5 Tips for Beginner Guitarists

1. Walk before you can run. Get the basics down before you start investing in extra guitar accessories. Although effects pedals can sound great, sometimes they can disguise your mistakes and make you sound better than you actually are. For example a compressor pedal makes your volume nice and even. It’s much better if you learn to hit the strings more evenly.

Sometimes you may not even have the ability to try something different. For example if you try a heavier gauge of strings they can be much harder to press down.

2. Make sure your overall technique is decent. It can hold you back if it’s not. You don’t need to do anything in an exact way, just make sure it’s comfortable! That’s the main thing!

3. Practice, but not too much! Yes this may sound like an odd one. You’re probably used to people telling you to practice all you can in your free time. However you want to avoid a situation where you’re burning out from playing too much but not improving. This is deadly as it can make you want to stop playing. So take lots of breaks and make sure you’re enjoying yourself.

4. Play with others. Playing with others, even when you’re a beginner can help lots. You can see where you’re going wrong and get new ideas. It’s good to have someone else (preferably another beginner) to compare yourself against.

5. Always be trying and learning new things. That includes chords, scales, songs and techniques. Don’t just stick to one sort of music and style. Having a diverse playing style early on will really pay off later. It’s easy to get stuck in one musical style.

Also check out our article on buying great beginner gear and read this awesome article for more info on beginner guitar tips http://www.fretjam.com/beginner-guitar-tips.html

Guitar equipment and your style

Been thinking more about guitar gear again recently (see this post if you want to see the best places to buy it).

I was thinking about the importance of developing your sound into something truly unique. Your gear plays a bit part in this (of course your technical skill is the most important part!)

What you don’t want to do, and what I did when I was first playing, is just buy a bit of everything without properly thinking. While this is ok with cheap stuff like picks, with expensive pedals, leads, guitar types etc it can get very expensive indeed. So it’s very important to stop and think what exact gear you want. Ask yourself these questions:

What genres of music do you like?

What’s your play style like? (fast speed metal or slower chord based music)

How hard is it to achieve the sound / tone you want?

Have you fully developed your technical skill to at least a basic level?

Answering these questions will let you make more decisions about the gear you need. For example with a different string gauge or certain pedal you may be able to get that sound you want.

So think and listen before you spend hundreds on unneeded gear!

Guitar Cable Sizes

As you get more experienced, and you start needing to mess around with guitar equipment and plugging them into various other hardware, you’ll need to know more about cables. Here is a quick guide on the different cable head sizes.

Cool Solo Video & The Value of Practice

Stumbled upon this cool lesson for writing a melodic solo. Really good advice. Made me think that it’s important to get the basics down before you start experimenting with pedals, amps, string thickness and new guitars. They can only do so much to mask as sloppy player. You need to be able to walk before you can run. They extra guitar gear can make you sound unnaturally good.

So make sure you at least have the basics down first. It’s ok to test new stuff out (it should be encouraged – pedals aren’t just for the elite!), but just don’t go OTT!

The Electric: Best Amp For A Worship Band?

Don’t talk about amps much on this blog – check out this awesome post.

Real World Worship

In this series I try and address different aspects of the practical side of playing electric guitar in church music. This week we’ll talk about amplifiers, which ones are good for a worship band, and which ones should be avoided.

KNOW WHAT AN AMP IS

An amp isn’t just the speaker that produces your guitars sound. In many way, the amplifier is an instrument in it’s own right. An acoustic guitar is just an acoustic guitar, but an electric guitar rig (guitar, amp, effects) is a group of instruments being used together to produce a sound or tone. My point is that it doesn’t make any sense to put money into a nice guitar or effects pedals and then have an amp that is sub par. An amp is an instrument. It has to sound good in its own right. To that end, if the amp doesn’t sound good on it’s…

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Tutoring and Gear

Been thinking more about guitar gear again recently (see this post if you want to see the best places to buy it).

I was thinking about the importance of developing your sound into something truly unique. Your gear plays a bit part in this (of course your technical skill is the most important part!)

What you don’t want to do, and what I did when I was first playing, is just buy a bit of everything without properly thinking. While this is ok with cheap stuff like picks, with expensive pedals, leads, guitar types etc it can get very expensive indeed. So it’s very important to stop and think what exact gear you want. Ask yourself these questions:

• What genres of music do you like?
• What’s your play style like? (fast speed metal or slower chord based music)
• How hard is it to achieve the sound / tone you want?
• Have you fully developed your technical skill to at least a basic level?

Answering these questions will let you make more decisions about the gear you need. For example with a different string gauge or certain pedal you may be able to get that sound you want.

So think and listen before you spend hundreds on unneeded gear!

Buying Cheap Accessories, Guitars & Equipment

At the moment I’m teaching my nephew the guitar. He’s using a really old one that I used to own. It’s actually older than me, sounds horrible and is hard to use. So we’re looking for a new one. It’s my philosophy that you should learn straight away on a full size guitar. You’re just going to be able to get up to speed faster when playing an electric.

In this search for a beginner guitar I went through a lot of sites so consider myself a bit of an expert now!

One thing which struck me is the wide range of prices, and the amount of sites who charge way too much. You really need to do your research! Even going into guitar shops in Manchester was expensive (good chance to test though!).

Also made me think about other beginner gear, and how sometimes we overpay. For example – why should a beginner ever pay 100s of pounds for a new distortion pedal? Seems silly to me, most beginners can’t usually tell the difference, plus amps already have distortion! But fair enough if you want to just test out a few pedals so you can try and play different genres of music.

