A pair of techs at work at StewMac’s Athens, OH, homestead.
Photo by Scott Marx
If you like to make, mod, or mess with your instrument, chances are you’re familiar with StewMac and Allparts. Here, their people tell us how they became the go-to suppliers for DIYers around the world.
It’s easy to forget, but it takes all manner of materials, tools, and know-how to make and maintain a well-loved guitar that’s built to last and plays exactly the way you like it. Pickups, tone knobs, toggle switches, and input jacks. Neck plates, bridges, tailpieces, and saddles. Strap buttons, truss rods, pickguards, string retainers, tuning keys, fret wire, ferrules. Capacitors and circuitry, nuts, and washers, screws and springs. Not to mention the tonewoods and specialized luthier tools used to fashion the body, neck, headstock, and fretboard.
These days, it’s not hard to find the parts and tools that guitarists need to make, repair, or upgrade their instrument. But decades ago, it wasn’t so simple. Before the days of online forums and same-day shipping, guitarists, luthiers, repair techs, and shopkeepers often had to scour the earth for the specific part they were looking for, or make do with an imperfect replacement.
Into that flawed and frustrating market stepped a few enterprising enthusiasts determined to streamline that search for the perfect part. The idea was simple: What if we just sold all of it? Every knick-knack and doodad, all in one place?
In the process, StewMac and Allparts emerged as the leading suppliers of guitar parts and tools, making it possible for nearly anyone to pursue their own quest for the perfect tone.
An acoustic guitar body is formed at StewMac HQ, while DIY words to live by hang in the background.
Photo by Scott Marx
Leading a Community of Luthiers
StewMac’s motto is “making guitars better.” But in the beginning, the brand had almost nothing to do with guitars.
In 1968, Kix Stewart walked into a music store in Athens, Ohio, to repair his banjo. He became friends with the owner, Bill MacDonald, and the two started building their own banjos. Not satisfied with the banjo heads available on the market, they developed their own. Soon, they realized they were making more money selling the individual parts than they were from the banjos themselves. So, Stewart and MacDonald focused on the parts, expanding their business with banjo assembly kits and mandolin components.
The biggest evolution yet came in 1986 with the addition of Dan Erlewine, now one of the most well-known names in lutherie and guitar repair. The company began not only selling guitar parts, but also developing their own specialty tools. Today, the company now known as StewMac is one of the world’s foremost suppliers of tools, parts, and woods for stringed instruments.
Still headquartered in Athens, a small city about 75 miles southeast of Columbus, the company employs just over 100 people at its four-story, 60,000-square-foot warehouse, which houses an inventory of more than 7,000 different products. About 15 percent of that is made, assembled, or modified at StewMac’s facility, while the rest is sourced from third-party suppliers. Elsewhere, StewMac runs their European distribution through the Spanish luthier company Madiner, which carries StewMac products and sources many of the tonewoods they sell.
On the average day, StewMac will ship out at least 800 orders, and during especially busy times—the holiday season, for instance—they can see up to 2,000 orders each day. A team of two dozen pickers works on the warehouse floor, shipping out orders within hours of when they’re received.
“Everybody that works here plays guitar, repairs guitars, builds guitars. It’s not so much a job as it is a calling.”—Brock Poling
As Brock Poling, StewMac’s vice president of marketing, explains, the company has succeeded largely because of its passion for the craft. Poling is a luthier himself, and he was a StewMac customer before he joined the team in the early 2000s.
“We’re not just a company that’s selling you stuff,” says Poling. “Everybody that works here plays guitar, repairs guitars, builds guitars. It’s not so much a job as it is a calling.”
There are several reasons why StewMac has managed to grow from a two-man operation into an international enterprise that’s been in the business for 57 years.
One important factor is their focus on specialty tools. Some of the company’s bestselling products include fretting tools and bending machines that were developed in-house by expert luthiers. This year, two of the hottest products have been the J Edwards Fractal Fret Press, handcrafted by Texas-based luthier Jerame Edwards, and a new acoustic guitar side bending system, designed in-house with input from Charles Fox, the original inventor of the universal side bender.
Where it all began: StewMac founders Creston Stewart (left) and Bill MacDonald.
