Come with us as we examine one of the most common guitar playing myths about guitar tone. Many think that buying expensive equipment will give you great sound. Join us as we discover what the true secret is to capturing professional sounding tones

There is one aspect of playing the guitar that can be quite elusive, even for the best of guitarists, and can even become an obsession for those who can never seem to find it. This crucial and pivotal aspect of playing the guitar is the tone. Every person who is serious about the guitar and strives to master the instrument understands that playing guitar isn’t simply about skill, but about skill that sounds good.

Trying to discover the perfect tone is like searching for the Holy Grail. You’re not sure if it exists, but there are a lot of myths and stories that seem to offer clues about where it can be found. There are a lot of myths about how one can achieve the perfect tone and sound from their guitar, and just about all of them are false.

One popular myth about achieving great guitar tones is that you have to have a certain type of pickup. While certain brands and types of pickups can improve the quality of your overdrive tones and give you some nice bottom end and some sweet highs, these pickups still won’t give you great tone. There are a lot of individuals who think that getting a new set of humbuckler pickups will solve their tone issues and that immediately they’ll begin playing like Eric Clapton! These individuals drop a lot of money to get these pickups put into their guitar, only to plug in and find that the sound they’re looking for still isn’t there.

Another popular myth about guitar tone is that you have to have a Marshall half stack in order to get professional, warm sounding tones. A lot of individuals get duped into thinking that if they buy the most expensive amplifiers from the biggest brand names it will automatically give them professional quality tones. While it is true that top notch equipment can really help you to fine tune your sound and help you expand your creativity, it’s still not going to make you sound like a professional, and it’s still not going to give you the sound quality you’re going for.

The only way to truly achieve professional sounding guitar tones is to focus on your playing abilities. As they say, the tone is in your fingers! You can have all the best selling, top of the line equipment there is and still sound like an amateur. In order to develop a great sound and a nice tone, you have to perfect your skills. The reason some of rock music’s greatest guitarists sound so good is because they are good. If you want great sound, focus on how you play and on mastering your instrument and that will take you down the path to achieving great sound.

Join us as we take a look into several different methods of how to improve your guitar tone during a live performance. You can also learn the benefits of using guitar backing tracks to help perfect your skills in practice and for help developing tone live.

One of the key aspects of putting on a great live performance is having a great sounding guitar tone that cuts through the mix. There are a lot of different ways that you can improve your guitar tone during a live performance to help you achieve a professional sounding tone that will leave your audience’s ears pleased.

One of the ways you can improve your tone during a live performance is to cut back on distortion or overdrive. Distortion is great but you have to ensure that your setup does not cause the tone to become too muddy. I have been to performances when everything sounds too thrashy and noisy due to a wrong setup. There is simply no tone at all! Too much distortion can make your notes sound thinner and cause a lot of buzzing that will take away from the rest of your performance. It’s recommended that if you need a little extra crunch on your guitar that you use an effects pedal rather than the amp settings.

Another great tip for improving guitar tone in your live performances is to use a tube amplifier. These provide a warm sounding tone and can really help to bring out the sweetness of your guitar sound. You will also need a great deal of wattage on the speakers too if you have playing in a large hall. Those small amps will not cut it.

The best way to improve your guitar tone when playing live is to remember that great tone lies in your fingertips. Developing good tone means you have to develop your techniques and skills. The best guitarist in the world could play through the worst equipment around and still make it sound good, because of his playing abilities. If you gave an amateur the best equipment and guitars money could buy, they would still sound like an amateur.

One of the best ways to perfect your techniques and skills is to practice and perform live with guitar backing tracks. Guitar backing tracks can be very beneficial for learning good improvisation techniques. Playing with guitar backing tracks can help you to be prepared for playing live and help you to develop the natural tone from your own playing style.

Guitar backing tracks can also be used to get better guitar tone by using them to play your live shows. Using guitar backing tracks for live shows are like being backed by a professional sounding band, which can help you to find a great quality tone. Guitar backing tracks are professionally recorded by seasoned musicians and can help you develop your ear along with your skills.

Tone woods.

Believe it or not, your sound is only as good as your wood. Each wood has a very distinct sound that is individual to every acoustic guitar. Like a finger print, it cannot be recreated, even if another piece of wood is taken from the same source.

