Tag: how to

Categories
Effects Recording

A Quick Compressor Class

UA Compressors

Do compressors confuse you? And who don’t they confuse?

My just-posted Premier Guitar column covers some basics and walks you through a typical guitar compression scenario (with many audio examples).

Using a variation on a technique borrowed from engineer Michael Paul Stavrou’s cool recording technique book, Mixing with Your Mind, I start with extreme settings that make it easy to hear the compressor’s effect, and then back the processing down to realistic levels.

If you ever find yourself twiddling those inscrutable knobs while remaining unclear exactly what, if anything, is changing, this case study may clarify the process. I hope it’s helpful! :pacman:

Categories
Recording

New Guitar Recording Column!

Screen Shot 2014-02-24 at 10.57.35 AM

May I take this opportunity to pimp my new monthly recording column in Premier Guitar? The first installment covers basic electric guitar miking technique. It’s ground that’s been covered often enough before, though I hope the article’s many audio files (recorded via ReAmp, moving the mic between “takes”) shed some new light on the topic.

Meanwhile, I’m breathlessly stoked about my new “Partsmaster.” It’s a Korina “Split Jazzmaster” body from Warmoth with Fralin P-92s and some new tricks I’ve been wanting to try with wiring and onboard overdrive, plus several other ill-considered, stab-in-the-dark adventurous experiments. It’s like some wacky Firebird/Jazzmaster hybrid (“Birdmaster?”) I hope to post some video later this week, but right now, the guitar is awaiting the plek treatment at Gary Brawer’s shop. Gary is also prettying up some of my clever but sloppy wiring, and remedying the fact that, when I brought the beast in, the strings were about a half-inch from the fretboard.

Can’t wait — this is an interesting one! 🙂

Categories
Bass DIY guitar Pickups

How to Install Pickups

"I always forget — which end gets hot?"
“I always forget — which end gets hot?”

Somewhat embarrassingly, I never got around to changing one of my own pickups until I was knocking on senility’s door recently. I owe part of the inspiration to that fabulous DIY Fest known as the Maker Fair, where each year hundreds of little kids learn to solder craft projects at long picnic tables. Or maybe it was the awesome soldering tutorial by 11-year old W0JAK. Well, after a buttload of pickup installs inspired by this blog, I guess I qualify as some sort of solder “expert,” because Seymour Duncan asked me to make a video designed to walk n00bs through the pickup install process for the first time. It was a lot of fun to prepare, and I learned some important things, like the fact that it’s hard to solder, talk, and operate a camera at the same time. Check it out:

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Categories
Acoustic guitar Recording

How Nashville High-Stringing Works

You don't have to be high in Nashville to enjoy Nashville high-strung.
You don’t have to be high in Nashville to enjoy Nashville high-strung.

Nashville high-strung tuning is one of the guitar’s great magic tricks. It has a delicious, “secrets of the Guild” quality — you feel like an insider just knowing what it is.

Not that I did know what it is until embarrassingly late in life. For the sake of my fellow late-bloomers, I’ll explain: You replace your guitar’s lowest four strings with thinner strings tuned an octave higher than normal.

You can think of it as using the higher-pitched of a each pair in a 12-string string set. (Or the top two strings of a normal set, and the top four strings from another normal set, with the first string as the third string, the second string as the fourth, etc.)

I love how this tuning can work subliminal magic, or step front and center for marquee riffs. Nashville session players conceived it as a way to add stereo shimmer to doubled acoustic guitar tracks. But rock players have used it to great effect as a foreground sound, as heard on the Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Floyd’s “Hey You,” Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind,” and Tracy Chapman’s “The Promise.”

Here’s a quick little demonstration, both solo and in a mix:

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