Guitar Lovers

Get heard when playing your guitar masterpieces. A 20w guitar amp will be great when you are jamming with your buddies. However, if you are the kind of stay at home musician, a 10w guitar amp will do.

A guitar amp is an electronic device designed to make the signal of either an electric or acoustic guitar louder. It helps produce sound through a loudspeaker. Guitar amps also modify an instrument’s tone by emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain frequencies as well as adding electronic effects. Amplifiers have one or more circuit stages which perform unique responsibilities in the modification of the input signal.

For those of us who don’t know a lot about music, shopping for the musician on your holiday gift list can be a difficult task.  Here are a few ideas sure to please an up and coming rock star or music enthusiast:

• Guitar Amps – most guitarists who are just starting out won’t own an amp, and several who have been playing for a long time will have an older or decrepit model due to their more expensive price tag.
• Music Sheets – designed for whatever instrument your musician plays, finding instrumentals for their favorite music is sure to be a hit this holiday season.
• IPod – great for inspiration, and for listening to their own music while the other parts of life beckon their attention.
• Microphone – having vocal as well as instrumental talent is important for getting noticed early in your career; a microphone is sure to get your musician motivated on improving their vocals and their talent as a whole.

MICROPHONE TIPS

The microphone is where it all starts—the sound is never going to get any better than it does when it is captured by the mic. You can tweak it, twist it, slice it, dice it, and squash it, but the quality of the raw miked sound is essential to the final results. These tips will help you optimize your miked signals.

11. Mono Miking
One mic will give you a tight, punchy track.
Should you use one or two mics on your guitar? The answer depends on the result you want. For a driving, hard-strummed track in a band context, one mic will create a tight, punchy sound without taking up too much room in the mix.

12. Stereo Miking
Use two mics for a complete picture of your guitar.
For a solo guitar track—fingerstyle or picked—two mics will give a broader, deeper, more spacious sound, with width that fills both speakers. Two mics can also be positioned to capture a more complete “picture” of the guitar than a single mic can.

13. Multiple-Mic Solutions
Make sure your tracks are in phase.
If you’re using more than one microphone on a source, or if you’re recording more than one instrument at a time and the sound from one instrument is getting into another instrument’s mic, you could have phase issues caused by the different arrival times of the sound waves at different mics. “Out-of-phase” tracks have a hollow, empty sound when combined. Most mixers (software or hardware) include a phase switch for each channel; try it both on and off. One position will usually sound noticeably better than the other.

14. Tracking Guitar and Voice
Use mic polar patterns to isolate tracks.
Tracking someone who plays and sings at the same time can be a real challenge—it’s difficult to isolate the guitar from the vocal so that each can be treated differently during mixdown. There are several things you can do to increase isolation between the two. Place the mics as close as possible to the guitar and the singer’s mouth. Take advantage of the mic polar patterns—cardioid, figure-eight, hypercardioid; all these mic patterns have “nulls” where they don’t pick up sound well. Try to position the nulls for the guitar and vocal mics so they aren’t picking up the other source. Depending on the song and performance, I prefer to just go with it—either live with the bleed between the guitar and vocal or use one well-placed mic pulled back a bit to capture both. The result will be a natural, “you are there” recording of the performance.

15. Recording More Than One Player
Make the performers comfortable.
As a recording engineer, my goal is to capture a great performance. When recording more than one player simultaneously, I make sure the performers are set up so they are completely comfortable, then I’ll place my mics to capture the sound as well as I can. As in Tip No. 14, try to place the mic “nulls” so that there is as much isolation between the performers as possible, and consider putting something between them—a sofa, a divider, whatever you have, in order to improve isolation. Or, again, just go with it: place mics in front of the performers and capture a “you are there” recording of the performance where everyone happily bleeds into everyone else’s mic.

16. Size Matters
Experiment with different mic types.
Should you use a large- or a small-diaphragm mic to record? For vocals—and vocal-like instruments, such as wind instruments—large-diaphragms are the standard. For acoustic guitar, in general, small-diaphragm mics will give you more detail and clarity while large-diaphragms will provide a fuller, punchier sound. Having said that, experiment! Try each type and see which you prefer.

17. Omnidirectional Mics
For natural sound and room ambience, try an omni.
Omnidirectional microphones mics pick up sound well from all directions. The advantage is that they will give you an even, balanced sound and good dynamic response, with no proximity effect (bass boost), even with the mic very close to the guitar. You also get some room ambience, resulting in a more natural sound. The disadvantage is that there is no isolation—the mic will pick up everything in the room to some degree. And if the room doesn’t sound all that great, you may not want its ambience in the recording. I love omnis for stereo “live” recordings of classical, acoustic jazz, and similar styles. They aren’t as common for multitrack recordings, but I’m using them more and more for their natural sound quality.

