Reverb is the original effect: the sound of the music interacting with the space in which it’s played. Sound moves fast—over 1000 ft/second. But that’s slow enough that we can perceive the difference between soundwaves that come directly to our ear, and soundwaves that are reflected first. Your ear is hearing the original sound, plus […]
Field Guide To Guitar Tones: Compression
This is the first in a series on common guitar tones that you ought to be able to identify by ear. The guide is roughly organized into chronological order—the order in which these sounds were introduced into the world. Each week from now until ~December, I’ll post a new one. This is a living guide, […]
Field Guide To Guitar Tones
I used to play in a band with a keyboard player who was a middle school music teacher. He would play recordings for his students and say things like “you hear that distorted slide guitar solo?” only to be met with blank stares—they had no idea what he was talking about. So he’d bring me […]
Five Pieces of Gear That Will Actually Make You Better At Guitar
We live in a golden age of guitar gear. Everywhere you look there’s a cool new gadget that redefines our price-vs-quality expectations. The trouble is, it’s such a fast-moving field that we can easily spend an hour (or more) each day “researching” gear. And really, we ought to be spending that time actually playing guitar. […]
Learn To Think In Intervals With The Same/Adjacent/Octave Rule
If I showed you these two notes, would you know what the interval is between them? What about these two? If yes, great. Carry on with what you were doing. But if no? Then let me show you: how to figure these intervals out quickly, and why you would even care about doing so. The […]