Over the summer, Reverb’s Joe Shadid got the first-hand lowdown on Cory Wong’s warmup routine. The video is chock-full of great practice ideas… that I didn’t implement. Maybe I’m just a weirdo, but seeing things written down makes them way more actionable for me. So I went through the video and wrote down each exercise. […]
Field Guide To Guitar Tones: Reverb
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. […]