An Intermediate Guide to Chord Tones and Tensions
Thinking about how chords relate to the notes in your melody is an important aspect of voice leading with intention — here’s a quick guide.
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Why Loud Bass Is So Problematic in a Mix
Bass frequencies can really mess up your mix, here’s why, how, and what you can do about it whether you’re mixing or mastering your audio.
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Why Can’t You Tune Your Guitar?
15 minutes of math and learning about frequency divisions can help you understand for good why your guitar may never fundamentally be in tune.
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The Best Guitar Amps for Different Genres, and Why
If you’re new to buying guitar equipment, you may want to start yourself off with an amp that already fits your genre’s sound. Here’s how to choose.
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What to Look for in Your First Guitar Amplifier
If you’re new to guitar amps and not sure what you’re looking for, here are a few guidelines that can help you make the best choice for your needs.
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5 Ways to Shape Your Guitar Tone in the Recording Studio
You’re not rewriting your songs or buying a new guitar before you enter the studio, so here are 5 ways to perfect your tone once you get there!
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Let’s Get Weird: Crazy Pedals for Crazy Guitarists – Distortion
Distortion, or dirt, as us cool guys call it, is not only used in loud garage rock. In fact, it’s used in every genre of music under the sun. It’s that crunch on the guitar, that huge, fuzz sound, the broken amp effect. There are three major types of distortion: fuzz, overdrive, and distortion, as well…
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Bang for Your Buck in a Box: A Rainbow of Great Guitar Pedals Under $200
With the explosion of boutique guitar pedal manufacturers in recent years, there’s never been a better time to get that certain sound under your stage toes. But it’s also in the nature of specialty pedals to be, well, specialized. In addition to being less versatile, they also tend to be a bit more expensive. Here…
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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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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:…
