Recording Electric Guitar On A Budget

So it's been a fair while since I posted anything and if you'll pardon me, we've all had exams and after a hectic week of band work I'm now somewhat more free. And so here we are again another blog! This is another of my sort of 'budget' blogs - if you haven't noticed I'm rather short of money. I'm going to run you through the two main ways of recording electric guitar on a budget but still with pretty high quality results.

We don't all have a multi-million pound recording studio in our garage, yet technology has advanced so much that we can achieve remarkable results for a fairly low budget. As you'll see throughout this post I'm going to spending my imaginary budget on gear, showing you the pitfalls and the tricks in order for you to (hopefully) get the best results. For those of you who are completely new to recording maybe check out THIS blog as it will run you through some basics of the home studio. I'm tailoring this post more towards recording electric guitar - the other post is somewhat more generic. I'm going to work with 2 budgets here - one for amateur recording/playing (£100) and one for intermediate recording/playing (£250).

Amateur budget (Interface, cables/headphones) - you may think £100 is a lot of money, or next to nothing. Now in recording terms £100 is handy but it won't build you a high quality studio. What it will do though is give you the bare minimum. First things first, you need an audio interface. As I said on the other blog post this is like a controller - you plug into it, and it sends the signal to your computer. If you will, it acts like an amplifier would - indeed that's exactly what it is. This little Alesis iO2 costs around £80 and will do the trick nicely. Its USB so you can plug it into any laptop. You've also got 2 channels for mic/line in so you could record with a microphone or an electric guitar output straight from the jack. If you're looking at buying a microphone then you're going to spend over the budget.

However if you also download a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) such as Reaper (great software) then you can record with this absolutely fine through direct input (DI). There are also plugins in your DAW to tweek your sound and you can even download AmpSimulators to dial in distorted and overdriven tones. Your excess £20ish could be spent on cables, or a pair of over-ear headphones - these headphones work a treat.

Intermediate budget (interface, microphone, cable)- here you can really have some fun and whats great is that this gear will last for a good long while as long as you're kind to it. So we start with £250. First things first we need an interface. Instead of going through USB however we're going to use firewire. This is effectively a more advanced and faster version of USB so you will get less audio lag and be able to record more channels at the same time. The interface above will work fine but it may well suffer after a few years and it is incredibly limited. What you see to the left is the Focusrite Pro 14 interface. This is firewire and extremely high quality (and brilliant - both Jim and I use them). On the front you've got 2 of Focusrite's legendary preamps and on the back and other two instrument inputs. This is going to cost you about £160 (from Gear4music) which is well over half the budget. However the trick is that this thing will last and will keep you happy for a good long while.

Next you're going to need a microphone. There is a great trick to be found here as you can get something multi-purpose - the Shure SM58. You may know a little about recording and think 'I thought SM57 was for recording, not the 58?'. Ah well, multi-purpose, like I said. Having tested both I can safetly say that the difference in two microphones comes down to that one has a grill, the other doesn't. The great thing is, you can't really use a 57 for live work for a singer yet it's industry standard to use a 58. So go for the SM58 as oppose to the 57. Some of you may dislike me for saying this - I care not. You don't even need a stand - just get a pile of books and balance the mic on top (little tips and tricks people!). That mic will cost you £81. You've got around a tenner left to spend on an XLR or whatever you may need. So this budget will give you the capability to record both through an amp and through DI - all you need!.

So there you have it! Need I say anything else? Of couse if you don't have a guitar, a PC or a guitar cable then you may need to include those in your budget! However these two outlines should give you some guidance. Any questions just post below!

Peace, Linus

Review - Ibanez 25h Anniversary Edition S1XXV

What up good people. A blog on request here from SwopCovers on our YouTube channel - remember if you want our opinion on any gear we'll check it out and let you know what we think! On with today's review though - the Ibanez S1XXV (£450)

What we have here is a truly different guitar. Ibanez are rather good at making unique looking guitars - anyone familiar with the Steve Vai signature range will know this all too well. These special editions are no exception  so lets take a closer look and see what we're really playing with.

Body & Neck - Solid mahogany body with Ibanez's Wizard III maple neck which looks pretty thing so you'll be able to get up some good speed. Jumbo frets as well and a handy 24 of them. Something that you will have noticed as well - this guitar comes with florescent strings and a florescent paint job on the body and the headstock. Its all personal preference but I can't say I'm a fan. For me, it's just going to get annoying having a glow-in-the-dark guitar and to be perfectly honest with you I think you'll look at it one day and think "why the heck did I buy this?". The strings though are nothing to worry about as you can easily change them to a nicer set and to be honest the paint will quickly come off them anyway.

