Music: Accessories

Showing posts with label Accessories. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Guitar Accessories: Some Helpful Goodies

You can treat yourself to a number of other little guitar accessories, doodads, and contraptions that make guitar playing a lot more painless and convenient. In no particular order, consider some of these guitar accessories, which are often worth their weight in thumbpicks.

Batteries: Tuners, effects pedals, and even some guitars run on batteries. Stock up on a couple of nine-volts and a few AAs and store them in a sealed plastic bag.

Bridge pins: These little plastic pieces wedge your strings into the bridge of your acoustic guitar. The problem is this: If you lose one (because it goes flying off a dock or into the grass after you yank it out), you can't find anything to substitute for it. Matchsticks are the closest things, but who carries those around these days? The next time you're at the music store buying strings, make sure that you also pick up a couple of extra bridge pins.

Cords and cables: A crackling cable is no fun for either you or your audience. That nasty sound means that your connections are worn and bad - it happens. Keep extra cables on hand of both the long variety (for connecting your guitar to an effect or an amp) and the short (for interpedal connections).

Cassette recorder: Don't miss capturing a once-in-a-lifetime musical moment because you don't have a tape recorder on hand. You never know when inspiration may strike. If you play with other people - especially those who can teach you something - keep the recorder handy so that you can preserve licks, riffs, and other cool moves for later study. Microcassette recorders are great because they fit right into your guitar case. After you get good at recording your ideas, you may even consider taking along a four-track recorder (one that enables you to overdub, or add parts to, existing tracks). You can create multipart arrangements with a four-track instead of being limited to only the simple ideas that you can capture on a normal cassette recorder. You can get a four-track for as little as $200.

Cloth: This is one of the guitar accessories that are often overlooked, but essential. You should always wipe down your guitar after playing to remove body oils that can corrode strings and muck up the finish. Cotton is good, and chamois is better. At least give your fingerboard a wipe before you put it in the case, and if you're playing with short sleeves, give the top a rubdown, too.

Singer and songwriter Jim Byrne has been a guitar player all his life. His songs has a twist of bluesy folk, country, Americana and Scottish. Discover more tips to help you choose the right guitar accessories and learn valuable guitar playing tips as he offers some great all-around advice for beginner and advanced players alike. Visit Jim's website for more tips and to download two of Jim's latest songs for free => http://www.songsbyjimbyrne.com/freemp3music/index.html

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Monday, August 1, 2011

Guitar Accessories: Effect Pedals and Devices

Electric guitarists seldom just plug into an amp and start playing. Well, they may start out that way, but if you listen to the radio - or any recorded guitar music, for that matter - you quickly notice a lot more going on than just a "straight" guitar sound. At the very least, you hear some ambient treatment in the form of artificially created echo, or reverb, as the effect is known in guitar lingo. You may hear some (intended) distortion, especially in rock and blues music, and you may hear additional effects, such as wah-wah, vibrato, and other electronic manipulations. Welcome to the wonderful, wacky world of guitar accessories known as effects.

Effects are devices that plug in between your guitar and amplifier and enable you to alter your signal in all sorts of creative and unusual ways. Scores and scores of these guitar accessories are available from all different manufacturers and in all price ranges. You can buy them as individual units or as an all-in-one box, called a multieffects processor. But whether you go for the package deal or a la carte, effects can spice up the basic sound of your guitar in all sorts of exciting ways.

Most effects come in the form of foot-accessed pedals, also known as stomp boxes because they reside on the floor and you activate them by stepping on a footswitch. This setup enables you to selectively turn effects on and off while playing the guitar without interruption.

If you plug, say, a reverb device inline (that is, between the amp and guitar), you can make your guitar sound as if you're playing in a cathedral. A distortion unit can make your tones sound like those of Jimi Hendrix, even at low volumes and with your amp set to a clean sound. Dozens of different types of effects are available - more than you could possibly own, not to mention use all at once. The price of these individual units varies, too, with distortion boxes as cheap as $45 and digital reverbs and delays as much as $175 (or more).

Individual pedals are a great convenience because they enable you to buy effects one at a time and use them in a modular fashion - you can choose to include them in your chain or not, and you can rearrange their order to create different effects. But many guitarists opt for a multi-effects unit, which puts all the individual effects into one housing. Multi-effects units are programmable, meaning that you can store different settings in the effects and recall them with the tap of a foot. Multi-effects guitar accessories, like individual pedals, also offer a modular approach to effect ordering, although they accomplish this electronically rather than physically.

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