Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies
Overview
Learn the secrets to achieving your ultimate sound
Whether amateur or pro, guitarists live for the ultimate sound. Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies provides the information and instruction you need to discover that sound and make it your own! Written in the characteristically easy-to-read Dummies style, this book is ideal for beginners and experienced musicians alike, and can help all players expand their skill set with effects. Guitarists tend to be gearheads when it comes to sound, and this book provides guidance on topics ranging from the guitar itself to amps, pedals, and other sound technology.
Amps and effects are the unsung heroes of guitar music. While most people recognize the more psychedelic effects, many don't realize that effects are often responsible for the unique quality of tone that can become a musician's trademark. Certain effects work on the volume
or signal level, others work on the environment, and still others work on the bass and treble content. Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies covers them all, and shows how effects can not only add something extra, but also "fix" problematic areas. Topics include:
- Gain-based effects, like distortion, compression, volume pedals, and gates
- Tone-based effects, including graphic and parametric EQ, and the wah-wah pedal
- Modulation effects, like the flanger, phase shifter, and tremolo
- Ambience effects, including reverb and delay
The journey to incredible guitar music never ends. No matter how experienced you are with a guitar, there is always room for improvement to your tone and sound. Whether you're looking for the sound of angels or thunder, Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies will help you achieve the music you hear in your dreams.
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About The Author
Dave Hunter has made a career out of explaining the relationships between guitars and amp tone, and the technology that creates it. He has authored or coauthored dozens of books on guitar topics, columns in Guitar Player and Vintage Guitar magazines, and is considered a top authority on amps and effects.
Sample Chapters
guitar amps & effects for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Every guitarist seeks to produce an expressive and distinctive tone, but trying to figure out what kind of gear you need to create your sound can be baffling.This Cheat Sheet explains the three main equipment categories that comprise your music-making rig: your electric guitar, guitar amps, and effects pedals and units.
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As important as striving for your own sound as a guitarist is, you often make your way there via the tones of other great players, past and present. Here, you explore the elements behind the signature sounds of ten of the world’s most distinctive guitarists.
Jazz incarnate: Wes Montgomery
Although jazz legend Wes Montgomery owned several different archtop guitars during his career, he is probably best known for the following setup:
Guitar: Gibson L-5CES: A hollowbody electric with a carved arched solid-spruce top and solid maple back and sides, maple neck with an ebony fingerboard, floating bridge and trapeze tailpiece, and one humbucking pickup in the neck position.
Guitarists and music fans alike are often guilty of pigeonholing certain musical styles, and of assuming the sounds of different genres can only be achieved on a limited range of gear. Such typecasting runs throughout the musical world, as it does through much of life, but plenty of adventurous artists have proved that it doesn't matter what you make your music on, as long as you make it.
Many great guitarists of the past have established guitar tones, in a wide range of genres, that have become iconic as examples of their type. Exploring recordings of some of these makes a great quick-hit method of familiarizing yourself with what experienced players often consider to be the standards of tone.
Guitar
Guitarists might not agree on much, but they can probably agree that there’s no one best sound. One player might rave over Carlos Santana’s tone in the 1970s and ’80s, while another might freak out about Mark Knopfler’s tone on the first couple of Dire Straits albums, and the next goes gaga over Slash’s playing on Appetite for Destruction.
Occasionally dwindling supplies of some of the more traditional guitar tonewoods — a situation that has affected guitar makers for decades, although more dramatically in recent years — has sent many manufacturers in search of alternatives. Others have turned to different woods simply to yield the different looks and sounds they afford.
You may think electric guitars have come a long way from the first commercially available models, but it’s amazing how many aspects of very old guitar designs are still in use today. This timeline takes you through the most significant early developments in the field:
1931: Electro-String (which later became Rickenbacker) developed the first significant and commercially available electric guitar pickup.
Guitar
Technically, the floating bridge is a type of fixed bridge. It gets its name from the fact that it isn’t actually attached to the top of the guitar but is held in place by the strings’ pressure on the saddles.
