It is a curious paradox of the music industry: guitarists, particularly rock guitarists, are often thought of as trendsetters when it comes to fashion and culture; but when it comes to their instruments, they are notoriously conservative. Innovations such as active electronics, guitar synthesizers and Steinberger’s intrepid steps into the field of headless instruments in the 80′s have failed to make much of a dent in the market. Gibson and Fender continue to dominate the electric guitar market much as they did in the 1950′s and 60′s. Even with the entry of new competitors into the market over the years such as Ibanez, Paul Reed Smith and Charvel/Jackson, the electric guitar has remained essentially unchanged with one to three magnetic pickups and a mess of wires connecting them to the controls. But things may be about to change! Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for category Electronic Guitars
Electric Guitar Technology 101
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How to Use a Guitar Tuner
A guitar tuner is an amazing help to guitarists of all stages of expertise. Every guitarist should learn how to use a tuner early in his career. They are small and compact and will come to your aid when your ear is too tired and emotional to tune your guitar with any accuracy. For many of us, tuning the guitar is more difficult than playing it, and a lot of time is wasted at gigs and during lessons trying to tune up by ear.
The notes on the open strings of your instrument are E A D G B E. Guitar tuners come in several different forms and make the work of tuning easier to varying degrees.
Although a guitar player tuning his axe by ear might look cool, the fact is that nobody’s ear is as good as a decent electronic tuner. You could forget all about trying to train your ear altogether and just make sure your tuner goes everywhere that you and your guitar go.
An electronic tuner tells the guitarist if the note he is playing on each open string of his instrument is at the correct frequency. Electronic guitar tuning gizmos can vary greatly in price but the most expensive is not necessarily the best. Some tuners are just LEDs you can carry on stage with you if you are worried about your instrument’s capacity to stay in tune, and some are sophisticated enough to be able to tune many different instruments.
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Acoustic Guitar Tuners
If you’re an aspiring guitar player then there’s a couple accessories you’ll need. Luckily, not too many or too expensive. Probably the most important thing will be an acoustic guitar tuner. If your guitar isn’t in tune then anything else you do won’t sound right. You won’t know if you’re making the right chords or not and you’ll be frustrated because you don’t sound the way you want to. Lets take a look at some types of acoustic guitar tuners so you can decide what’s best for you.
Electronic Acoustic Guitar Tuners
Most electronic guitar tuners have a needle, or an LCD representation of a needle to show you whether the pitch is sharp or flat. If it is pointing dead center that means the note is in tune. If it’s to the left that means it’s flat (low), if it is to the right that means it is sharp (high). They will usually have a little scale with the notes on it, these notes highlight as you play the string. Most of them will have a green light that flashes when your string is in tune, a red light will flash to the left it it is flat, and to the right if it is sharp.
