Guitars guides & articles

Indispensable on the pedalboard of any guitarist — right next to the overdrive/distortion — the reverb pedal allows you to add some ambient or to modify the position of a sound in a mix. Naturally, i…

Electromagnetic transducers play a crucial role in the sound of a guitar player and many of us like to change the original pickups on our guitars. Here are the results of a survey we ran some time ag…

The time has come, your band is ready for the big jump: Your first live gig as a guitar player is imminent. However, your stress is rising at a rate that would shock any cardiologist. Stay cool — her…

Thanks to "Doc" Emmett Brown, everybody knows that you need 1.21 gigawatts for a DeLorean to go back to the future when its flux capacitor runs out of plutonium.

Broken, worn-out or simply ugly-looking tuners are often the cause of complaints by guitarists. If changing them is unavoidable, here is some info that will help you understand the subject better.

Whether you play guitar, keyboard, saxophone or any other lead instrument, there’s more to being a good soloist than just having chops and knowing riffs. Playing fast is great, but speed by itself do…

Toontrack recently released a new collection of amp models with effects called the Classic Amps EZmix Pack, which can be opened as presets in the company's EZmix 2 software. How do these emulations s…

With our recent review of the Mutterstolz tube distortion in mind, the Audiofanzine editorial board decided to review some of the other models from Palmer's Root Effects collection. We've already pos…

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…

We took this new, inexpensive dreadnaught from Yamaha for a test drive. Here's what we found.

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 …

On the occasion of our recently published Palmer Mutterstolz distortion pedal review, your favorite website decided to revisit some of the German brand's Root Effects, and here we review Automat, an …

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…

Following up on the success of the original Ditto, which had only two controls, TC strikes again with the X2, featuring more than twice that. Can it give the final blow to its competitors in the not-…

Back in the day when fluorescent colors were in fashion, amps resembled fridges, all the songs on the radio had a guitar solo after the second chorus, and the Berlin Wall was still standing (Bingo!, …

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

Line 6 enters the Bluetooth era with the new AMPLIFI series, which combines multimedia speakers and a modeling combo in a single box.

Gibson, to whom we own a lot of legendary guitars, decided to introduce several months ago a guitar with an original shape (something that doesn't happen every day): the N-225. With a hybrid look hal…

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.