GEAR, TECHNIQUE AND RECORDING LESSONS

Let’s kick off with an assortment of easy tips

AMPS, PEDALS & EFFECTS

Lesson 01 Set your amp tone up for the stage, not the bedroom

We hate to say it, but all those hours you spent painstakingly tweaking your amp to sound perfect when you’re rocking out at home were fun, but they’re not necessarily going to help you very much when you come to play in a live environment. To make your amp sing in a gig or practice, you have to think about your place in the mix. So, for simplicity’s sake let’s say the bass and drums take up the low frequencies, while the cymbals and vocals occupy the highs – where does that leave you? The middle! So, when you’re setting your amp’s eq at a gig, give the mid control a twist to the right and notice how all of a sudden you hear yourself cutting through!

Lesson 02 Keep your pedals going in emergencies

If you ever find yourself with a dead batterypowered pedal and no time to replace it mid-set, this one’s for you. Keep a standard nine-volt battery in your gig bag, along with a nifty battery clip with the right sized power jack on the end (most electronics stores sell them). It’s an instant power supply you can buy for a couple of quid!

Lesson 03 Get your pedalboard in the right order

The order you place your pedals in your signal chain has a significant impact on your tone, and, while there are no ultimate rules, there is a generally accepted order that will get the best out of your effects. The start point is wah then EQ and compression pedals. Next are distortion/ overdrive effects, then boosts, then modulation effects (chorus, flangers, phasers etc). Delay comes next, before reverb at the end. Don’t forget, experimentation with effects is half the fun, so don’t be afraid to break the rules and see what happens!

Lesson 04 Get more from your multi‑effects unit

The mythical four-cable method could give your multi-effects unit extra versatility. All you need is an amp with an effects loop, a multi-effects with send, return and input sockets, and four cables.

1. Plug your guitar into the your effects unit’s instrument input.

2. Run a cable from your effect’s output to the amp’s effects in/return socket.

3. Connect a cable from the amp effects send into the pedal’s effects return.

4. Finally, connect the pedal’s effects send to the amp’s main input.

This will enable you to place effects in the amp’s loop as you would with physical pedals. Most modern multi-effects units allow you to choose where the loop occurs in the signal chain, giving you the option to bypass your amp’s preamp all together. It might take you an afternoon of fiddling, but the results can be spectacular!

Lesson 05 Overdrive, distortion and fuzz. What’s the difference?

This trio increase your gain in different ways. All create distortion, so the lines between them can be blurred – the sound of many pedals genuinely overlaps between the three.

To make your amp sing in a gig or in practice, think about your place in the mix

Generally, overdrive is mildest and will drive a valve amp into smooth distortion. Most overdrives use gentle ‘soft clipping’, unlike distortions, which use harsher ‘hard clipping’ to flatten the waveform’s peaks and create increased harmonics with lower dynamic range. And what makes fuzz fuzzy? The clipping threshold is even lower than a distortion pedal – and the resulting wave can be almost totally square. With that comes a series of strange, abrasive harmonics, and in extreme effects an almost synth-like square-wave sound.

Lesson 06 The key to harmoniser mastery

Harmonisers blend your signal with a pitch-shifted interval to imitate dual-guitar lines. Think The Boys Are Back In Town and you’ll get the idea. Most units operate in similar ways. Simply set the interval you want the pedal to create, and blend the direct and harmonised signals together. However, you’ll get more from your harmoniser if you know about key signatures. Let’s say you’re playing in C major (C D E F GA B) and you set your pedal to harmonise four semitones up. Play a C note, your harmoniser will give you an in-key E. Hooray! Trouble is, you won’t always get an in-key note – and that’s a problem. The solution? ‘Intelligent’ harmonisers such as the Boss Harmonist PS-6 can be set to stay in key. Tell it your root note and whether you want major or minor. Job’s a goodun!