Question:
I have a basic setup of an electric guitar ad a basic amp - my guitars 'natura;' sound is a bit liek an accoustic sound - what do I need to change the sound to make it a bit smoother and more electric sounding? I guess something that sits between the amp - or perhaps an amp with effects?
Answer:
Its a little hard to respond without knowing what amp / guitar you have. If you have a cheap amp (those little extremely basic / cheap 5-15W buggers you tend to see in starter packs etc) your sound is going to come out a bit lifeless and twangy / acousticy could describe it. In that case, a better amp would be high up on my list to achieving a more electric sound. Same with the guitar (especially the pickups) cheap pickups give a flatter more acousticy sound. Good guitar / pickups and a good amp (not saying mega bucks here) really help breathe vitality into the electric guitar sound. Aside from that something that may help and is often missed from cheap amps is reverb, a splash of that always helps to produce a better sound. Other gentler effects you may consider to breathe life into an electric guitar sound would be a light splash from a Chourus, Flange or a Phaser pedal - especially on clean tones, they will certainly make your guitar sound more electricy and add some really great sounds/tones into your sound (a gentle splash of them works real nice, not always best to lather them on). Out of all of them I would certainly recommend the Chorus pedal (the other two are slightly more wierder and maybe not so widely appliable). You could really play any clean stuff with a light splash of chorus. Something that may help with your currect setup is pickup selection, again dont know what guitar but I find the single pickup pickup selections (e.g. bridge, neck or middle pickup) give again more flatter acousticy sounds as opposed to say the neck + middle seleciton, or the middle + bridge seleciton on a 3 pickup guitar, or the neck + bridge seleciton on a 2 pickup guitar. (with regards to amps depends what you are going for, tube / solid state will both give good sounds. Amps with effects are also good, but again not requierd. In fact I much prefer using stomp boxes / singular effects when compared to amp+effects and multi-fx units, mainly because the overall output of your sound varies greatly on the position / order of the effects - which you cannot often change on the amp+fx / multi-fx. Though multi fx are very useful / easy and I think some of the higher models enable you to order you fx) One last suggestion worth a small though is you guitar strings, they do effect the sound. Anything like ernie ball, di'addario are plenty good.
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