeaker: The speaker pumps the signal back into the air for you to hear, and it also adds some of its own sonic character to everything that has come before.As your signal finally comes out through the speaker, completing its long journey from the guitar, what started as a pure, white beam of light it is now a bold, multidimensional rainbow. It is much enhanced from the condition in which it started its journey, and even what comes out of the amplifier is considerably different than what went in — very different than it would look if it had just been processed by a simple, clinical “make it louder machine.” Your signal is now truly the culmination of everything that has happened to it from guitar to speaker; and if you have been considerate in your selection and use of all of those little links in the chain, it sounds a lot better, too.
Gathering Accessories: Every Ingredient Matters
Just as you wouldn’t save long and hard for a vintage Chevy Camaro then put a pair of low-budget retreads on it before screaming up the coast on Highway 1, you might think twice about surrounding your carefully selected electric guitar with cheap accessories. Inferior accessories may prove frustrating at best and rob you of some of that preciously crafted tone at worst.
Consider that your strings and your pick originate each and every note, and your cables (also called cords) carry them to your pedals and amplifier, and you can see how poor or faulty examples of any of them are likely to impede your bigger items — guitar, pedals, amp — from sounding their best. I’m not implying that you need to spend a lot of money on the extras such as cables, strings, pickups, and other bits and pieces, but I do recommend that you do your research and source these things wisely. And above and beyond that, it’s simply worth being aware that all of these can also make a big difference to your sound.
Aside from the poor/better/best relationship, different types of these accessories can simply sound different and may therefore be part of your consideration in an effort to achieve a specific sound. In the following sections, I explore strings, cables, and picks both for the sake of quality and for variety.
Strings
What else can you change for less than $5 and so drastically alter the sound and performance of your guitar? Well, your guitar pick, sure — and I deal with that in a following section — but your strings are a great way to fine-tune your tone, yet they’re so often underappreciated amid all the talk of the big-ticket items. Your strings are literally where the sound originates, so these six humble wires are definitely worth some consideration.
Most guitarists think about their strings, when they think about them at all, more in regard to feel than to sound: Are they the gauge that gives me my desired playing feel under the fingers of my fretting hand? If so, I’m likely not to apply much cranial exertion over them until they get a little tired and old, or one breaks, and I need to replace them. Beyond that, most of us find a brand that works for us and stick with that, or semi-randomly grab whatever brand is on the shelf in our price range, and slap ’em on. Strings of different compositions have slightly different sounds and playing feels, though, so you can tailor both of these crucial factors to your liking by shopping the market wisely.
Investigate these types of strings to find what works best for you:
Nickel-plated: These are the most common types of strings for electric guitar, available from all major brands. The steel wraps of the wound strings on these sets are plated in nickel, which gives an ever-so-slightly round and mellow tone to the otherwise bright, powerful steel cores and steel plain strings. These strings tend to have a bright, balanced tone when new, though they sound duller as they age. Sometimes you need to do your research to discern nickel wound from pure-nickel wound; the former often just says nickel, but if it doesn’t say pure there’s a good chance they are nickel plated (see Figure 2-5).Pure-nickel wound: The most common type of string up until the late 1960s when nickel became more expensive, these are still fairly widely available, but they typically cost a little more than nickel-plated strings. (These are also shown in Figure 2-5