Photo by Carl Fleischhauer
Among StewMac’s other bestsellers are all-in-one kits that come with everything a beginner needs to complete their own project. The company introduced its acoustic and electric guitar kits in 2017, and a few years later expanded to offer a line of pedal kits, including the highly popular Ghost Drive, a do-it-yourself clone of the Klon Centaur.
“We’ll have people sending pictures of amp kits they’re working on, asking, ‘Where did I go wrong?’ And we’ll help troubleshoot.”—Ally Campbell
But what has really made the difference in the company’s business model, Poling says, is its strategic focus on how-to guides and video tutorials. StewMac has nearly half a million subscribers to its YouTube channel, which offers more than 500 videos about building, repairing, and maintaining guitars.
“This opens a new avenue to give someone a new idea, a new project, a new thing to pursue,” says Poling. “I’ve built our pedal kits. That is a new thing for me. I’ve never really built anything like that before. It’s fun, because not only is it a new project, it’s also a new set of skills.”
In essence, StewMac has fostered a community of users who are regularly looking for ideas for their next project—and conveniently, StewMac has all the parts and tools to bring those projects to life.
“We’ve really tried to look at this as if we are YouTubers first and a brand second,” says Poling. “We don’t sell, we don’t pitch. We want to provide value to the people that are watching these videos. The tools and materials that are in our videos are just cast members in the story.”
Poling says that while a small percentage of the company’s customers are professional builders, the majority are hobbyists. In 2020, when Covid pandemic forced most people to stay at home, StewMac saw an “enormous lift” in sales, Poling says.
There are about 30,000 subscribers to the StewMAX membership, which offers free shipping and returns, discounts, and monthly offers. And if anyone runs into problems, StewMac has plenty of people around to help.
“We don’t just have customer support reps to help with orders—we also have a team of guitar techs who can walk you through projects,” says Ally Campbell, StewMac’s social media manager. “We’ll have people sending pictures of amp kits they’re working on, asking, ‘Where did I go wrong?’ And we’ll help troubleshoot.”
StewMac has tapped into a community constantly on the lookout for the next invention to make guitar work faster, easier, better—or all of the above. That’s also where Allparts shines.
“Recession-Proof”: The Timeless Appeal of DIY
While StewMac was still in its early years peddling banjos, the manager of a music store in Houston had his own idea for a company that would sell the guitar parts he had always had such a hard time finding.
In 1982, Steve Wark started Allparts in his garage, working several part-time jobs to take care of his new family while he cold-called music stores across the country to sell his catalog of 115 hard-to-find products he had sourced from a single Japanese supplier.
“You can’t necessarily count on another Eddie Van Halen and Floyd Rose combination coming along. So, we have to think as players: What would be interesting?”—Dean Herman
Throughout the ’80s, Allparts benefitted from strong sales of metal parts, particularly a bestselling tremolo that was marketed as an alternative to the Floyd Rose, just as that product exploded in popularity thanks to shredders like Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai.
The Allparts team at their Houston warehouse, with Dean Herman in the front row, second from right.Photo by Enrique Rodriguez
Nowadays, Allparts sells more than 3,500 items from suppliers in 18 countries, and it fulfills thousands of orders per month. Far removed from Wark’s garage operation, Allparts employs roughly two dozen people at its 13,000-square-foot facility in Houston.
“The company has always been fairly lean. “Everybody here wears a couple of hats,” says Allparts president Dean Herman. “We’re very capable of being able to adapt to whatever the business calls for.”
By 2020, Wark had sold Allparts to the private equity firm Ambina Partners and was planning his retirement. Herman joined the company after 25 years at Fender, where he had worked his way up from junior rep to sales director. First hired as Allparts’ vice president of sales and marketing before being promoted to president a few years later, he was tasked right away with modernizing the company’s e-commerce site, sales and inventory system, and order fulfillment.
Five years later, he reports that results have been positive across the board: a boost in sales, improved logistical efficiency, and a superior customer experience. The company now keeps pricing and inventory more accurate, ships most web orders the same day, and has strengthened its product descriptions to help customers understand each piece of gear and why it could be the right fit for their rig.