This is due to the wood’s unique characteristics. Perhaps there are knots in the wood, or a slightly different grain pattern. Maybe there are some other subtle differences but in the end, it all affects how the wood resonates. Resonate is a fancy word for vibration, which is what wood does when you attach strings to it.

How freely the wood resonates will affect your volume (how loud you are) and your tone as a result of that. This explains why that plywood (laminate) guitar sitting in the pawnshop or music store doesn’t sound that great: The wood is too stiff to vibrate freely.

That’s why you may frequently hear the saying “Solid top”. While that may sound great in a sales pitch, the reason it’s actually important is that it’s real wood, not plywood. This transforms your tone to give you a much nicer sounding guitar.

Before the wood actually gets to your guitar, it undergoes quite a few steps. First off, most tone woods are either industrially logged. This is common for many production model guitars. Still sounds great in most cases, but there are some imperfections.

Higher end guitars have their wood hand selected. It is usually cut by hand and the select chunks are chosen for quality and then shipped back to home base for further processing.

Most manufactures of decent acoustic guitars season their woods for a period of time. This removes excess moisture and hardens the fats, oils, murr (gum), and other sticky googy things that are naturally found in wood. This seasoning protects the wood from warping and prepares it structurally for the building stage.

From that point, a piece of wood is then book matched. This is the process where one single cut of wood is sliced into two pieces. This forms two identical pieces of wood, which can then be used for the front or back of the guitar. That explains why you have that line running down the back of your guitar (it’s usually white). That line just covers up the seam.

Now, onto the woods. Here are some of the neatest and powerful woods out there:

Spruce - Spruce is an extremely strong wood, which is important for building a guitar. It offers some very nice crisp highs and a much more powerful volume. Great wood choice. Used on the majority of guitars.

Cedar - Slightly more mellow than Spruce and has a very warm feel to it. It has a beautiful glow and is aesthetically pleasing.

Maple - A great all round wood that offers a good balance of highs, mids and lows. This is something that many guitarists desire for an all round good projection and clean sound. However, because of this equal balance, it can also sound quite flat for the acoustic world so it’s often used on electrics. It is highly desired for it’s beautiful grain and lusture.

Koa - Known for it’s high range, Koa is known for it’s solid tone. It doesn’t have a good bass response but makes up for it in the high end of the dynamic sound spectrum.

Mahogany - Great projection and nice treble. The flatpickers dream when combined with the dreadnaught body type because it offers such a great response and tone.

Brazilian Rosewood - This wood is probably the most wanted piece of wood for guitars in the world. It’s becoming increasingly rare as it’s becoming extinct, therefore jacking up the price tremendously. It offers a huge bass response with nice treble and mids. Unfortunately, most only come on limited edition guitars that are at the top end of the price spectrum.

Indian Rosewood - The more popular alternative to Brazilian Rosewood and is far more accessible. Has virtually the same tonal characteristics, just not as powerful. It’s used on most professional guitars.

Cocobolo - My personal favorite! In my humble opinion, it takes many characteristics from the above woods and combines them to form a truly unique sound. It produces a great bass, awesome volume and phenomenal overtones. This wood will most likely be on my next acoustic. I suggest you do the same.

…Keep in mind that there are many, many more species of tone woods available to you. There are also some great subtypes of the above woods. For example, Taylor guitars use Sitka Spruce on many of their models and limited edition guitars. It’s in the family of spruce, but offers something different.

In the end, the above comments are extremely subjective. While I have played many of the woods mentioned above, my ear likes things that your ear may not. The only way to find out is to hunt them down and try them for yourself. Many companies use the above woods listed, so it shouldn’t be extremely difficult.

There are a lot of theories floating around in the guitar player community about the techniques to improving your guitar playing speed. Most of these theories are based on some sort of half truth, but a good part of the time these theories are nothing more than myths and really offer no help to truly improving a guitarist playing ability or their speed and style. One of the biggest myths, discussed heavily at times out there about achieving faster playing speed is that you cannot play fast with thick strings and high action. Most of the proponents of this particular guitar playing myth say that in order to be able to make your fingers fly across the fretboard, your strings have to be thin, as thin as possible and the action in the strings needs to be ultra low.

