Tag: tips

Posted in Tips and Online finds

Thoughts on Guitar Amp live EQ Settings

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I play a lot of gigs of all kinds and styles of music , as I always enjoyed doing that. I always considered myself a bit of a ‘session guitarist’ always trying to ‘fit in’ rather than ‘stick out’. When somebody approaches me at the end of a gig and says  how well I complemented the band and ‘blended in’, I feel I have done my job.

So I wanted to do a post on what I think a lot of guitarists out there get wrong…remember this is my opinion!!

First of all: you need to  find a balance between what is a volume/tone/sustain that is both comfortable and inspiring for you but not overpowering and intrusive for the other band members.

A good approach is to CUT rather than to BOOST on your amp’s EQ section. Unless you are playing on the same stage every night, every room will make your amp sound different. So I always start from all EQ on 12 o’clock and start cutting what I feel makes my tone muddy. Usually…bass!! I always hear too much bass coming from guitar amps. That’s the bass player’s realm.

Cutting frequencies will also allow me to turn up the volume more, which is always a good thing for tone…we all know that! 🙂

A slight boost in the midrange area might help you ‘cut through’ when needed.

I own different amps, but my go-to amp for medium size gigs is a modified Fender Hot Rod Deluxe with a Vintage 30 speaker.  Unless you play metal, there is enough in there to make everybody happy at any gig, and not break your back carrying it around. It’s not an expensive amp, and I have seen even Mike Landau use them live and great some great tones…so if it is good enough for him…

Even though ‘all knobs all the way up’ might be  a good setting to record a rhythm part in a studio, this might make your tone clearer and fuller:

Then again…use your ears!! All I mean to say here is try to think like a sound engineer mixing a band rather than just to make your guitar sound bigger.

A last thought: learn to play with a lighter touch. Too many guitarist pick too hard all the time. Let the amp do the work for you, and ‘dig in’ when you need that extra kick or break-up. All my favourite guitarist in terms of tone just about touch the strings with their picking hand.

Suggested Reading:

Guitar Tone: Pursuing the Ultimate Guitar Sound

Posted in A day in the life of a musician

The Importance of Repertoire

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In this short post I want to spend a few words on the importance of knowing tunes, either written by other musicians or by yourself. ‘Repertoire’ is often a fancy word we use to identify ‘all the tunes we know’.

In my experience as teacher I have found to be a divide between the guitarist that is obsessed by theory and scales and that who is just interested in learning songs with no real interest in knowing how this songs are created.  I always wondered why  the second category were happier about their playing…

We spend as musicians most of our time learning theory, techniques and we often wonder how these fit in with ‘real life’….a lot of times we forget that tunes and musical pieces/compositions should be the goal of what we do. All these exercises and music theory studies should be a way to better perform and understand the tunes we know and write.

I always suggest to all my students to always keep an updated list of all the tunes they know (or they can busk), and a folder with all their original material, from the completed tunes to the ‘work in progress’ type material.

Keep writing and learning new tunes: this will give you a sense of purpose  in your studies and also it will be a test for all the techniques and theory you have learnt…

Good luck!

Posted in Guest Post

Tempo Memory – By Mike Outram

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This is a guest post by Mike Outram.  Mike is a London based guitarist, professor at Trinity College of Music and The Royal Academy of Music with performing credits including Tony Levin, Gavin Harrison, Robert fripp and many more.  More about him at: MikeOutram.com

You’re in Gardonyi’s, looking over a piece of music that seems interesting and you want to get the gist of how it goes. Your sight-singing is impeccable so that holds no problems, but what’s that in the corner of the page? – ’120 bpm’.

Can you guess what the tempo of the piece is? One way to do it is to look at a clock and count the rate of the seconds – that’s obviously 60 bpm [beats per minute]. Double it if you need 120 bpm; half it if you want 30 bpm; triplets would move at a rate of 180 bpm. And then, is it a little faster or slower than one of those? Great, but what if there’s no clock?

Well, make a tempo map. Pick some very memorable songs that you can easily imagine and map their tempo. Start vague and get more detailed as you go on. Ideally, they’d be songs that everyone knows, definitive versions, for it to work. And you have to have a pretty accurate mental image of the song at roughly the right tempo.

I started out thinking I’d get a list of ‘the most popular songs of all time’ and work out the BPM. But I think what you really need is:

1. a really memorable song that you know very well and can easily imagine.

2. a way of linking the BPM to some content within the song. Or, any way of memorizing the tempo that’s quick and doesn’t involve rote memorization.

I found this great site http://djbpmstudio.com, which is a list of thousands of songs and their tempos. On that site, you can look at all the songs at, say, 120 bpm and then just choose the song you know best at that speed and then come up with a way of memorising the tempo. For example, it’d be great if ‘When I’m 64′ was actually 64 BPM, or 128. But it isn’t, so forget that. But you get the idea, eh?

Ok, so now you have the problem of memorising which songs go with which tempo but maybe that’s where you can get all creative in service to the common good by somehow linking a tempo to a song, Tony Buzan-style 🙂

So, maybe you’re a massive Queen fan. Of course you are! If so, I’ll start you off. Here are some Queen tracks and their rough BPM. Can you think of a clever way to memorise the tempo?

40 bpm: Somebody to Love – 40 bpm is from ‘Find’ and ‘Body’ in this song. (I’m allowing this kind of fudging the rules). We Will Rock You and Save Me also work. Maybe you could think, 40 bpm is the first thing on the metronome and the first thing you need in life is Somebody to Love 🙂 That’s a terribly lame example but I am sure you are WAY better at this than I am.

50:

60:

70:

80:

90: Fat Bottomed Girls

100: Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy

110: Another One Bites the Dust

120: You’re My Best Friend

130: Now I’m Here

140:

150:

160:

Use this site to test your tempo memory powers:http://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm Can you nail 90 bpm? Try it…

Other games to try if you’ve got no friends or are pathologically bored: Try and name any tempo and hit the bpm and nail it straight away. Or, try to keep the tempo the same for more than two beats.

So the question is: Are you geek enough to make a tempo map? Do you instantly know the tempo of a particular song? Why? How? Why aren’t you sharing your knowledge here? Or maybe it’s just me…

Posted in The Jazzy stuff (but good for every style!)

Tips: play Giant Steps on guitar

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Giant Steps has always been a challenging standard to play, in this video I give a few tips on how to approach this famous tune.

The Chords (from the fake book-as far as I know it is not copyrighted material so I am posting the original):

One good ‘pattern’ to start familiarising with the progression in playing 1235 for every chord (meaning the 1st,2nd,3nd and 5th of every chord). For the original key it would be B,C#,D#,F#(Bmaj7) then D,E,F#,A (D7), G,A,B,D (G)and so on…

It’s all about getting used to keep your brain engaged at any time. A great exercise!