20 Life-Saving and Extremely Useful Guitar and Gear Tips!

To commemorate my 200th post, here are 20 useful, and on occasion, life-saving guitar and gear tips that have worked for me over the years.

• Leave cables with solderless plugs for home or studio use.  I really like the tone of cables with solderless plugs.  They usually tend to be of high quality and sound really transparent.   But they're also most prone to a bad or loose connection that can be a nightmare to troubleshoot, especially if you have a huge pedalboard.

• Use an aural exciter if you need to punch through the band without playing louder.  An aural exciter works by separating the different frequencies in a signal by milliseconds so that they reach the input source or amplifier at slightly different times.  This separation reduces muddying of frequencies resulting in better clarity.

• If you've just bought a new multi effects pedal, don't bother tweaking the tone at home.  Once the rest of the band kicks in, it's going to sound totally different onstage.  Book a couple of hours rehearsal time with your band and tell your mates that the session is purely for you to tweak your sound 

• Don't pay attention to the numbers on the knobs when tweaking your gear. Just keep twisting the knobs till the sound approximates what you hear in your head.  Then use the numbers as a reference to remember later.

• When using an amp modelling pedal in a live situation, play through a clean solid state amp -- I love the Roland JC120 or JC160 solid-state amps for this application.  Tube amps impart too much of their own color to the sound.  A direct line into the PA also works well but you'll need a good soundman who can give you a good onstage monitor mix

• Go stereo.  All the famous cats, from Steve Lukather to Pat Metheny to John Scofield do it.  Stereo creates a nice spread to the sound, and surprisingly lets you relax more as you play because you're not dealing with a sound that is emanating from a single, direct source.  And going stereo let's the bass player enjoy some of your juicy tones from his side of the stage too!  

• A simple truss-rod adjustment can make a guitar play like butter.  Learn to do this yourself or shell out a few bills for a repairman or luthier.  My personal preference is for absolutely no neck relief.

• If you're going to be leaving your guitar on a stand between sets, unplug that guitar cable and put it away from the instrument.  Guitar cables have a tendency to get caught in people's feet, unleashing that prized PRS Private Stock onto the floor.  The floor always wins.  If you play an expensive instrument, it belongs back in the case between sets, no matter how gorgeous it looks onstage on a stand.  'At first it's all ooh and ahh, and then there's running and screaming..'

• If you have your guitar setup the way you like it but there is still some fretting out somewhere around the 17th to 20th frets you might want to check that the screws on that bolt-on neck are not torqued too tightly.  Overtightened screws tend to push against the fingerboard, causing a slight hump which can lead to fret buzz. This applies especially to fretless bass!  Thanks to my friend and bass virtuoso Serge Dionne for this tip!

• A compressor is your best friend for clean tones.  It fattens the sound, increases perceived sustain and generally imparts a polished, studio-quality tone.  Add a smidgen of reverb and you're golden.

• You can buff out ragged edges on a guitar pick by rubbing it against carpet!

• Pickups set too close to the strings can cause a warbling, double-toned, 'out-of-tuneness' when playing above the 12th fret.  This is especially true of single-coil pickups.  Back the pickups off a little more and allow the strings to 'breathe' and vibrate through their full ellipse.  But back the pickups off too much and you'll lose some output.  Find a happy medium.

• The neck pickup always sounds louder than the bridge pickup -- the neck pickup sees a far bigger vibrational movement of the string.  I like to set Stratocaster pickups or Les Paul pickups so that the relative volumes between each pickup are as equal as I can get it.  And this usually means setting the neck, and middle pickups (on a Strat) slightly lower than the bridge pickup. This will also help in alleviating the warbling and intonation problems I mentioned earlier.  

• On nylon string guitars you can get away with changing the nylon treble strings once with every three or four changes of the metal wound bass strings.

• If you go with stainless steel strings on an electric, you can leave the bass strings and get away with replacing only the top three treble strings two or three times before you have to replace the entire set.  Clean the bass strings between changes with isopropyl alcohol or even aftershave lotion!

• Rosewood fretboards tend to dry out and need to be lightly oiled once every six months.  Just a smidgen of lemon oil does the trick.  I usually also take this opportunity to go over the fingerboard with a soft toothbrush, removing any gunk that has accumulated.  Moisturized rosewood has a nice luster and shows off the grain of the wood.  Dunlop makes some nice fingerboard conditioning products.

• Maple fingerboards usually have some kind of hard finish over them and therefore do not need moisturizing.  Just the occasional cleaning with a coarse, damp rag -- with the strings off of course.