Allparts receives a lot of high-volume, lower-priced orders for small, highly specific parts with “evergreen demand,” like jacks, switches, pots, and knobs. But their real bestsellers are the premium, player-oriented aftermarket upgrades, like Leo Quan’s Badass bridges and tuning keys, and the relatively new Certano T-Bender bridge for Telecasters.
Herman is particularly proud of the T-Bender, which was designed by the French craftsman David Certano and further developed in partnership with Allparts. The bridge serves as a simplified alternative to B-Bender and G-Bender bridges, offering players the ability to bend their B or G string up to a full step to get those classic pedal steel sounds. But unlike its predecessors, it doesn’t require any extra drilling or routing to install, and is fully reversible. That makes it way more accessible to players curious to try it out, but who don’t necessarily want to spend hundreds of dollars and permanently retrofit their guitars in the process, Herman says.
“I don't have illusions that [the Certano T-Bender is] ever going to take the place of a Glaser Bender or anything,” he says. “But we just thought an elegant, more-DIY friendly solution would offer players a fun way to dip their toes into that arena, and to take their playing in a different direction without having to modify their instruments.”
That’s exactly the type of new product that Allparts is training its sights on. Herman says he’s excited about the prospect of working with new collaborators who have great ideas that satisfy a niche market—something that’s more challenging today than in previous decades.
“It’s always a good time to be in the parts business.”—Dean Herman
“In the past, it might have been a little easier,” he says. “There was a predominant style of music that you could attach yourself to, and you could come up with an item that catered to a specific crowd. Nowadays, there's a zillion different kinds of players listening to a zillion different kinds of music. So we’re looking for interesting little niches, and that next thing to get excited about. You can’t necessarily count on another Eddie Van Halen and Floyd Rose combination coming along. So, we have to think as players: What would be interesting? What would people find compelling?”
It’s that type of thinking that gave Allparts a leg up in the market when Wark was still getting the company off the ground in the ’80s, and it’s what continues to push the company forward more than 40 years later. To be sure, Herman says, “We have lots of other fun ideas in the works.”
Allparts’ Herman poses at the company’s corporate headquarters in Houston with a Tele fitted with a Certano T-Bender bridge.
Photo by Enrique Rodriguez
Throughout the years, Allparts—much like StewMac—has weathered economic shifts well, relatively speaking. While many American businesses have grappled with the effects of the Trump administration’s new tariffs, both Allparts and StewMac are navigating the situation carefully, and neither reports seeing much of an effect. Similarly to how Brock Poling of StewMac referred to a sizable share of the company’s product line as “recession-proof,” Herman sees opportunities for Allparts to thrive in virtually any economic situation.
“If the economy is great, people are buying guitars and basses, and builders need cool, differentiated parts that offer their customers something new they haven’t seen before,” he says. “But if the economy’s not great, the repair side of the business does better. So in our view, it’s always a good time to be in the parts business. It’s always a good time to be thinking about cool, innovative upgrades for musicians.”
Hello, and welcome back to another installment of Mod Garage. My homework for this month’s column was to completely disassemble last month’s Harley Benton guitar, and as expected, there were some surprises under the hood.
The first surprise hit me while taking off the factory-installed strings. While doing so, all six string ferrules fell out of the body onto the floor. While it’s not a rare scenario that the ferrules on a Telecaster can be pulled out easily, this was special. It’s not a big problem, because with the strings installed, the string tension will hold them in place, but who wants to search for the string ferrules on the floor every time you need to change the strings—especially on a dark stage floor in the middle of a gig? This is not custom-shop grade, so it was the first issue on my list.
After measuring the diameter of the drilled holes in the body and the ferrules, it was clear why they fell out: The holes are a lot larger than the diameter of the ferrules. It was clear that I can’t glue them in for a better fit, nor use tape to compensate. There were only two real solutions: close the holes in the body with wooden dowels and drill them again, or use different ferrules matching the diameter of the holes in the body. The stock bullet-shaped ferrules are very cheaply made, so I decided it wasn’t worth the work to save them. I ordered a new set of ferrules with a larger diameter than the holes in the body (making an existing hole bigger is much easier and less work than filling it and starting from zero). I picked a standard set of vintage protruding ferrules—the first $12 on our bill.