These bridges are most often found on hollow or semihollow electric guitars, where drilling into the top to mount a fixed bridge could weaken the structure of the guitar or impede its acoustic resonance.
However impressively you may be able to sound like another great player out there, that acknowledged “great tone” — like any flavor you overindulge in — gets tiring after a time, both to you and to your listeners. Spicing it up with some variation is a great way to awaken the ear, to grab some fresh attention, and also to renew your own interest in playing.
Active guitar pickups require a power source to function, which is usually supplied by an internally mounted 9-volt battery. By using an active voltage source, such pickups can be more complex in nature and can also offer a more powerful signal, of a higher fidelity.
Another benefit of active pickups, for those who enjoy them, is their low-impedance signal, meaning their output can survive long cable runs without loss of high-end content.
One of the great things about the booming replacement-pickup market is that if you love a guitar you already have but feel the pickups can be improved, you can usually find something new to do the trick. It’s a lot easier, however, if you acquire the guitar with at least the right types of pickups in it in the first place.
Variously referred to as cords, cables, and leads, these wires carry your sound to whatever is going to help the wider world hear it, so they are an important part of the tonal equation.
Plenty of cheap cables out there might work, but they will most definitely dull your sound — and often they don’t even work for long, or are noisy and microphonic (meaning they clunk when you slap them on the ground) even when they do technically function.
Guitar
Your signal chain is the sequence of elements that work together to get the electrical signal that carries your guitar sound from its starting point to its end point. It can also be referred to as a sound chain, because its sole end is to make a sound.
The starting point is your guitar pick’s or your fingers’ contact with the guitar string to play a note, and the end point is the speaker from which the amplified sound of that note eventually emanates.
Several woods have been used to construct electric guitar bodies over the decades. The four described in the following discussions are by far the most classic, appearing in the seminal designs of the 1950s and ’60s and continuing to be used today.MahoganyMahogany is a rich, warm-sounding tonewood with good depth.
Guitar
The procedures for cleaning your guitar’s electronics are very different from those used to clean and polish the body and neck. In fact, cleaning in regard to controls in particular, means internal cleaning, and it’s something that has to be done just right, with the right product. However, it’s still something you can very easily do yourself, usually as an easy fix for scratchy-sounding or stiff-feeling controls.
Guitar
Your guitar’s fingerboard is one place where grime can often build up, even if you regularly wipe down your instrument each time you play it. The sweat and oils from your fingers gather along fret edges and in the wood grain where a cleaning cloth may ordinarily miss it if the strings are in the way.
Give the fingerboard a real deep-cleaning when you change strings, and take them all off the guitar at once.
A considerable engineering feat in its time, the vibrato unit on the Fender Stratocaster, unveiled in 1954, was one of the key features of this radical guitar. Original-style units remain in wide use today and have also inspired countless reissues, clones, and re-creations — some to exacting specs, others considerably modified.
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. A basic wipe-down of your guitar’s strings, body, and neck with a soft, dry, lint-free cloth after each playing session should keep it clean and prevent substantial grime from building up.
Keep a cleaning cloth handy (or even a hand towel, if you tend to sweat a lot) during extended rehearsal or performance sets to wipe it all down quickly every so often between songs.
Talk to plenty of guitarists who think they know a thing or two about the instrument and you'll come away with the implied truism that a bolt-on neck is inferior to one that is permanently glued in place. Such "accepted wisdom," however, simply isn't correct. The two types of neck construction contribute to guitars that are different, sure, but this isn't a "better or worse" relationship.
Guitar
Every guitarist seeks to produce an expressive and distinctive tone, but trying to figure out what kind of gear you need to create your sound can be baffling.This Cheat Sheet explains the three main equipment categories that comprise your music-making rig: your electric guitar, guitar amps, and effects pedals and units.
Lots of fans of vintage or high-end (that is, expensive) new guitars will tell you that they wouldn’t be caught dead playing a guitar with a finish done in anything other than nitrocellulose lacquer (nitro for short), and this finish has indeed earned some kudos as the coating of choice used by the most beloved electric-guitar makers in the golden age of the instrument.