The reason this is a myth is because in reality, thinner strings and lower action do not at all make it possible for you to play faster, or better. Thin strings and lower action just reduce the amount of resistance you get when you play. This makes the notes easier to hit, but does nothing for the quality of your tone, nor for your speed and skill. It just makes making noise easier.

Playing with thin strings doesn’t take an individual who is still an amateur and make them into a guitar master, even if they play faster. What it really takes to be able to play faster isn’t lightning quick fingers, at least not at first. The key to successfully mastering speed and any part of guitar playing is accuracy and clarity. Let me repeat this once again. The key to successfully mastering speed and any part of guitar playing is accuracy and clarity.

A lot of people who get into playing the guitar immediately want to jump into learning how to play fast, and forget all about accuracy. It doesn’t matter how fast you play if you always hit the wrong notes and play sloppily. The problem is people tend to put a higher value on how fast you play, rather than on how well you sound when you play. Accuracy is the key to developing fast fingers. Learn how to play all your scales and chords, master them and their positions on the fretboard, slowly at first. Then after you have them committed to memory, start working on speed. By doing this you will develop into a very well rounded player and will be able to play lightning fast solos with pinpoint accuracy and clarity.

Here is another excellent tip for aspiring guitarists to improve accuracy and speed. Use professional guitar backing tracks during practice sessions. Practicing your solos and your speed techniques can be made even more beneficial when you can play along with an entire virtual band of musicians, at the comfort of your own time and speed. Professional guitar backing tracks provide you with a whole band to back you up while you play and allows you to slowly develop your skills while learning how to play with other musicians.

Laptop or laptop notebook is the most highly evolved innovation in computer. Good performance and portability make notebook PCs a vital section of the daily lives of many people.

Individuals, who have decided to buy laptop can consider the below mentioned tips to get a good notebook: Select a brand considering its quality, price, and warranty. Find out the key configuration including speed, processor, random access memory (RAM,) and hard disk capacity. Select the kind (LED or LCD) and size of display required. Buy laptop with an inbuilt CD-ROM and floppy drives, if handiness is more crucial than dependability and portability. Buy laptop equipped with touch screen pad and lithium-ion battery. Check the duration of warranty and service coverage. Calculate the overall laptop price along with additional peripherals, if any.

Apple 15.4″ MacBook Pro Notebook: The prominent features of Mac laptop are great battery life, silent, super fast, supports Windows using bootcamp and OS X, bright LED display, large touchpad, and well built body. This Mac laptop PC is quiet and fast. The latest LED display is bright and consumes less battery than a normal LCD display. Latest Intel chip supports both OS X and Windows (Vista or XP). The graphic card is fast and games run efficiently. Overall, battery life is fantastic. The notebook can run around for three and half hours nonstop.

Dell Latitude Notebook Series: The new slim and lightweight Latitude D600 series equipped with new Pentium M Processor marks the start of a brand new corporate look for Dell notebook collections. The latest silver edition of D600 is a smaller, thinner version of the gray C600 weighting around 5.3 pounds. The notebook includes an in-house adjustable space that houses a secondary battery or one of the selected drives: CD, DVD, CD-RW, floppy, 40GB hard drive, or DVD/CD-RW drives.

Many people feel that, they need a brand new laptop. Hence, they purchase laptops that are the latest and the greatest in the market. In many cases, unless the user is a power user or a gamer, a refurbished laptop is sufficient. More than the capacity of the RAM or the CPU, the connection speed matters the most.

Another imperative configuration, which is crucial to verify in a refurbished laptop, is the connectivity to the internet. The most usual way for internet connectivity is through modem. Mostly, refurbished laptops have inbuilt modem or modem card.

If determined to sell your laptop, approach the notebook outlet in vicinity to verify the price of brad new and renovated laptop, to evaluate the price. This technique is most effective to vend laptops for greater returns.