Photo courtesy of SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
This wasn’t the best start, but it is what it is! After taking the guitar apart completely, I made a game plan. Visually, I want to keep it mostly vintage looking, but with a modern twist to get the best of both worlds. I decided to age the hardware only slightly to give it a used and worn look, but with no rust or artificial damages. Same with the body and neck—while the neck already has a satin-matte look, the body is very shiny and glossy. I’ll break the shine, giving it a matte and used look but without cracks or damage. This will lend the color a much more pleasing vintage appearance, and it’ll feel much better compared to the high-gloss finish. The complete guitar weighs only 7.2 lbs (3.3kg), which is really lightweight for a Telecaster. I really like light electric guitars, so I’ll attempt to shave off even more weight during this process.
Let’s start with analyzing the body of our guitar to see what we have. It’s easy to see that saving time and cutting costs were principal directives—which is understandable given the price of the guitar. Let’s love it for what it is rather than hating it for what it isn’t. The rough-hewn body is very lightweight and made out of basswood, which is not a traditional “tonewood” for electric guitars. It’s the first choice for carving and woodturning work of all kinds because it’s relatively soft; easy to work with, but solid. From the neck pocket’s vantage point, we can tell that the body isn’t made of one or two pieces of wood, but of many, many more. In the neck pocket alone, I can count four pieces, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the body is made out of 15 pieces or even more, so I think we can call it stave-glued. We can also glean some more information from the neck pocket: It’s not only stave-glued, but also laminated horizontally in several layers, and the paint is ultra-thick—a trait you can notice around every drilled hole on the body.
Photo courtesy of SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
With these qualities in mind, let’s repeat some common internet guitar knowledge (CIGK) and make some assumptions about this instrument:
A lightweight electric guitar will have no sustain and a thin sound.
Basswood isn’t tonewood, so it won’t sound very good.
It’s a multi-piece body, which will make it sound worse.
The ultra-thick polyurethane finish kills tone because the wood of the guitar can’t breathe and resonate freely.
According to all this online wisdom, we have the worst guitar one can think of, right? Ignoring all these assumptions, one could argue it’s an excellent body because it’s extremely solidly made (stave-glued and laminated), armored under a thick and glass-like layer of ultra-resilient polyurethane finish, yet still lightweight. By the end of our project, we’ll see what’s fact and what’s fiction, but we have plenty of work to do first.
Here is a list of fixable issues to be addressed:
1. There is a lot of paint in almost every hole in the guitar, often paired with fringed wood fibres from the drilling process.
2. There is a lot of wooden debris, primer, and paint in the neck pocket, as well as a 10mm hole.
3. The depth of the bridge pickup’s cavity is relatively shallow.
4. Inside the electronic compartment there is a massive block of wood.
These will be the first steps to enhance the quality of the body, with the first being the easiest one. You don’t need much for this, just some half-round files in different sizes, a countersink, some old newspaper, and, of course, some time.
I assume they used worn-out, blunt drill bits in the factory, which would explain this mess. They first drilled the holes, with little care for the result, then painted over afterwards, preserving all the fringed wooden fibres under a thick layer of paint. Luckily, this is easy to correct. Cover your workspace with some old newspapers, place the body on it, and clean all the holes with a half-round needle file before using a larger one to clean the hole for the output jack.
This was the meanest one on this guitar—I was really surprised how much stuff came out of it after some passes with the file. After all the holes are cleaned and free of any paint and debris, use a sharp countersink to carefully clean the tops of all the holes. Don’t use any machine for this, just a countersink, your hands, moderate pressure, and two passes for every hole. Because the paint is really thick, it’s easy to chip off some color, so it’s important that your countersink is really sharp and you don’t apply too much pressure.
Photo courtesy of SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
This was a good start! Next month, we will continue with the second task on our list: cleaning the neck pocket, which is a very important step. Stay tuned, and remember, our $352 budget is reduced to $340 because of the new ferrules I bought.
Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage! Let’s pick up where we left off with our Telecaster.
Our next step will be to take care of the neck pocket, which is a very important and crucial task. This is the contact point of the body and the neck, so we want a tight, precise connection for maximum tuning stability and playing comfort.