18. Give It Some Space
Pull your guitar mics back a few feet.
No one ever hears an acoustic guitar from a foot away—which is where we often place our microphones. As listeners, we always hear the instrument from some distance back in the room. For most instruments the sound “develops” and comes together a few feet away from the instrument. With guitar, for example, the main source of the sound may be the soundboard—though the sound quality will vary depending on the spot on the soundboard you are listening to. But vibrations from the neck, back, sides, even headstock, all contribute to the overall sound to some degree—and a close mic will never capture all that resonance. Try pulling your mics back a few feet, or use distant mics placed five or more feet away in conjunction with close mics, to really capture what your guitar sounds like.

19. Laser Accuracy
A laser pointer will show you exactly where your mics are pointed.
Want to know exactly where your mics are pointing? Use a laser pointer alongside your mic to see exactly where it is aimed.

20. Sonic Reinforcement
Record a pickup track alongside mic tracks.
If a guitar has a pickup, I always record it to a track, even if I’m using microphones. I then have the option of blending in the pickup sound (with or without EQ to shape it) to reinforce the mic tracks.

21. Tweak the Pickup Track
When recording a pickup signal, use a good direct box and shape the signal with EQ.
If you’re working with just a pickup (no mics), it can be a challenge to get a great recorded sound. First, use a good direct box or instrument input. Consider using something like one of the Fishman Aura processors, which use digital “images” of real acoustic guitars—I’ve done solo guitar recordings using these and had excellent results. Many listeners couldn’t tell I hadn’t used a mic! D-Tar’s Mama Bear is another option, as it uses digital modeling to create more realistic acoustic sounds from a pickup. Otherwise, record the pickup signal dry, then during mixdown carefully EQ the pickup signal to remove any harsh upper midrange. Brighten the top end to open up the sound, and shape the bass to be more realistic. Then, add a small amount of extremely short reverb—1/10 of a second or so—to simulate the resonance of the instrument. You don’t want so much that you hear it as a reverb tail, just enough to add some space and depth to the pickup sound.

Know the secrets of the guitar masters. The guitar effect pedal is an innovation in music artistry. Transform the sound of your guitar into different kinds of instruments and effects. The reverb effect prolongs the melodic tones to several bars. The wawa effect was made popular by Chet Atkins that allows the sound into “wawa” eclectic sound.

The foot pedals amplify your guitar licks into crescendo mode and they can multiply the effect to make it sound like more than one guitar is playing. One click on the device will change an electric guitar’s sounds into that of an acoustic classical guitar. This amazing device will amplify your guitar skills to make you sound like a guitar master.

One of the biggest things for most guitar players comes from their own belief that, in order to be a great player, one must have natural ability. I¹ve learned over the years and I hear things like, I’ll never be a good playerf or, Players like Stevie Ray Vaghan or Jimi Hendrix must have been born with natural musical talent. I usually respond by telling that person that he (or she) will never be a great player as long as one believes those things. Great players didn’t just pick up the guitar one day, practice for a little while and then become good. Both of them had worked extremely hard developing their skills. Many musicians say that they practiced 8 hours a day between the ages of 13 and 18! If they were born with all of this talent then why did they all have to work so hard to get where they are today?
A great non-musical example of perseverance would be the great basketball star, Michael Jordan. Jordan wasn’t even good enough to make it on his local high school basketball team! Most people would have given up after such a disappointment and most would have believed that there would be no point in trying again next year, since they obviously would assume that they don’t possess the talent. We all know that this was not how Jordan thought about his situation. He worked extremely hard everyday, practicing and asking the coach to teach him, even though he was not a member of the team. The next year, Michael made the team and went on to eventually become one of the world’s greatest athletes of all-time.

There will always be some players that will believe in natural talent no matter what. It is always the same kinds of people who believe in this concept (players who are not great!) I’ve never heard a great player / virtuoso claim that he (or she) didn’t have to work really hard at their playing. The next time you have an opportunity to talk to a truly great player, ask him if it just all came easy to him. I bet you’ll hear about how many thousands (if not tens of thousands) of hours that he worked at his playing! The other types of players will often blame their own lack of progress on the belief that they lack the genes to play great.

Despite all that I’ve just written, I have known some players  that did seem to be naturally better at some musical aspect more than other players, but this usually happens in only one area. The fact is that to be a good musician one needs a lot of different types of skills. A musician needs: a solid physical technique, a good ear, a good sense of rhythm, a creative mind, an intelligent mind to understand and apply music theory, good improvisational skills, a good ability to compose music, etc. So even if one possesses some good natural talent in one area, no one is born with it all, so we all have to work hard on all the elements that go into becoming a musician.

I’ve known a few people to believe that they did have natural musical ability. Unfortunately, I have watched them waist their time waiting for their ‘natural ability’ to turn them into great musicians. They showed some initial progress when they practiced, but depended too much on their talent to do the rest of the work for them. Usually at this point, they begin to become lazy and practice less, thinking that they will be great anyway. It is always hard for me to see people fail because they didn’t persevere when the potential was there.

What does all of this mean for you? It means that you can achieve great things if you have the passion in your heart for music and if you have the perseverance to learn and practice each day. It will take a long time, but it is well worth it. Each of you has basically the same potential as everyone else to accomplish great things. Don’t wait for some natural abilities to take you where you want to be though. You must believe that you can do it only if you work hard and long. If you believe in this concept and believe in yourself, you wil be great.