Guitars guides & articles

Buying a steel-string acoustic guitar is an investment that you don’t want to go into lightly. Unless you plan to purchase a super-cheap entry-level model, you’re likely to spend a fair bit of coin f…

Unless you're one of those guitarists or bassists who flat-out refuses to consider digital effects, it’s worth comparing the merits of multi-effects pedals with traditional pedalboard setups, before …

One of the most powerful ways to make a track sound bigger and more impactful is by doubling it. The quintessential example of this is the doubled rhythm guitar part, which can really fatten the soun…

Guitarists are well-known for their countless effects pedals, exotic strings and other not-always-indispensable thingamajigs. So, here's a list of 10 useful and/or eccentric toys that you can buy wit…

For those who have a tendency to hammer their electric or bass guitars with a heavy attack, or can't play consistent rhythm parts throughout an entire song, a compressor might be the solution. A comp…

Here are the essential techniques and basic information you need to get started playing slide guitar

Due to its violent nature, heavy metal needs a particularly polished guitar sound or it might become unintelligible. Here are several tips to achieve a heavy and accurate sound at the same time.

If you polled a group of engineers and producers, asking them what’s the best way to record electric guitar, probably 99% of them would say by miking an amp — preferably a tube amp that’s turned up r…

Ah, punk! Some say it's enough to pick a guitar, an amp, a jack, and a strap (the longer the better), crank it all up and it should sound like it's meant to.

After having found your clean sound, let's now look at how to color your sound with a bit of distortion.

We have already seen how to set correctly the knobs of your instrument. But we still have to shape the signal before it comes out of the loudspeaker.

Sure, you can grab your guitar, crank up all the knobs and play. But if all those controls are there, they must serve a purpose!

A guitarist must frequently adapt to the voice of the singer and specially to his or her own vocal range. How should this be done?

For many years, when we were forced to leave our comfortable home to buy strings, we trusted our favorite salesman to recommend us an adequate set. Thanks to the Internet, there is no need to waste s…

Besides the standard E-A-D-G-B-E, there are lots of other alternative tunings that allow us to explore new sound horizons with our guitar. Let's review the main open tunings.

Here are the top electric guitar manufacturers according to the survey we carried a few days ago in our forums.

Aside from the guitar (and the guitarist!), the amp is certainly the most decisive factor in a guitarist's sound

When people refer to a sound as being "fat" they usually mean different realities and consequently different practices. Here is an overview of the techniques most commonly used to easily get a fat so…

If you're a guitar player and have started to think about recording your instrument, you may have heard about reamping. But what is that exactly?

You have an electric guitar, you have learned how to play it, you have written a wonderful song, and now you just have to record it. But how?

Without pretending to publish the definitive guide to guitar recording, here are a few tips on how to record an acoustic guitar with an electrostatic microphone.

The basic function of an amplifier is to increase a low intensity signal capture. It can be a direct source such as a microphone, a musical instrument, or a signal corrected by an intermediary preamp…

There are a few different reasons why a musician might wish to use multiple amplifiers as part of their rig.

For recording guitarists, one benefit of a head-and-stack configuration over a combo is that you can separate the amplifier from the speaker cabinet and run a long cable between the two.

Guitar amps are, no matter how you cut it, black boxes. You may think you have control over them, but when it gets down to it, you can’t really see inside the black box, and even if you could, there …