• Clean volume, tone and wah wah potentiometers with a spritz of a good quality contact cleaner meant for electronics.  Servisol brand contact cleaner is probably the best.  Don't use WD40 as it has too much gunky industrial lubricant that will build up and spell trouble in the long run!    

• Stewart-MacDonald produces radius gauges for measuring arcs between 7 1/4" and 20".  Repairman use these gauges and often adjust the bridge arc radius to match the fingerboard radius.  When I did get hold of one of these radius gauges I measured how I had set up the bridge saddles on my own guitars.  I found that I had consistently gone with a 12" arc radius, regardless of fingerboard radius, on all my guitars, purely by feel.  Just my preference, but you might want to experiment with the gauges yourself.  Dan Erlewine's 'How To Make Your Electric Guitar Play Great' includes free radius gauges in soft vinyl.  A must have!

• With some bolt-on neck guitars you may find that the bridge saddles are as low as they can possibly go but that the action is still too high.  Shimming the neck in the neck pocket is your only option in these cases -- I've used strips cut out of business cards for this purpose in the past.  The added tilt to the neck angle automatically causes the strings to sit lower to the fretboard.  Fender's Micro-Tilt feature performs this adjustment admirably without having to add shims or even remove the neck. 

 So there we go.  Twenty of my most useful guitar and gear tips.  What are some of yours?

WAVES Eddie Kramer Artist Signature Series

Working at Olympic studios as staff engineer in the 60s, Eddie Kramer helped a certain rock guitar legend revolutionize the art of recording .

When Olympic studio relocated to Barnes from London in January 1967, Jimi Hendrix was among the first artists to record there.

To create the sonic soundscapes that Jimi envisioned, and given the limitations of only 4-track machines to record with at Olympic, tracks had to be recorded on one 4-track, ‘comped’ (compiled into a stereo mix), and then bounced to 2 tracks of another 4-track machine.

Needless to say that everything had to be exactly as they wanted it as there was no way to modify or undo tracks once they were comped and bounced.

Says Kramer of his time working with Hendrix, “When he played the guitar.. it’s the guitar, the hands, the heart, the brain, it all became one. When he played a chord or played a solo, it was so telling, so vibrant and so unusual that people were just attracted to it. My job was to capture the sounds.”

In collaboration with Kramer, WAVES has introduced their Eddie Kramer Artist Signature Series of software plug-ins.

Designed to work on various digital audio platforms, this software bundle is designed to give anybody immediate access to Kramer’s recording expertise by way of his personal EQ, compression, reverb and echo settings for each different instrument group. According to Kramer, the plug-ins “ reflect some of the sounds I‘ve created over the years, so the end user can call up an Eddie Kramer vocal sound, guitar sound or drum sound.”

For the guitar plug-in, Kramer designed a “good overall rock guitar sound” -- something he has come to be identified with considering his work with Hendrix and Jimmy Page -- with a punchy EQ in the midrange, compression, reverb and slap echo. Slap echo, Kramer feels imparts a much needed analog quality.

For the inexperienced home recording buff as well as the budding professional engineer , Kramer has taken the guesswork out of trying to figure out all the various EQ and compression settings for drums, cymbals, overheads, bass, guitars and vocals. The end user gets a great starting point, eliminating hours or even days ‘tone-chasing’ in the studio.

The Orange Squeezer And The Dynacomp -- A Tale of Two Compressors

Back in the 70's there were two compressors of note -- the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer and the MXR Dynacomp.

Plainly speaking, the Orange Squeezer was the more sought after of the two by tone connoisseurs.

But the Orange Squeezer had a major downside. It wasn't a floor-dwelling stompbox but a small box with a right-angled 1/4" plug that connected directly to the guitar's input jack -- not a viable option for Stratocaster players because of the Strat's recessed input jack. It also wasn't very adjustable having just one flip switch to turn the unit on or off.

But it did sound pretty good.

The choice of top studio guitarists of the day such as Tommy Tedesco, Jay Graydon and Lee Ritenour, the unit's characteristic slightly exagerrated compression appeared on many a hit album. Ritenour was often photographed with an Orange Squeezer attached like a permanent appendage to his red Gibson 335.

But nearly non-existent marketing and poor distribution meant an early ride into the sunset for the original Orange Squeezer. Although there were attempts at re-releasing the Orange Squeezer by Mutron in the late 80's such as the one pictured here (Pic Source: AnalogMan), the lack of availability of the the original IC chips meant that similarities were little more than cosmetic.

Throughout the 70's and 80's MXR, on the other hand, was aggressively marketing its comprehensive line of effects pedals for the modern guitarist, including phasers, flangers, choruses and distortion boxes.

The Dynacomp, the company's flagship compressor pedal, was a strong contender and was the standard pedal that appeared on many pedalboards long before the mass marketing and profileration of the Boss pedal line by Roland Japan in the late 70's.