The frets are the thin metal strips inlaid into the fingerboard atop a guitar’s neck, which serve as the terminus for the strings when you play a fretted note, that is, anything other than an open note, when the strings end at the nut.
Credit: Photograph and guitar courtesy of Tom Bartlett
When guitarists give any thought at all to their frets, it’s usually in the context of playability.
Every guitar’s neck plays partner in anchoring the strings, so the wood it is made from plays a part in the instrument’s sound, in tandem with the wood and construction of the body. Many of the woods used for guitar necks are also, unsurprisingly, those used in their bodies.RosewoodRosewood is commonly used for fingerboards on necks made from maple, mahogany, and Korina.
If your strings are where the sound originates, your guitar pick is what sets those strings in motion. It stands to reason, then, that guitar picks of different styles and materials act slightly differently upon those strings and elicit different sounds as a result.
Credit: Photograph by Dave Hunter
Here are the three main factors influencing guitar picks:
Gauge (thickness): Most players’ first consideration, the thickness of the pick determines the playing feel — whether it feels firm against the strings when you strum, has a little give, or is somewhere in between.
A pickup gets its name from the fact that it picks up your guitar’s sound and sends it to an amplifier. Back in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, pickups were sometimes referred to as microphones or guitar mics, which makes sense, but pickup is pretty much the universal term for these units today.
Pickups are electromagnetic devices, meaning they use a coil and magnets to produce an electrical signal, and the vast majority of them are passive, meaning they require no electrical input from a battery or wall socket to function.
A nut (that is, a string nut) is that thin, slotted strip of organic or synthetic material that lies across the end of the fingerboard and guides your strings on their way to the tuners. Beyond this purely functional role, the stuff your nut is made from plays a big part in shaping your tone.
Credit: Photograph and guitar courtesy of Tom Bartlett
In partnership with the bridge saddles, the nut is one of the two anchor points that determine the speaking length of your string — the components that denote the break between the section of the strings that vibrates and makes all the sound and the dead portions — and it greatly affects both the way in which the strings ring and the amount of vibrational energy that is transferred into the neck and body of the guitar.
What else can you change for less than $5 and so drastically alter the sound and performance of your guitar? Well, your guitar pick, sure, but your strings are a great way to fine-tune your tone, yet they’re so often underappreciated amid all the talk of the big-ticket items. Your strings are literally where the sound originates, so these six humble wires are definitely worth some consideration.
The term hollowbody electrics refers to guitars intended for use primarily as electric guitars but which have fully hollow — in other words, acoustic — bodies. These hollowbody electrics did evolve, however, from archtop acoustic guitars that were popular on the jazz, swing, and dance-band scenes before the electric guitar emerged.
When the electric guitar arrived in the late 1930s and then became far more viable in the 1940s and ’50s, it changed the face of popular music, and therefore culture, in ways that have never been undone.
The guitar is the single most popular musical instrument in the world today, but that wasn’t the case in the 1920s and ’30s.
Adjusting your guitar’s neck relief (the amount of bow and resistance in the neck) may sound like a scary proposition to the first-timer, but this task is something you can definitely do yourself if you take it slow and work in very small increments.
Most quality guitar manufacturers supply the correct tool for adjusting neck relief specifically because they feel this is a job the player can tackle and often needs to tackle as wood shifts due to seasonal changes in climate, travel, normal aging, and other factors.
Humbucking pickups take their colloquial name from the fact that they’re designed to reject hum that can be induced from electrical sources. They can also be called double-coil pickups (as opposed to single-coil pickups), because they achieve this noise reduction by pairing together two coils wound in opposite directions.
Semi-acoustic refers to an electric guitar with a solid center block but acoustic chambers in its outer body wings. You’d think that semi-acoustic guitars would have arrived as an evolutionary step between the acoustic archtop electric of the 1930s and ’40s and the solidbody of the early ’50s, but they arrived good and proper with Gibson’s unveiling of the ES-335 model in 1958.