It’s all about gradually building up. Buy what you need and nothing else. It will really make you appreciate the good gear and will help you tell the difference between ok gear, and good gear. So try not to pay for brand names when you’re starting out. For me this had the added benefit of making me think this “Well my gear is ok, a little on the cheap side. Hmm I need to sound better. I know – I’ll practice more!”. This is always the best solution. Practice to sound better – don’t buy expensive equipment to make you sound better. The day where you need expensive equipment and accessories may come one day. But not within the first few years of your musical career.

Anyway that’s my quick bit of advice on buying. Hope it helps!

Digital Guitar Technology – Sometimes Better?

It’s only natural that guitar systems join the majority of other wireless technology and go digital. Only now that they have been out of a good few years can we properly evaluate them. But how do digital wireless guitar systems they work? The transmitter converts the guitar sound to VHF or UHF radio waves. What I didn’t mention was in the process of being converted to VHF or UHF something called a compander is used to squash the signal so it fits into the range of VHF or UHF and then when it reaches the receiver, it’s expanded out again into the original guitar sound. But inevitably when you squash the signal down like this, some quality is lost. With a digital system there isn’t a compander, so there isn’t any squashing of the signal and therefore it sounds much better; the signal should arrive in exactly the same form as it left the guitar pickups. Another problem with VHF or UHF systems is to do with the bandwidth, and in particular dealing with the bass noise. Bottom E on a bass is 44Hz and some VHF or UHF systems simply don’t get this quality range, a similar thing can be said for higher sounds as well; some quality will be lost. A digital system will have the full range however, and minimal sound quality will be lost.

With a digital system you should get no interference at all, certainly not from anything on the VHF or UHF frequencies such as radio waves and TV signals. Other digital signals such as phones, Bluetooth and wireless internet should not be picked up by a wireless guitar system because the receiver is only searching for a digital transmission from the transmitter which is encoded in a certain way. All other digital transmissions it ignores, so that’s why the chance of interference is virtually impossible. The weak point of digital transmission used to be range, but thanks to advances in technology this is no longer the case. You can see from the digital Line6 Relay range they have increased the range substantially with each new models the G30 has a 30m range, the G50 has a 60m range and the G90 has a 90m range.

So overall you have to say that digital systems seem to be superior to VHF or UHF systems, before it was hard to justify the massive amounts of money you would have to spend on a digital system but now they have come down a lot in price; you can even pick up the Joyo digital wireless guitar systems system for a decent price. The better quality, reliability, and now equal range therefore make digital systems a great purchase. But a lot still depends on build quality. A highly priced UHF system is almost certainly going to be better than a low priced digital system.

You can’t say this about pedals though. I’ve tested quite a few, and must say they sound horrible (in my personal experience). The other day I tried a digital pedal, and an analog pedal. While the digital had more features, and could delay for longer, it just sounded baaaaad! It sounded cheap. Not beautiful.

I guess that tells us that digital technology works well for some guitar equipment and accessories, but not others.

Here is a good article if you want to read more:

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Analog_vs_Digital

Cool Effects Pedal Infographic

Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.

We think this infographic is really cool. Explains everything so much better than words ever could! Also gives a great overview of guitar pedals in general.

Getting Good Reception From Receivers

You obviously don’t want your wireless guitar system to crackle, pick up interference or even not work at all. Buying a good qualify system can stop these things to an extent but there are also a few things you can do yourself to boost the performance on a low quality system, or extract even more performance on a higher quality system. The following technique should be able to be used on all systems and can also work as a rough troubleshooting guide if your system isn’t working at all.

Main causes of poor wireless guitar system performance:

1. Objects in the line of sight. The guitar signal can be interrupted by physical objects getting in between the transmitter and the receiver. This tends to be a problem with system at the higher end of the scale since they find it harder to diffract around objects. This problem is easy enough to get around; simply make sure all unnecessary objects are not in the way between you and the receiver. If the stage is at a strange angle which means the line of sight isn’t great, perhaps consider moving your receiver from your amplifier to your pedal board for example, or vice versa.

2. Out of range. As you probably know there is a limit as to how far you can go from the receiver. Going past this limit will cause your system to cut out or become unreliable. However most systems have a decent range that you’re unlikely to go beyond, and instead the problem may be a delay. Now the delay may not be a problem with the wireless guitar system at all, the delay may be caused by you being so far away from the amplifier, that the sound takes more time to get to you – since as you probably know, sound travels relatively slowly. Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do without rewriting the laws of sound! One possibility would be to hook up a headset to play directly into your ears – so you’re hearing the sound through your earphones not the amplifier. If you’re in a big band and this happens to you, ask someone at your local music shop for a solution similar to the one I mentioned above. Otherwise, just don’t walk too far away from your amplifier!

3. Low Batteries. The power of the batteries do depend a lot on the quality of the performance. If they’re low and you try to make them last as long as possible this will compromise the quality. Most system do have low battery warnings, but if you get one half way through a set then that’s no good! The beauty of the G30 system from line6 is the accurate battery display, which will tell you how much time you have left. Try and not play with the battery below 25% – at this stage (depending on system) you will start to see the negative effects. So try and replace the batteries before they reach this stage to have your system at peak performance at all times.

4. Excessive reflections. Radio waves can bounce off objects, which may result in the receiver picking up the signal at different points in time. This is because the signal from the receiver took a slightly longer path when it reflected off something. The problem won’t be any sort of delay but rather a conflict with the phase, which creates interference and a bad quality sound. The best way to stop this is to thoroughly test the stage / area you will be performing. You may well find that in certain locations there will be excessive reflections, and in other areas it will be fine. If you find a poor area just stay out of it! Luckily as technology has advanced these reflections are quite rare and should not be a problem.

Hopefully with those tips you should get a little bit more performance out of your systems. Thanks for reading 🙂