Sony VAIO AR Series: The VAIO AR Series of Sony marks another highlight for its VAIO versions, in terms of both competence and design. The laptops come with high resolution widescreen display, dual core processor, 200GB hard drive size, and incorporated Blu-ray optical drive. All these features make the AR Series more than just a super laptop PC. Further, the Sony VAIO AR Series is very much user friendly, both at home and at office, and is lightweight too to mark its portability feature.

by Raymond Sabo www.cellphones-mp3.com

Every so often, we decide to dive into a new aspect of playing guitar that many are either afraid of, or just simply have no idea what it’s all about. We’re going to tackle one of the more feared issues evolving around guitar… Transposition.

Join us as we teach you the most simplistic and easy ways to transpose your music.

Getting That Riff In Your Favorite Key!

How many times have we composed a riff that we absolutely love, or perhaps found a song that we really enjoy playing and wanted to put it into a new, original song and truly make it ours? Chances are that we’ve all wanted to at least try it out once or twice but always came across one roadblock… Keys.

As mentioned in our last article, the probability that two riffs will be in the same key is very low if you are writing a lot of songs or wish to link two well known songs together. This is where you need to transpose one of those riffs so you can connect them together and put them in that song.

Another scenario is that you just wrote an awesome riff that you envision going into one of your band’s songs… The only problem is that it’s in the wrong key! With transposing, you can still use that riff and play along with the rest of the band.

If you’re a true band nerd, like myself, you have probably been around transposition since the days of Jr. High or Middle School. Now, if you’re still like me, you didn’t have two clicks on how to do it either. I was always amazed to see how my teacher would take a trumpet part and transpose it so I could play it on my sax and still be in the right key!

With guitar, this is invaluable. You can take a sax part and transpose it to your guitar. If you happen to have a sax player around, you can now play along with that sax and still be in the proper key.

One of the most unique things about playing guitar is that we have a number of tools available to us to use for easy transposition. Many other musicians envy us for this and call us cheaters in the game of music theory, however, if you can use it… Why not?

The tools that you can use.

One of the most common tools used to transpose music on the guitar is the capo. The capo is essentially a piece of rubber that is glued onto two pieces of metal with a spring placed in between. When clasped onto the neck of your guitar and placed behind a fret, it acts as a new nut (AKA the “zero” nut.) This new nut raises the pitch of your guitar, therefore changing the key.

Most guitarists use them so they can make really complicated chords into easy open chord shapes. This is where the whole joke about cheating comes in. Instead of actually practicing those really hard chords and getting your technique down, you can transpose that chord using the capo and turn it into an open chord shape such as an E Major or an A and still have the same chord.

While I don’t recommend that you always do that because it’s always good to know how to play a song if your capo breaks, it’s great for live performances where you want to minimize the risk of messing up a complicated chord. If you’re a lead guitarist, you can still use a capo but in all honesty, it’s far easier to find the key that everyone else is playing in relative to the capo and just use the scale that suites the song best.

In most cases, it’s actually quicker for a lead guitarist not to use a capo and just find a scale. Switching a capo around the neck of your guitar can cost valuable seconds between songs.

Join us as we take a closer look at some tips that can help you to improve your lead guitar playing skills. We will also analyze different methods of achieving better playing speed as well as the benefit of playing along with guitar backing tracks.

When most people take up learning how to play the guitar they usually have one goal in mind, and that is to be a rocking lead guitar player who sets their fans’ ears ablaze with their lightning fast solos. A lot of serious guitarists have the talent and dedication to practice and to grow as musicians and often become excellent lead guitar players. Some guitar students may not have the kind of resources available to help them grow in their techniques and to achieve their dreams of being a lead guitarist.

There are a lot of different tips and tricks available that can help you improve your lead guitar playing skills and techniques. One fundamental tip for improving your lead playing skill is to observe the way you hold your pick and how you actually pluck your strings. This really have a dramatic impact on how the harmonics on your guitar are played out. For instance, it’s better if you do not have a lot of the pick protuding out from your fingers, but instead have your fingers closer to the edge of the pick. By doing this, it will help you to bring out the sweet harmonics of the notes you hit, especially on a highly overdriven guitar setup.

One of the most common aspects of playing lead guitar is learning how to develop a stronger hand so that you can play faster. Playing fast is an important part of being a lead guitarist, but there are a few things you should know before trying to improve your speed. One of the most important lessons to learn is that speed is useless without hitting the right notes. It’s better to perfect a scale you’re learning slowly, and then work on increasing your speed.

