View All Students
Bill Sloyer
During our 18th lesson on Friday 1/12, Larry and I talked about:
-Guitar parts: nut, bridge, fret, fretboard:
https://cz.pinterest.com/pin/429530883183703568/
A Fender Stratocaster is very common
A Fender Telecaster is more clean sounding
-There was a Kemper Profiler in the studio. It’s a digital guitar amp and effects processor. Can use it to recreate MANY different guitar sounds.
-A Power attenuator for a guitar amp: Get distortion without having the volume all the way up.
-Elixir guitar strings are plastic coated.
-Dreadnought guitar: most common acoustic guitar style
-Larry sometimes does over the shoulder guitar miking, which includes mics in 2 other locations as well.
-You can mic a guitar amp from behind. The signal will be out of phase from a mic in front of the amp.
-Playing with your fingers is less bright than using a pick
-Thumbing with pick – brings out low notes
-Finger picks – only used with banjo and steel guitar. Some players glue on fake nails to play!
-If a guitar is out of tune, it could be 3 problems:
--Intonation problems
--Out of tune
--Player not playing correctly (maybe pulling the strings down)
*Also look up equal temperament guitar tuning
-Mandolin guitar miking – hole is okay if you need to get more bass. Halfway between the neck & body is where Larry mics it.
-Guitar pickups: single coil pickups are brighter, double coil (humbucker) are duller and have less noise.
-A humbucking pickup on a guitar reduces hum and gives you more output. You can identify b/c it’s a wider pickup (but note that sometimes regular pickups are made to look like they’re humbucking.) Used a lot in rock and metal.
-Noiseless pickups are also available. An example: http://www.proaudioland.com/news/noiseless-single-coil-electric-guitar-pickups/
-Guitar pedals:
-Boost pedal - Overdrives the preamp by sending the the line in signal “hot.”
It will take the sound of your guitar and make it bigger and louder, much like the volume knob on your guitar. Imagine that your volume knob can only go up to 8 (out of 10) and you had to push a button to get to 10. Well that is exactly what a boost pedal is (actually a lot of guitar players use it to take their volume from 10 to 12).
-Distortion pedal
-Overdrive pedal – give you somewhere between clean boost and distortion, according to Larry. Also found this: In the case of overdrive pedals, the intention is often twofold: either to provide a gain boost to “overdrive” a tube amp into distortion, or to approximate the mildly distorted sound of a slightly overdriven tube amp. In practice, most do a little of both
-Expression pedal – controls a parameter. An expression pedal is an important control found on many musical instruments including organs, electronic keyboards and pedal steel guitar. ... Separate expression pedals can often be added to a guitar amplifier or effects unit and used to control many different aspects of the tone.
-Octave pedal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_effect
-Tremolo pedal - volume drops up/down. In electronics, is the variation in amplitude of sound achieved through electronic means, sometimes mistakenly called vibrato, and producing a sound somewhat reminiscent of flanging, referred to as an "underwater effect."