I don’t know if it’s the same on all Harley Benton T-styles, but the fitting accuracy of the Harley Benton’s neck and neck pocket is perfect—I wish I saw this kind of quality on guitars which cost more than 10 times the price of this one! No need to modify our neck pocket by gluing in some wooden veneer to make it tighter; we can leave it just the way it is.
While the fitting is commendable, unfortunately the craftsmanship of the neck pocket itself is not that good. Besides wooden debris and chips, there’s a lot of “stuff” inside that I can’t identify for certain, but it’s likely some grain filler and clear coat. We’ll need to remove a fair amount from the neck pocket to ensure the heel of the neck has a completely level surface for installation.
SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
I decided to use a simple razor blade, a Japanese carving knife, and a razor knife to scrape all the junk away. You can also use some micro chisels, or even simply sanding paper. Special knives that are used for guitar lutherie as well as violin-making are ultra-sharp, and with some practice, it’s easy and fast to use them for such tasks. I was surprised by how much material there was in the neck pocket; it had a strong chemical smell to it, so it went immediately into the garbage.
SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
Next, I took some sandpaper of different grits to make the surface as smooth as possible. I started with 150-grit and worked my way up to 1000-grit. After blowing away all dust, the neck pocket was absolutely even and clean, offering the perfect surface for the neck heel. Pleased with the result, I moved on to the next task.
For some reason, there was a big hole in the neck pocket, which I think has something to do with the CNC routing or the painting process. While this hole is not a problem regarding stability, and it’s invisible after the neck is installed, it’s not in the original Fender design, and my inner monk can’t live with this, so it had to be closed with a wooden dowel. After measuring, it turned out to be a metric 10 mm hole, and I knew luck was on my side—as is often the case, IKEA would be my best friend. You’re probably familiar with the bevelled wooden dowels used on almost every IKEA product to attach two parts together. They’re made out of strong beech wood and available as individual spare parts with an 8 or 10 mm diameter, so I always have a good collection in the shop. This was easy going: I simply cut the dowel to length and put it in a cup of warm water for a couple minutes so it expanded a little bit for a tight fit. After drying it for a short time, I put some wood glue on it, plus some in the hole, before pushing it in and wiping away the excess glue with a damp cloth.
SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
A tip from the shop: Ask your local optical store what they are doing with the old lenses from their customers. If there’s a chance you can get some for free, this is the perfect helper for any glue job—I always have a good collection of such lenses in the shop, and they’re easy to clean with a bit of rubbing alcohol. Put the wood glue on the concave side of the lens and use a toothpick to apply the glue to the dowel and hole. Afterwards, wipe the rest of the glue away, clean the lens with water, and it’s ready for the next time. This also works for super glue, but you’ll have to throw away the lens afterwards.
Here, we can clearly see how many different pieces of wood are glued together for the body (I count four pieces alone in the small neck pocket), that the body is laminated horizontally, and the thickness of the paint.
As you can see, the routings for the bridge pickup and the electronics are a little bit strange. The bridge pickup’s cavity is relatively shallow, and a Forstner drill bit was used to create deeper spots for the three screws holding the pickup in place. At the bottom of the electronics compartment is a block of wood, which I’d guess was there to shorten routing time and reduce production costs. I still haven’t decided on the pickups and electronics I’ll use for this guitar, but I certainly don’t want to run into any trouble making them fit. The wooden obstruction here could limit what sorts of pots and pickup-selected switches we can use, so it’s best to get ahead of that and remove it from the equation. (Even if it doesn’t end up being 100 percent necessary, it’ll remove a bit of excess weight!) So, let’s carve out some space here.
SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
The professional way would be to mask the whole body with tape and use a handheld router to remove the wood. Since I bet most of you don’t have that sort of tool, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way, using a Forstner drill bit and a drill press. I don’t recommend any handheld drilling device for this—if you don’t have access to a drill press or a handheld router, ask your local carpenter if he can do the work for you. After masking the body, the drilling process is easy to do with a sharp Forstner bit. I used a smaller one for the edges and a bigger one for the rest.
SINGLECOIL (https://singlecoil.com)
It’s a crude but effective—and fast—way to remove the wood. After the drilling, I used some sandpaper to smooth out the surface and put some shellac on the bare wood, but this isn’t mandatory—my inner monk, you know? Take care to not drill too deep, which happened to me years ago on a custom-made Jaguar body with a very special paintjob. That wasn’t fun to explain to the customer.
