Tag: guitar pedals

  • The 9 Most Common Mistakes Musicians Make When Learning to Play Electric Guitar

    The 9 Most Common Mistakes Musicians Make When Learning to Play Electric Guitar

    By Natalie Wilson As a guitar teacher, I see a lot of common mistakes in my beginner students. While it’s okay to have lofty goals and aspirations, all too often, beginner students get discouraged early on by not being able to achieve the tone, smoothness, and power of famous guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric…

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  • Don’t Hit the Stage Without These Overlooked Heroes of Your Pedalboard

    Don’t Hit the Stage Without These Overlooked Heroes of Your Pedalboard

    Guitarists like to spill ink all the time about distortion boxes, classic overdrives, boutique delay pedals, and bucket-brigade modulation effects. It’s understandable why: These attention-grabbing stompboxes lead to dramatic and satisfying changes in sound. Like a great vintage amp or a top-notch guitar, it’s these larger-than-life pedals that help a player define his or her…

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  • Aesthetics: The Forgotten Frontier in the Tone Debate

    Aesthetics: The Forgotten Frontier in the Tone Debate

    If you’ve spent enough time around guitarists or bassists, you’re certainly familiar with what gear obsession looks like. You may even be a gear obsessive yourself, or have at least been through a phase of quarreling over minutiae in online fora. And if you know a gear obsessive, you’ve almost certainly witnessed them debate their main adversary: the “tone-is-in-your-fingers”…

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  • 5 Mind-Bending Early Guitar Innovators

    5 Mind-Bending Early Guitar Innovators

    Compared to most instruments, the modern guitar is a relatively new instrument. While classical instruments like piano, brass, and woodwinds all have hundreds of years of pedagogy behind them, the language of guitar music and how we learn to play is new and constantly changing. Today, we can find chords to any song on the internet…

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  • 14 of the Most Commonly Confused Terms in Music and Audio

    14 of the Most Commonly Confused Terms in Music and Audio

    Once upon a time, remixing a song meant actually redoing the mix. Many vintage consoles (some Neve 80-series, for example) have a button labeled “remix” that changes a few functions on the desk to optimize it for mixing rather than recording. But sometime in the late 20th century, the word “remix” began to take on a new meaning:…

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  • 4 Other Uses for Your Favorite Guitar Pedals

    4 Other Uses for Your Favorite Guitar Pedals

    By Casey van Wensem Every guitarist has that one effects pedal (or two, or three, or 12) they just can’t live without. Maybe it’s a boutique overdrive pedal that gives you just the right amount of gain and saturation for crunchy leads or a vintage analog delay pedal perfect for lush, dreamy soundscapes and gigantic swells.…

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  • Everything You Didn’t Know You Needed to Know About Pedalboards

    Everything You Didn’t Know You Needed to Know About Pedalboards

    Pedals! Despite the wide range of effects they produce, individually, they’re typically pretty straightforward devices. But as soon as you begin to assemble a chain of pedals, complicating factors seem to mount up exponentially. The inconvenient reality is that the more complex the system of pedals, the more helpful it becomes to have some basic…

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  • Keep ‘Em Guessing: A Bizarre Holiday Gift List for the Special Musician in Your Life

    Keep ‘Em Guessing: A Bizarre Holiday Gift List for the Special Musician in Your Life

    If you’re still wondering what to wrap up inside a box this holiday season, maybe your list could use a bit of outside the box thinking. We can help with that! Here’s a list of our favorite bizarre musical gifts for the loved ones in your life who deserve something a bit special this year! (If you…

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  • 12 Essential Guitar Pedals for Your 2016 Holiday Wish List

    12 Essential Guitar Pedals for Your 2016 Holiday Wish List

    Happy holidays, dear Flypaper readers and Soundfly students! If you’re anything like me, that is, a chronically dissatisfied gear nerd, this is the time of year when many manufacturers and distributers offer great deals on their products, upon which we must pounce like the bargain-savvy consumers that we are.  Heck, it’s our right as Americans! This year,…

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  • How to Create a Shoegaze Guitar Sound with Effects Pedals

    How to Create a Shoegaze Guitar Sound with Effects Pedals

    Trying to get a classic shoegaze tone out of your guitar? Our affordable effects pedal combo will help achieve that shimmering wall of sound.

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