Fast forward to 2009 and Dunlop Mfg., the present owner of the MXR brand, has reissued the '76 Dynacomp in all its vintage glory.

With the original thin-script lettering framed against the familiar matte red box -- along with a true-to-the-original lack of an LED indicator -- this pedal is more than a mere cosmetic reissue.

According to Dunlop, the internal components are identical to the original -- from the handmade wire harness to the original out-of-production 'new old-stock' CA3080 IC chip. Because of limited availability of this chip, the Dynacomp reissue is being produced in a limited run by the MXR Custom Shop.

Determining Proper Placement for Effects Pedals In A Signal Chain

We're in the Golden Age of effects pedals. The humble stompbox has enjoyed a tremendous resurgence and no self-respecting guitar player will be seen without at least a couple of them at his feet.

And in response to prevailing market demand, a plethora of backyard workshop-type companies have emerged, churning out an endless parade of 'boutique' stompboxes -- old schematics, slightly modified, upgraded with audiophile-grade components, given nifty names and sold for stupefying prices.

Pedalboard sizes too have reverted to the gargantuan, stage-hogging proportions of the ones used by rockstar guitarists of the 70's -- think David Gilmour's sprawling Pete Cornish pedal rig on many a Pink Floyd tour.

After the smoke has cleared, determining the correct order of effects on a pedalboard is key to getting the best tone with the cleanest possible signal out of it.

As a general rule, here's how pedals can best be arranged on a pedalboard when using them in series ie. a pedal's signal feeding the next pedal in the chain.

From the guitar's output, the order of effects will be:

1. Wah pedal
2. Compressor/limiter
3. Booster, overdrive, fuzz and distortion pedals
4. Equalizer
5. Pitch-altering pedals such as octavers and pitch-shifters
6. Envelope filters and ring modulators
7. Short time-based effects such as phasers, flangers, chorus pedals and Leslie-speaker simulators
8. Signal attenuators such as volume pedals and noise gates
9. Long time-based effects such as reverbs and delays

As always, take this as a basic guideline and experiment..

Using Compressor/Limiter Pedals

A compressor can be a very effective device when used properly. But because they are often misunderstood, so too are they often misused.

Compressors -- sometimes called compressor/limiters -- do essentially two things, and it's all about thresholds:

First, they boost low signals so that the signal does not fall below a certain 'floor' threshold.

As a string is plucked it vibrates intensely. Over the span of several seconds, the vibrations gradually decrease and the string eventually stops moving.

But as long as the string is still vibrating, no matter how subtly, the compressor boosts the level of the signal gradually, corresponding to the decay of the vibrating string. This creates the perception of increased sustain as the signal does not decay as quickly.

Secondly, compressors create a 'ceiling' so that the volume and dynamic do not go above a threshold that has been set -- they limit loud signals. If the note is hit harder than the setting on the pedal allows, the compressor kicks in. Which can create a desirable effect as we shall describe below.

Depending on how we set the floor and ceiling thresholds, the signal can come out very even, characterized by increased sustain and and a characteristic compressed 'squash' if the note is played hard. This squash can be used to good effect for funk rhythms, for smooth-jazz type solos and for country pedal-steel-type bends.

But since compressors raise the floor threshold of a signal, they will also raise noise and hiss levels of booster, overdrive and distortion pedals if placed after these. They should therefore always be placed first in the chain, immediately after the guitar.

Let's look at what we have to work with on a typical compression pedal. On the classic Boss CS-series Compressor/Limiter pedals there are controls for Level, Attack and Sustain.

Level controls the overall amount of volume coming out of the pedal. What most players don't realise is that Level also determines the 'ceiling threshold' described earlier. Setting it lower, let's say at 10 o'clock, also lowers the ceiling, which means that we do not have to play as hard for the compressor to kick in, resulting in more squashing of the signal. Raising the Level beyond 12 o'clock causes the compressor to kick in less, allowing for a more neutral sound.

The Attack knob controls attack time. Attack time determines how soon (in miliseconds) the compressor will kick in when the input exceeds the threshold set by the Level. Setting the Attack low allows more of the initial attack of the note through, which sounds more natural. Set higher, the signal becomes very even, with the attack smoothed out.

Sustain controls the 'floor threshold' described earlier. Set lower, the compressor does less to amplify any signal that falls below a certain level, resulting in faster note decay. Set higher and the compressor becomes more sensitive to any signal that falls below a certain level, raising their apparent loudness, and increasing sustain.

Use these concepts as a basic guideline, then break out the ol' compressor and have at it..

Buy Compressor Pedals Here!