Another great tip and trick that has helped a lot of guitarists master the craft of playing lead guitar is playing along with guitar backing tracks. An individual playing along with guitar backing tracks can greatly improve a variety of different skills and abilities as well as the enjoyment of practicing along with an entire band.

Practicing your lead guitar skills to backing tracks for guitarists also helps you to improve your speed and your improvisation techniques. These guitar backing tracks provide you with structure and help you to adjust to playing lead on top of another guitar playing rhythm. These guitar backing tracks can also be useful for doing gigs and playing live, which also is a great help to improving your skills.

Looking at your sound, the other way around

This awesome article is going to blow your mind and challenge you to reach new heights with your guitar. We encourage you to try new things that you may have never thought of before

Have you ever felt like you’ve been playing in a box and you keep getting that same old sound that everyone else already seems to have? Today is the day that you can change the way you think about playing your guitar for the rest of your life as we take a look at altered tunings.

Who ever said that we had to play in the same tuning for the rest of our lives? The fact of the matter is that altered tunings can give you a tone that’s simply unmatched by standard tuning and virtually impossible to achieve if you don’t use those altered tunings.

We’re going to show you how altered tunings work, why they are so effective, how you can tune to them using your standard tuning, and what you can play using them! That’s enough information to keep you going for a year!

Tunings That Keep You Swooning…

Why new tunings are cool.

These has been a lot of talk about getting yourself out of the trap that many guitarists typically fall into at one time or another. The solution to pulling yourself out of that ditch varies from person to person but for me, altered tunings have helped me grow as a musician.

Believe it or not, even the editor of a guitar site can get into the same monotonous groove over and over again. Recently, I started playing in other tunings other than standard. As a classically trained guitarist, I was very much bent on standard tuning because theoretically, everything you need to get the sounds you want is there.

However, what I have learned in recent months is that it’s not necessarily what you can do with standard tuning, rather, what tones and chords you can’t get by using it all of the time. Alternative tunings offer a new, and often easier method of playing chords and a very rich tone that is unmatched.

I mention chords for an important reason. You may have noticed that the guitar isn’t laid out in a fashion that allows for easy access to every single chord combination. According to theory we can achieve incredible sounding chords but the problem is having the technique to stretch that far. Some of those chords are often impossible for any of us to play. Tuning your guitar to different tones bridges that gap between theory and technique, allowing us to play new chords.

Altered tunings involve playing around with the notes that your guitar is currently tuned to. For example, standard tuning is what you’re probably tuned to at the moment and your six strings from top to bottom are tuned to the notes E, B, G, D, A, E. An altered tuning will use different notes in our musical vocabulary and replace the notes in standard tuning.

There’s really an unlimited array of alternate tunings to choose from because you can tune your strings to form any chord you wish. For example, tuning in open g will allow you to play a G chord simply by strumming your strings without any fret work!

You could do this with many other chords to get a lot of new sounds. These sounds form the building block for new music to be formed and is a lot of fun to explore with. Later in this lesson, we’ll play around with new ideas evolving around using chords as your open tuning.

How you can achieve them without a tuner.

One of the many reasons why people choose not to tune their guitar using alternate tunings is simply due to the fact that they don’t know how to tune their guitar to those notes. If you have a tuner that simply is made for standard tuning, you’ll find that it’s very inaccurate to use. You’ll want a chromatic tuner for any alternate tunings you may wish to use. However, a much easier method is learned by the notes on your guitar neck.

Come join us now as we take a closer look into tips and tricks for improving your guitar playing speed and for some practical knowledge on effectively using metronomes and other advice to improve your practice sessions.

Most aspiring guitar players today fill their heads with dreams about moving their fingers effortlessly across their fretboards with lightning quick speed and accuracy that leaves minds rocked and speakers blown. There have been a few guitarists throughout the ages of rock that have been born with an almost supernatural understanding and talent for the guitar, but that isn’t the case for most musicians. Learning to be a master of shred requires a lot of hard work, dedication, sweat, bloody fingertips, and patience.

There is a lot more to mastering speed than having a good sense of rhythm and a well-trained ear. You have to be willing to put in the time to practice, and to practice hard. If you want to learn how to blaze solos and belt out face melting guitar solos, you have to be dedicated to learning and putting into practice all you learn.