Next month, we’ll finish the work on the body, before moving on to the hardware and electronics. The good news is that our $340 budget is still in hand for future investments, so stay tuned.
A trio of verbs: (l-r) EMT 250, Lexicon 224, and EMT 140
Reverb is one of the most powerful colors in our palette. We all know that moment when you feel the need to add some to your tracks—whether you’re recording and looking for an inspiring new dimension, or you’re mixing and require that extra touch of spatial magic. But why are there so many options? With literally hundreds of convolution, algorithmic, plate, and spring reverbs out there, it’s easy to feel an overwhelming sense of anxiety. Knowing the differences between types of reverbs and why certain units have become legendary can significantly elevate your recordings and mixes. Tighten your belts, the Dojo is now open.
The Starting Point
I’m going to sidestep the deeply fascinating and well-researched physics and psychoacoustics behind the phenomena of reverb. Instead, we’ll focus on practical strategies for how to choose the right one (plate, spring, algorithmic or convolution), and why some types are more prized than others.
Unless you’re situated in an anechoic chamber or an open field, every environment, from a hall closet to a canyon, has reverberant properties. But before the advent of reverb chambers and plate reverbs, it was a fixed byproduct of the space where the recording took place—think of the 1961 concert document, Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall, for example. Not all concert halls lent themselves to studio quality recordings, though, especially for genres of music other than classical or opera.
After 1947, the only way to add artificial reverb was to employ a chamber—literally, a specially built room with a speaker and microphone(s). Recording studios started to develop their own echo chambers that gave a unique sonic fingerprint to the recordings, and we still prize certain studios—Abbey Road, Ocean Way, Blackbird, Motown, Sound City— for their chambers, many of which are now available in the forms of plugins.
All that began to change in 1957, in Berlin, with the advent of the EMT 140 plate reverb. EMT’s solution was brilliant: suspend a large sheet of steel under tension, feed sound into it through a transducer, and capture the shimmering decay with contact mics. The EMT 140 gave engineers long, smooth tails that felt lush without overwhelming the source. Vocals in particular took on a glow that instantly elevated a mix. That unmistakable “plate vocal sound” defined the recordings of countless artists, from Frank Sinatra to the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix to Pink Floyd. Even today, plug-in makers such as Universal Audio, Waves, and Arturia are still chasing that magic, and multiple original units are still widely used by world-class studios.
“Unless you’re situated in an anechoic chamber or an open field, every environment, from a hall closet to a canyon, has reverberant properties.”
Fast forward to 1976, and EMT again pushed things forward with the EMT 250, the first commercially available digital reverb—for the princely price of $20,000 (over $114,000 today). Only 250 units—a mini refrigerator-sized machine with controls that looked like they came off the dashboard of a spaceship—were produced. What made the EMT 250 special wasn’t just its novelty, but the way its algorithms shaped reflections. It had a character all its own: warm, slightly grainy, and wonderfully musical. Almost a proto mutli-effects processor, it didn’t try to mimic reality so much as create a believable illusion of space, and it did so with a tremendous personality. (The EMT 250 is currently available from Universal Audio as a plug-in for $249 street.)
Meanwhile, across the ocean in Massachusetts, Lexicon was hard at work refining digital reverberation. The Lexicon 224 (1978) was half the price of the EMT 250 and boasted a reverb range of 0.6 to 70 seconds. It also offered the first flexible and convincing Concert Hall, Chamber, Room, Plate, Rich Plate, and Inverse algorithms. It was the studio reverb of choice until the 480L(1986) which, with its updated signal processing power, became thestudio staple—and for good reason. Chances are it’s the main big reverb on classic U2, Talking Heads, Rush, Prince, and Peter Gabriel records. The 480L’s algorithms remain benchmarks: dense, lush, and capable of everything from subtle ambience to stadium-like grandeur. Even today, if you walk into a top-tier studio, odds are a 480L is still patched in.
I encourage you to set aside some time and get to know the differences between these four classic verbs, before we move on to another set in the next installment. They are all available in plugin format with fully functional trial periods. I’ll share my favorite reverbs in order of preference and application next month. Until then, namaste.