Pickups & tone - maybe the reason you bought this guitar is then simply because of its tone. And there you certainly have a decent point - this guitar has that 'Ibanez' sound. The mahogany body and maple neck work brilliantly with Ibanez's Infinity pick up series in. You've got two humbuckers and a single coil to play with - more is better? I'll leave that up to you, but the INF pickups are at the heart of Ibanez's S series so they can't be too shabby. In my opinion though they lack some clarity and punch and are too bottom endy so they'll get lost when you start cranking an amp. If you're a beginner/intermediate player they'll do you great but I think it won't be long before you're going to want to look at putting a Dimarzio, Duncan or EMG in there. Like I say though its all personal preference and a lot will depend on what you play and the amp you're plugging into.

Bridge - a locking tremolo system here, not an actual Floyd bridge but a good tremolo nonetheless. This bridge is pretty highly regarded and from what I can see it stays in tune fairly well. It also has the added advantage of being altered to a floating trem if you so desire. Also you can easily adjust the tension of the springs without an operation worthy of a master surgeon. The guitar sustains pretty nice too from what've heard.

Overall? - this guitar ain't my cup of tea if you want my honest opinion. I'm not an Ibanez found, they've always sounded a bit fake to me. BUT what I say is far from the bottom line and you need to try this guitar before you buy it (as you should with any really). I should also say having never actually played this guitar I'm by no means a good judge but having checked the specs and heard it plenty on videos this is my honest opinion. I'd rate it 6/10.

One last thing - this is a great review from Rob Chapman (review of the RG1XXV as well) - Its a great laugh to watch as well even if you're not thinking of buying this axe.

Any questions just drop a comment below or on one of our videos. Thanks for reading as ever

Peace, Linus

Cheap & Cheerful SS Amps for under £100 - Bargain!

Now then. Hello all. Having read the title of this blog you may be thinking one of two things:

"£100? For an amp? Well it'll be terrible!!" 

Or

"I've never heard of them before, I want a Marshall, everyone uses Marshall, so they'll be better than everything else, end of" 

However I'm here to tell you all that, even if you're an advance player looking for a portable bedroom/practice amp, help is at hand, oh yes! Here are my top 3 cheap and cheerful less than £100 SS (this stands for solid state by the way, i.e. there are no valves/tubes to worry about) combo amps! These are in particular order it should be said.

Orange Crush Series - the one over in the picture is the 30w version. I own a 15w version from the previous series (still called the crush) and I couldn't believe how 'real' it sounded! Having heard plenty of Jim's Tiny Terror I thought Orange would struggle to get a sound even half as good - sure enough they have done. Its an 8" speaker inside the wicked orange casing. One thing I love about this little amp is, unlike a lot of SS small amps, it really has some character and life to it. Sure it doesn't have the same kind of clarity and texture of a tube amp, but when its up towards 11 it still sounds amazing. The cleans are really pretty vibrant and with a little bit of overdrive you can dial in a sweet 'classic' rock tone. Couple of other nice features - its got a solid back but a small hole so you can threat the power cable in so its not hanging out. Nice and light and if you're playing on single coils it sounds brilliant - top amp this one. Kudos Orange.

Crate FW Series - another one I own (but its the 65w version) which is really rather impressive. The one on your right is the baby of the series, the 15w version First off its so simple to use. You've got 2 channels (clean and overdrive) with a volume, high, mid, and low tone gages. Along with that you've got a really handy headphone socked for when you want to still play but your neighbours have been round to tell you to pack it in. 8" speaker again in this one with an open back for a couple of leads and a pedal or two. In terms of sound? Well the 3 band EQ gives you a nice variety of tones. The cleans are good and bottom end'y so if you want to run a distortion pedal infront of the amp, you'll still have a nice beefy sound (that is one drawback of the orange above - it can get a little aggressive in the top-end). What about the overdrive? That's got a really good tone to it as well for a SS. Lovely little amp to have tucked in the corner of your bedroom for when you wanna do a little practice - probably don't carry it out with you at a big gig though - it might get a little scared! 

Roland Cube XL Series - we're looking at the 15w version here because you can get one for under £100. I've played on this one a couple of times in shops and it's so awesome I actually spent a lot of time (where I was trying out guitars), playing with the amp! This one is a little bit more 'gismo'ed up' compared with the others so its a fraction more expensive £85ish. You've got a huge variety of tones and the 'select' button on the electrics allows you to chose from 4 different overdrive/distortion tones. I shall admit the 'extreme' tone is rather nasty, but the rest sound pretty reasonable given the price. Its seriously sturdy (albeit its not much of a looker) and the main thing is you've got a huge variety of tones. Only drawback I would say is that in comparison with particularly the orange, its not as loud. But I suppose when you're just practising that's actually an advantage as oppose to an issue. 

So there you go! Proof you don't need to spend big money on big names to get a decent sound! Any questions just post below and I'll get back to you. 