As the name suggests, a single-coil guitar pickup is one that uses just one coil to get the job done. Because they lack another coil to reject unwanted noise, single-coil pickups often exhibit a little noise from electrical interference or florescent lighting, but players who like their sound tend to just live with it, or work around it (and it usually isn’t a problem when you start playing!
Archtop is shorthand for the big, hollowbody guitars, both acoustic and electric, with f-shaped soundholes that proliferated before solidbody guitars. (Some solid and semisolid electrics, such as the Gibson Les Paul and ES-335 respectively, also had arched tops, but the term used on its own usually refers to fully hollow guitars.
Whatever kind of sound you’re after, it all starts with your guitar. Make no mistake, an electric guitar can’t make any sound without the rest of your equipment, other than a thin, soft jangle.
But when you plug it into an amp (and any effects you use in between), it feeds a signal to the truly electric parts of your rig, and that signal determines the fundamental nature of the sound that comes out the other end, however much it’s shaped along the way.
As with so many things in the guitar world, the vast majority of control and switching layouts used today follow what was employed by one or another classic make and model dating back to the ’50s and ’60s. For that reason, a quick perusal of these templates familiarizes you with the majority of what you find on guitars hanging on the store walls today.
The strings-through-body bridge has multiple variations, but it’s best known as it appears on Fender’s Telecaster and similar guitars. When Leo Fender introduced his revolutionary solidbody guitar in 1950, it had strings anchored in ferules (small metal cups) inset into the back of the guitar and passing up through holes in the body and through the bridge plate, where they took a right-angle turn over three bridge saddles.
If you know what you want, sticking with the simple guitar rig can be rather Zen. It doesn’t work for everyone, and some players do need a wide range of very different sounds on tap at the stomp of a switch. But forgetting all the tweaking and adjusting and fussing by using a simple amp and just concentrating on your playing often does wonders for your connection to your music.
Developed by mechanical engineer Paul Bigsby in the late 1940s, the Bigsby Vibrato was the first widely available add-on guitar vibrato suitable to a number of different guitars. Early models were mounted like a trapeze tailpiece — anchored to the tail end of the guitar with wood screws — making them suitable for archtop acoustic-electric guitars.
The bobbin of a guitar pickup holds the wire wrapped in a pickup’s coil in a consistent shape and, to some extent, protects it. Think of it like a bobbin of thread on a sewing machine: It isn’t an active component in the sense that it participates in producing your guitar’s sound, but it assists another crucial part that does.
The signal chain that works to create any electric guitar sound is made up of several major building blocks, each of which has lots of smaller building blocks within it. These main ingredients that influence your sound include your guitar, any effects pedals you use, and your amp.Electric guitarIn addition to being a musical instrument in the pure sense, your electric guitar is a signal generator: It produces the small electrical signal that carries the sound of your playing all the way to an amplifier.
The coil wound around the bobbin of a guitar pickup consists of several thousand turns of extremely thin wire in one long strand, which begins and ends at points on the base of the pickup where the hook-up wires are attached. The hook-up wires take the electrical signal generated in the coil to the volume and tone controls and, from there, to the output jack.
In addition to the bobbin, a guitar pickup’s cover and base plate are ingredients that are mainly there to help hold it all together and protect the delicate internal wires, yet they can have a slight effect on the sound, too. You can take a look at the cover and base plate in the figure.
Credit: Photograph by Dave Hunter
Both of these parts are somewhat self-descriptive.
Guitar
The Gibson ES-335 is the true godfather of semi-acoustic electric guitars. This guitar is traditionally made from a laminated maple top, back, and sides, with a solid maple core running down the center of the body.
Any guitar of similar construction, though (which includes solid carved top and back), can be considered to be in this same category (such as the Epiphone ES-339, a scaled-down rendition of the classic Gibson ES-335).
Each piece of gear you use together to make music is part of a sound chain. When you play an electric guitar, your sound is never just about that guitar; it’s an amalgam of everything else that contributes to the sound. In that sense, although your hands manipulate the guitar itself to make music, that first piece of the chain isn’t really an instrument all on its own.