Player feel, mic placement, and your recording room are the real secrets to getting soulful, compelling performances. Spend time understanding them before you push the button.
In a world saturated with plugins, presets, and post-production wizardry, it’s easy to forget the most important part of the recording process. I call it the “Red Light Trifecta.” It’s a simple, powerful concept that can transform your recordings from sterile to soulful—regardless of your gear, your room, or your budget. Tighten up your belts, the dojo is now open.
The Red Light Trifecta refers to three interdependent elements that define every recorded sound: the player (of which the instrument is merely an extension), the microphone (and its placement), and the room. If you’re lacking in any one of these, your recording suffers—not just in fidelity, but in feel. When all three work in harmony, the red light on your recorder becomes a doorway to magic. Below, we’ll explore the steps to achieving this.
1. Feel First, Gear Second
It’s easy to get lost in the gear conversation. The internet is full of passionate debates about preamps, converters, boutique mics, and vintage/new guitars. But none of it matters if the performance isn’t compelling.
When you press record, you’re not capturing a tone; you’re capturing a human being’s interaction with an instrument. You’re capturing intention, emotion, and energy. The touch of a player’s fingers on the fretboard, the timing of a right-hand mute, the bend at the end of a phrase—these micro-decisions are what form the soul of a recording. And they’re specific to that player.
“When you press record, you’re not capturing a tone; you’re capturing a human being’s interaction with an instrument.”
If you’ve ever plugged into someone else’s rig—same guitar, same amp, same settings—you know how uncanny it is that you still sound like you. Conversely, a truly great player can make a pawnshop guitar sound like it came from a boutique luthier’s bench. That’s not mysticism; it’s muscle memory, control, and mindset.
So the first rule of recording is this: Start with the player (even if it’s you)! Are they connected to the music? Are they playing with purpose? No amount of EQ or compression can fake that.
2. The Mic: Placement Over Price Tag
If the player is the heart of the performance, the mic is the conduit. There are thousands of microphones out there; some with reputations so mythic they practically glow in the dark. But a great mic in the wrong place will still result in a lousy recording. Conversely, a modest mic in the right spot can yield professional, even breathtaking results.
Mic placement is where your ears matter more than your eyes. It’s about experimenting, listening, and adjusting. Moving a mic an inch can dramatically change the tone—less boom, more clarity, tighter low end, softer transients. You’re not just pointing a mic; you’re sculpting a sound at the source.
Want a quick way to test your placement? Record a short passage, then move the mic slightly and record again. Compare. Listen to not just the tone, but the space, the balance, the emotional impact. Don’t be afraid to break rules or try unconventional setups. Your job isn’t to copy someone else’s sound—it’s to find the best version of yours.
Remember: It’s very easy to make an expensive mic sound cheap. But with care, it’s also possible to make a budget mic sound exceptional.
3. The Room: The Invisible Instrument
The third member of the trifecta is the most misunderstood—and the most revealing: the room. Every space has a sound, whether you’re aware of it or not. Some spaces are flattering. Some are brutal. But all of them are recorded.
Think of the room as your invisible instrument. It contributes resonance, reflections, and tone. It shapes the reverb tail, the attack, and the decay. If the room is boomy or boxy, your track will sound that way—even before you add any processing. If it’s too dry, you might find your recordings feel lifeless or anemic.
That doesn’t mean you need a world-class studio with floating floors and golden ratios. It means you need to understand your space. Clap your hands. Walk around while playing. Record from different spots. Learn what your room wants to do naturally and work with it, not against it.
Sometimes, the best solution is to change the instrument’s location by a few feet. Or use furniture as gobos. Or hang a blanket. Or lean into the room’s quirks and let them define the character of the track.
The Trifecta in Action
When all three elements align, you get a vibe. You get a performance that resonates emotionally, and sonically. And in the end, that’s what we remember: not the mic model or plugin chain, but how the music made us feel. Until next month, namaste.
The Allparts team at their Houston warehouse, with Dean Herman in the front row, second from right.Photo by Enrique Rodriguez
![Devon Eisenbarger [Katy Perry] Rig Rundown](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=61774583&width=1245&height=700&quality=70&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