Peace, Linus

1 Year Anniversary

A fairly short blog this week but nevertheless an extremely important one for Jim, Adam and I.

We've now been in the virtual world for almost a year to the day and for us its been a lot of and actually, pretty successful. Up on youtube we've made a lot of progress. From 1 video this time last year, we've gone to 24. Up there we've got 15 detailed and HQ reviews of pedals including BOSS's famous DS-1 and EHX's Big Muff. Also we've produced several vlogs and tutorials along with some videos showing the production of my band's latest single.

On the blog I've covered a wide variety of topics and have learnt a bit doing some investigations and research of my own to tell you good people.

All in all its been pretty good fun for us and we've racked up an amazing 60,000 views in 12 months which works out at someone viewing one of our videos once every 10 minutes. Along with that we've hit 164 subs (as I'm writing this) which is awesome for us.

What's to come? Well more reviews, more blogs, more tutorials and hopefully some new ideas. So all that is left is to say a massive thank you to everyone who has viewed any of our videos or read this blog. We didn't really set out with any ambitions so its all a bonus for us.

And on that note I wish you Happy Easter!

Peace, Linus

Guitar Twins: A Logical Impossibility

Some ideas in life are truly ridiculous. Time travel, teleportation, a universal language. And if I said to an alien 'we've strung 6 wires to a very high tension to some wood to make music' you may well get a funny look. Yet its an instrument that has shaped the world of music. More importantly though is something you may not have considered - for such a widely used instrument, is every single one different? Its a silly question, but the answer is undoubtedly yes. 

As I've probably said recently I bought a Fender Jaguar not that long ago. I went to the shop, tried it out and knew it was the guitar I wanted. Sadly, though I didn't have the money to pay for it there and then. What bothered me the most was that someone else might buy it because I knew that the one the shop got in to replace it wouldn't be the same. 

Guitars are a very personal instrument in that they really are all different. In some ways they're a lot like people. Without going into the depths of human biology, it is commonly known that no two children (even coming from the same parents) are entirely the same in personality. There is no difference in a guitar. You can put the same pickups, body wood, neck wood, strings, into two guitars and they won't sound the same - you needn't go to a shop to try that one out!

Lets look at this a little further. Start with the wood of the guitar. Even if two supposedly 'identical' guitars are made from the same wood type, perhaps even the same tree they will give out a different sound. The density of, for example, maple varies from 0.6 - 0.75 (103 kg/m3) so every tree will be rather different sounding! Take into account that when the wood is shaped this will have some alteration to the make up of the wood again modifying the sound. 

Pickups and other electrics will change the shape of your tone. The way in which a pickup is wound changes the tone. Because the pups are wound so minutely and how the tone is 'picked up' (as such) is through a slight change in the electromagnetic field around the pickup any even slight alteration to the coiling is going to make a difference. The electrics themselves are again pretty fragile and slight resistance caused in the tone and volume pots (and the wires it should be said) will alter the overall output of your tone. 

But lets move away from the science of it all. Truth be told each guitar feels a little bit different as well even if they came from the same factory and were made by the same worker. I'll reiterate - guitars are a personal instrument, there is some feeling about them and you certainly form a relationship with them. Why do you think people keep guitars from the 1960s? Sure its partially because they sound rockin' but moreover because people don't want to part from. They become an obsession and a part of you. 

You may not believe a word of what I've just thrown at you, but if you don't, just think about it for a minute or so. There's more to a guitar than meets the eye I'll tell you that one for sure. 

Peace, Linus  

Tonal Sapping

Evening good people welcome to another blog post! This week we're going to be talking about tonal sapping! Now quite simply this is the biggest pain in the neck for all guitarists - but let me explain what it is first before I go into why its about as annoying as Justin Beiber on live television.

Take a simple guitar signal chain. With no other gubbins in the way you've got Guitar --> Amp simple as you like. Put a pedal or two in the way and here we may well discover the issue of tonal sapping. The signal from your pickups is sent through all the electrics on your guitar, out the jack and down a cable. Now on many pedals we have what's called a bypass (in other words the pedal isn't on) - for the purpose of this exercise we don't even need to switch a pedal on to experience the problem. The signal comes out the cable and into your pedal and then through all the circuit board (PCB) in your pedal. A small amount of physics here so bare with me. Throughout all the components on your PCB you will experience resistance and without going into any more detail, that results in a loss of your sound! BAD TIMES!

So how serious can this be? Well all non-true bypass (we'll come back to this in a minute) will sap some of your tone, that's just the laws of physics I'm afraid. However so are certainly worse than others. Take wah  pedals, they appear to be a real issue pedal. CryBabys and in particular Vox base range wahs (V845) eat a whole lot of tone for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Worse than this though are multi FX units. The PCBs in these are quite simply enormous and you lose a tremendous amount of tone. I actually sold a BOSS ME-50 because of this issue. Note here, it is particularly bad with single coil pick ups from what I have found.