One method of improving your guitar playing speed is to use guitar backing tracks. Guitar backing tracks can help you improve your speed by playing along with other instruments in a set tempo. This can help you to take what you already know and work on perfecting those particular skills.

It is of the utmost importance to remember that one picks up speed picking by using your wrist rather than wriggling your fingers back and forth. Eddie Van Halen calls this Fan picking. Another excellent tip for improving guitar speed involves practicing with a metronome. It is important to remember that before you can practice with a metronome to help you develop speed, you must first learn the technique and scale at your own speed. After you have mastered it at a comfortable level, you can now move on to practicing to a metronome, set at whatever tempo you’d like. Slowly increase the tempo, a little at a time and practice till you are comfortable before moving up the speed. Never, ever push beyond what you can achieve as that will demoralize yourself. Take it one step at a time.

For speed, it is necessary for guitarists to develop new skills with the right hand - quickly alternating the pick stroke upwards and downwards (variable stroke). The quicker the right hand can make these alternating strokes, the quicker the playing will be.

It is necessary to begin from the most standard tremolo (fast recurrence of one note). Triplets are the most effective way of learning to play a tremolo. Try to begin each of your lessons with a tremolo. It develops (and warms up well) the right hand. The tremolo notes must sound dynamically equal (all notes sounding of equal loudness) and with equal tempo.

It’s important to remember that a crucial aspect of developing speed is to first develop accuracy. Learning to play fast means nothing if you aren’t playing the right notes, and if you aren’t playing the right notes cleanly. If you can train yourself through much practice to be as flawless as possible in your accuracy, you will be able to easily improve your playing speed.

When you’ve got your picking speed up, then you can look into worrying about the left hand notes, although this pattern fits quite well into the major scale at higher speeds. It is important to have fun every step of the way.

Many guitarists desire to be able to master the guitar and to shred along side some of the legends of rock music history. If you have the determination, the drive, and the willingness to dedicate yourself to practicing and learning, you will go pretty far, and may even accomplish your dream.

Join us as we take a look at a few key tips for learning how to master the guitar. You’ll learn how playing with no effects improves accuracy, how to get the most out of practice sessions with guitar backing tracks, as well as a few principles to apply to guitar practice.

Everybody who picks up a guitar has the ultimate goal in mind of being able to just pick up their guitar and blaze a solo, leaving impressed friends and family in a state of speechless shock. The problem is that most people don’t put in the effort that is necessary in order to master their instrument because they desire instant results. Guitar is one of the most difficult instruments to master, yet anyone can do it if they put in the effort and time and have a true passion for creative musical expression.

There are a few tips that are the key to unlocking success when it comes to guitar mastery. One of the most basic tips to playing the guitar is to put in the time to practice, practice and practice some more. As elementary as it may seem, a lot of people simply fail and give up the guitar because they expect instant results without putting in any work. There is simply no formula for overnight success. Practice takes time, effort, passion, and work. There is not a single great guitar player in the history of music that didn’t sacrifice a lot of time to practice their guitar. Guitar legends are made, not born. Some would practice for five to eight hours a day. This doesn’t mean that you have to practice that long every day, but you definately have to give more than ten minutes of your time if you want to see any real results.

Another great tip for mastering the guitar is to take it slow at first. This means that playing fast is put to the side for awhile. Take your time perfecting your chords and learning them. Learn all your scales, commit them to your mind, master these fundamentals first, and then you can begin to build on your speed. It’s important to remember that playing fast is not as important as playing with accuracy.

One tip for mastering accuracy and clarity in your playing is to play your guitar clean. Playing your guitar clean means no distortion and no effects. By practicing your scales and chords without distortion, you will have to play the notes clean and accurately in order for them to sound good. This will push your style and accuracy to the next level as you’re learning new techniques and scales.

An excellent tool to help you put into practice all that you’ve learned is to use guitar backing tracks. These are great for helping you take what you have learned and use it alongside other musicians. It makes practice so much more fun and keeps your motivated! These guitar backing tracks are like practicing with an entire band, and will help you develop timing and rhythm. They are excellent for helping you tap into your creativity and apply what you have learned to creating excellent lead parts.