Dave Hunter - Guitar Amps and Effects For Dummies

Youre a guitarist, right? So your first priority should always be to play the guitar. Next in line, though, are achieving a great sound while doing so and understanding how to get a variety of sounds that are appropriate to the style of music you play. This may sound like hyperbole, but its no lie: The better you sound, the easier playing your guitar becomes and ultimately, the easier it is to just forget all the distractions and make music. And the more you unlock sounds that express your creativity as a musician, the easier youll find it to make rewarding music.

Guitarists, embrace the necessities of your craft, and dive in here to begin a thorough grounding in all the knobs, switches, circuits, woods, wires, and other technicalities that otherwise hold your precious guitar tone at their mercy. With just a little thought and effort, you can become a fully informed participant in the sounds you create, and that will result in sounding distinctively and consistently like you. And that, in turn, will not only make you a happier player but also be far more likely to get you noticed, too. Have fun!

The trick to achieving the great, expressive, and distinctive tone that every guitarist seeks is that you have to scale a veritable obstacle course of technical gear to do so. No problem; Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies is your road map to that potentially baffling journey, providing all the shortcuts, rest stops and off-the-beaten-path attractions you need to walk the walk and talk the talk like a long-time gearhead.

This book is broken down into the three main categories that comprise your rig: the electric guitar, guitar amps, and effects pedals and units. These all work together to create your sound, so if you feel youve got more of a handle on one than the other, dive right in where you need. Each part, and even each chapter within each part, is totally independent of the others and unveils a wealth of information on its specific subject. I like to think you can benefit from the accumulation of advice and techniques that comes from reading several sections one after the other, but those dont have to be approached in the order in which they are printed here. You can definitely dive into just one chapter today and come out the other end of it with a thorough grounding of, for example, guitar pickups and electronics or the amplifier.

Even if you dont yet have an effects pedal or an amp or even an electric guitar! each part explores the wealth and variety of each part of the overall rig in the kind of detail that arms you for your shopping trip. Peruse the appropriate chapters, and youll emerge with fixed and informed ideas of what youre likely to need to play your own preferred genre of music. Although the makes and models evolve pretty quickly and often cant be detailed successfully in any book with a long shelf life, the features and applications of the most prominent (and plenty of more unusual) designs are thoroughly covered here. As such, Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies makes a great buyers guide, but that isnt even my primary intention with this book. Instead, I aim first and foremost to help you explore how to use this equipment to make music and how to bend it to a wide and infinitely variable array of tones. So jump in where you like, get your hands dirty, and employ your newfound abilities at tone-crafting in the worthy venture of making beautiful music!

First and foremost, I wrote this book with the assumption that you are seeking to better understand the functions and applications of all parts of your guitar-effects-amp setup, with the goal of playing more expressively and making better music.

I never at any point while writing this book assumed that you, the worthy reader, are foolish! That said, the gear guitarists use to make music can often be dauntingly technical stuff, and I have worked with and spoken to many, many successful professional players who still only have a basic grasp of how their rigs function and would love to know more, if only they had time. With that in mind, I assumed throughout the writing of Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies that you were a guitarist who liked the idea of better understanding how to create different sounds both classic and original using what gear you have on hand, and also that you might like some exploration of what else is out there, if what you already own proves to be not quite right for you.

Although I have tried throughout this book to find a way into each and every topic that will be suitable for the raw beginner (hey, we were all there once), I havent assumed that every reader wants to cover ground he or she already knows. To that end, each part, chapter, and section should be thoroughly dip-innable, if you will: Skip sections that smack of something you already know, and jump in where you feel youve got the most to explore. If you feel you dont have the first clue about how