Can you get around this issue? Yes! There are two ways. First is extremely simple - buy only True Bypass products. True Bypass simply means that instead of going through the PCB when your signal hits the pedal, it goes in and straight out again without losing any tone! This isn't ideal though because the day is going to come when you want a pedal that isn't true bypass and there is nothing you can do about it. Or is there? Ah! Well the second way is a little more complicated. It is possible to make a pedal True Bypass. The aforementioned Vox wah series can be modded pretty easily see - here! And there are Youtube videos on how to mod other products - especially CryBabys - these are a popular mod.

It must also be said I suppose that this problem isn't always THAT bad. I run several pedals in my board that aren't true bypass (all BOSS's compact range are non-true bypass) and they function just fine. So don't simply discard buying non-true bypass and definitely don't aim your non-true bypass for the nearest 5th story window! The best way of testing how bad a simply bypass pedal is plug your guitar into the pedal and play a bit. Then plug straight into the amp and check for the difference. Sometimes the difference is unattainable - sometimes it sounds like epicmeal time guy has bitten a chunk out your signal!

A couple of note worthy pedals -

• MXR (tend to have true bypass) 
• BOSS (do not)

Final thing - even if you do have true bypass on a very long signal chain you may experience some tonal sapping - a preamp or a micro amp can sort this out 

Peace, Linus 

Warm Ups - 3 Of My Favourites

Morning morning.

 So then, I'd like to pose a short question to you, before you play guitar (or any instrument) do you ever warm up? Have a quick think. You see you wouldn't go into a football/tennis/rugby/whatever training session without doing at least a short warm up would you? The idea behind it is not only to get your muscles warmed up and prepared but also to get hand-to-eye co-ordination up to speed and generally get the brain into the mindset of playing the game. Well my friends music is no different.

If anything warming up in music is more crucial than in sport. Ok fair enough you're not going to tear or pull a muscle (or at least I hope you won't!) playing guitar. But the point is that until you've been playing for a short while your body isn't going to be used moving both hands quickly, in particular your left hand. I spoke to the drummer from Embrace - a British pop band if you don't know them (and yes this is a bit of a name drop) and he said that if he didn't warm up before playing he wouldn't play his best stuff until he was halfway through a set. Warming up then is key. This is generally what bands do backstage at gigs, aside from drink and ,potentially, smoke heavily. So then, here are my 3 favourite warm ups, 2 for the left hand and 1 for the right hand.

1. The Spider (left hand) - this is designed to get all 4 of your fingers on the left hand moving in tandem. Particularly if you're playing metal or hard rock or anything of that calibre, this is a great warm up.  Method - You're going to walk your fingers over the fretboard and up the strings. So start on the low E string, first finger at the first fret. Individually pick 1,2,3,4 moving up a fret with a different finger every time - you get a walking action moving across your 4 fingers. Then when you're at fret 4, move down a string and up a fret, 2,3,4,5, etc etc until you get to the high E string. When you're there start going down but carry on working up the fretboard. So once your on the high E string your pinky finger should be on the 9th fret. Then go down so on the B it would be 7,8,9,10 and so on finishing on the low E with your pink on the 14th fret. 
2. Jumping 3s (left hand) - you're probably only going to want to do this with your 1st and 3rd finger. This is a useful lick as well if you can get it nice and quick but start with doing it at a fairly slow speed. Method - pluck the low E string and then hammer on fret 3 and then fret 5. And that is pretty much it, its very simple but you can develop it tonnes. So you could work your way up the strings in that shape. I like to play the pattern and alternate between the E and the A string, getting it really quick. Its cool to play it backwards as well so pluck the open string then fret 5 then 3. Simple as that, but its about building up speed. 
3. Right Hand, Right Cramp (right hand - duh look at the name) - you definitely  need a metronome for this one. Its worth doing all exercises to a click. I actually do this as a drum exercise as well so if you're a drummer you can apply this too. Mute the strings with your right hand and put a click on at a tempo of about 100bpm, we're going to be playing semiquavers (16th notes for those across the pond) so choose a wise speed! Start by playing crotchets for 2 bars, then quavers, then triplets and then semiquavers. If you're feeling adventurous then you could go up to sextuplets or even demi-semi quavers (32nd notes). Tips - play it with alternate picking, otherwise you may die. And keep on going till you start to feel a bit of cramp coming on - hence the name! 

Warming up is crucial good people, and you'd be surprised how much better you play as a result. Only needs to be for 5 minutes max, and then get playing! Hope these tips help, post any questions below. 

Peace, Linus