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DIY

Jens’ two-microphone setup for resonator guitar and his Fender Super Reverb.

Our columnist recounts what he’s learned about getting the sound of a projection cone to an audience, and his ultimate solution: two mounted mics and his faithful Super Reverb.

In my July 2022 column, “Acoustic Guitars and Fender Amps,” I talked about using acoustic 6-strings with classic black-panel amps—particularly the bigger models with wide EQ possibilities. This month, let’s take it a step further and talk about Fender amps and resonator guitars. I will share what I have discovered by experimenting with various microphones, pedals, and more.

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Now the world’s best-known 6-string duo, Gabriela Quintero and Rodrigo Sánchez have long-reaching roots that extend from metal to Irish folk music and distill into their unique take on nylon-string-acoustic-guitar music.

Photo by Ebru Yildiz

On their new album, In Between Thoughts… A New World, the acoustic duo goes half-electric, plumbs programmed beats, adds slide guitar, and explores nondualism—following a creative path that opened due to the Covid shutdown.

Grammy Award-winning guitar virtuosi Rodrigo y Gabriela started recording what would become their latest album, In Between Thoughts… A New World, in February 2021. At the time, crafting a new album wasn’t the catalyst for making new music. They really just wanted to write, jam, and record without an agenda while locked down during the pandemic.

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Fig. 1: Unlike traditional microphones, contact mics only pick up the vibrations of the surface they’re attached to.

Using a contact mic on your acoustic guitar has many advantages—and can open the door to some adventurous experimentation.

Hello and welcome to another Dojo! In honor of our “acoustic” issue, I want to focus on one of my favorite creative, yet sadly under-used, mic techniques—using an external contact microphone. This type of microphone (aka piezo microphone) picks up sound vibrations through direct contact with a surface and, of course, is the same technology that is already embedded in your under-saddle or bridge pickup for those of you who have acoustic guitars with a 1/4" output jack. But having an external contact mic allows us to move it to unlimited locations on any guitar (acoustic or electric) and, more importantly, on almost everything else you can imagine
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Our much-loved former columnist Jeff Bober returns to explain how to check and reset the bias of your amp’s output tubes—and delivers some potentially shocking warnings about a few common but dangerous techniques.

Hello again, Premier Guitar readers! It’s your old bud Jeff here, author of the once popular Ask Amp Man column. Editorial Director Ted Drozdowski asked me if I would be interested in writing about bias, and, of course, I said, “Sure, I know a thing or two about that!” So here I am, temporarily returning to these pages. Now, let’s get started.

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Fig. 1

Using templates when recording makes a big difference in streamlining your workflow, and will leave you more time to get creative.

Hello and welcome to another Dojo! This time I’d like to focus on the benefits of using templates in your recording and mixing process. I’ll also show you some ways in which you can increase your productivity by using customized templates for your particular workflow regardless of what DAW(s) you use. Whether you’re recording a live band or a solo artist, you can create templates that include the necessary tracks, processing, and routing setups to meet your unique requirements. Tighten up, the Dojo is now open.

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