The world of electric guitars has plenty of frauds masquerading as solidbody electrics while hiding a hollow secret deep within. Many so-called chambered or semi-solid guitars are built with bodies that begin with solid wood but are routed out to create either minor or substantial air pockets within.
Sometimes they’re revealed with an f-hole (like you might see on a fully acoustic archtop guitar), although often they’re hidden with a sold top with no soundholes.
A guitar pickup’s magnet or magnets provide(s) the power that enables it to do its thing by sensing the movement of the guitar’s steel strings when you play.
Different types of guitar pickups use different numbers of magnets, usually one, two, or six, depending on their design. If just one or two magnets are used, they are usually found as bar magnets mounted beneath the pickup’s coil, which charge steel pole pieces running through the coil.
Pole pieces are the screws, poles, or posts that run through the guitar pickup’s coil to serve as a magnetic conductor for each string. Frequently you see one pole piece per string (or two, in a humbucking pickup), but many designs also employ one long pole piece, or blade, to detect each string.
The pickup’s magnet or magnets can double as the pole pieces, and in such cases are mounted within the center of the coil.
If you’re not at all sure yet what kinds of sounds you’re looking for from your guitar and equipment, then you need options. Several types of amps out there are designed to offer a broad range of sounds — some of them, a little of just about everything — as well as some guitars and effects pedals that are particularly versatile, too.
Guitar
The tune-o-matic bridge was designed in 1954 by Gibson president Ted McCarty as a replacement for the wraparound bridge, and it has proved one of the most influential and most copied electric-guitar bridges since that time.
With six individually adjustable saddles, plus height adjustment via a thumbwheel at either end, this bridge allowed for extremely accurate intonation adjustment of each individual string.
A wraparound bridge is an integral bridge/tailpiece unit constructed traditionally from a metal bar drilled with six holes on the underside, into which the strings are loaded from the front before wrapping up and over the curved bar and heading off over the pickups and toward the neck.
The original renditions of these are solid, simple units, where the curved, slightly contoured bar acts as a single saddle piece for all strings.
Thinline electrics have slim but fully hollow bodies. They really aren’t deep enough to produce sufficient acoustic sound to be used unamplified, as you could with a full-depth archtop acoustic-electric guitar, but their acoustic nature does influence their electric tone. In a sense, you could categorize them under hollowbody electric guitars, but their shallow depth leads many guitarists and manufacturers to group them more closely with semi-acoustics.
Many vintage effects pedals and stand-alone units have sacred names out there in guitarland. Major artists will name-check them reverentially in magazine interviews; players will discuss them in hallowed tones on discussion sites; and vintage dealers will charge you enormous sums to get your hands on the more prized examples.
Tuners is the common contemporary term for those six little mechanisms mounted at your guitar’s headstock that are responsible for tuning the strings, which were often called machine heads or tuning gears in the old days. In one sense, their job is to efficiently bring your guitar strings up to tension and keep them there.
Your amp is where everything gets louder. In effect, the amp takes the signal from your guitar and translates it back into sound waves in the air that your listener can hear. But even at this seemingly final stage, plenty more happens to your sound than just the "gets louder" part of the equation.
The circuitry within most guitar amps contains several stages that shape your guitar signal in a variety of ways, one after the other, allowing you to alter and enrich your guitar tone, above and beyond merely amplifying it.
You can improve certain aspects of an underperforming guitar by upgrading certain hardware components. In some cases, if not all, a guitar that is otherwise solid in its body and neck, and which has a playing feel that you enjoy, can only be made better by the addition of, for example, a better bridge and/or tailpiece, improved tuners, a new nut, and so on.
Hang out in amp or guitar chat rooms or check out lots of manufacturers' promotional write-ups and you'll notice that that term "Class A" gets slung around more than hash off the griddle at a greasy spoon in Memphis. Call a thing "Class A" and it automatically sounds superior, right? As it applies to tube amps, though, Class A isn't necessarily on a par with Grade-A beef or First-Class mail.
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