Bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun played guitar, as well as several other instruments, on her first three albums under the Myrkur name. This time, she handed the 6-strings to Will Hayes.
Too many album covers have little to do with the music inside. That’s not the case with Spine, the latest release from Myrkur, the performance moniker of Danish singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun. On the cover, a metallic fossil of some mythical creature lies on top of a mossy forest floor. It could be the remnants of the alien from Predator, or one of the “Great Old Ones” that H.P. Lovecraft wrote of that preceded humanity by millennia on Earth. The surreal juxtaposition of these elements encapsulates Myrkur’s ethereal style, which mixes such disparate influences as Scandinavian metal and Celtic ambient.
Myrkur has often been described as a one-woman band. And while Bruun does write all of the music and lyrics, Spine was very much a collaborative effort between Bruun, guitarist Will Hayes, producer Randall Dunn, and technical assistant Úlfur Hannson, who did most of the synthesizer programming, sound design, and string arrangements. Bruun, whose inspiration for the album was drawn from her experience as a new mother, elaborates on the challenges that the collaboration created for her: “I had to grow with the assignment. That is not natural to me. I am a complete control freak. Myrkur is such a strong vision, and so personal. Then after I became a mom, I had to realize I have no control the way I thought I did.”
MYRKUR - Valkyriernes Sang (Official Audio)
Bruun and Hayes were introduced to each other by Dunn back in 2017, when Bruun was working on her third album, Mareridt. Hayes was a session musician in the band that Dunn had arranged for Bruun, when her plans to put together a group of Danish musicians in Copenhagen fell through. Where on Mareridt and Bruun’s two albums preceding it, she contributed parts on nearly every instrument, on Spine, she ceded all of the guitar work to Hayes.
On Spine, Hayes worked with Bruun and producer Randall Dunn to fine-tune his tone for each song.
“The process was similar on both albums,” Hayes describes. “Amalie’s songs were fully written, so the chord changes, vocal parts, and lyrics were all there, with riffs and additional instrumental ideas included in the demos.” His responsibilities in both cases were to “learn the music and come in with ideas about how to activate what’s there, and bring out the depth of the songwriting.
“Mareridt feels more metallic and jagged, and a very Northwest sound,” Hayes elaborates. “On Spine, the songwriting is more in focus, and the ‘metal band’ features are more of a faint transmission coming through, overlapping with other elements. With the guitars, it’s more about how they’re layered with synths in the production. The sound is holographic.”
“I had to grow with the assignment. That is not natural to me. I am a complete control freak.”—Amalie Bruun
The music that came from the demos for Spine—three of which had, as Bruun calls it, “emotional and spiritual involvement” from Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan—were expanded tremendously in the studio. (Corgan produced Daggers, the second album she released with her past project, Ex Cops.) After Bruun would leave the studio for the day, Dunn, Hayes, and Hansson would work on the various layers to present in the final product. These included strings, synth programming, and vocal harmonies.
WIll Hayes' Gear
On his solo projects, Hayes has experimented with audio-to-MIDI conversion, where he generates MIDI with his guitar.
Photo by Cassandra Croft
Guitars
- Custom Dunable Yeti baritone
- Gibson SG
- Martin acoustic
- Fender Precision Bass
Amps
- Sunn Model T with Hiwatt cabinet (Royer ribbon mics)
Effects
- Klon clone
- Vintage Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer
- Hologram Electronics Microcosm
- Universal Audio A/DA Flanger
- OTO Machines BAM Space Generator Reverb
- The GigRig Wetter Box
- Lehle Mono Volume Pedal
- Lehle Dual Expression Pedal
- Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water K-Field Modulator
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball 6-String Baritone Slinky Nickel Wound (.013–.072)
- Dunlop Gator Grip .71 mm
Hayes explains, “I feel like the secret to this record is that it’s a singer-songwriter record, but with this whole landscape surrounding it. A lot of the guitars are very austere and a lot of the layering and the instrumentation is fitting together in a way that gives things a depth of field.”
Spine’s first three tracks immediately establish an interconnected atmosphere while still being distinct from one another. “Bålfærd” features a drone from a hurdy-gurdy, emanating behind vocals, acoustic strums, and synthesizer washes. “Like Humans” leads with malevolent harmony and martial drums before an anthemic chorus. “Mothlike” is another early highlight: Voice and synthesizer establish a dance-club-like groove—think refreshed Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart—morphing in and out of a wall of distortion, Bruun’s screams, and a brief but epic guitar solo from Arjan Miranda, who guested on Dunn’s invitation. “Arjan has lived and breathed NWOBHM [new wave of British heavy metal] and Mercyful Fate,” says Hayes, “and that’s totally the type of old-school solo that was called for on that song.”
“It’s less about conscious genre-mixing, and it’s more associative.”—Will Hayes
For Hayes’ parts, he shares, “The influences varied song to song and sometimes by part. For instance, the flanged-out riff during the chorus of ‘Blazing Sky?’ The idea was to have a cold liquid part there, so Cocteau Twins naturally became a reference we agreed on. It’s less about conscious genre-mixing, and it’s more associative: For the different roles a guitar part might play in the arrangement, there are different stylistic influences to plug in.”
After being laid off from a warehouse job, Hayes applied to the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where he went on to study classical composition.
Photo by Abby Williamson
Hayes’ guitar work acts as a foil to Bruun’s enchanting, mythological-siren-like vocal, providing an unexpectedly ideal complement with heavy, overdriven, churning chordal textures, carefully articulated lines, and at times aggressive tremolo picking. Among his approaches to black metal in general is a knowledge of how to implement the third, which he says can simulate the sound of a bowed instrument. “When you’re tremolo picking across whole chords, there’s a blurriness to that and an aleatoric nature to how you can activate the chord and stretch the rhythmic particles to act as texture, which can morph and be impressionistic.”
Hayes grew up listening to metal, learning to play guitar by mastering Slayer and Megadeth riffs, eventually gravitating towards “more extreme bands” such as Sepultura, Sarcófago, Morbid Angel, Celtic Frost, Bathory, and Mayhem. He began writing his own music as a teenager, and when he was laid off from a warehouse job at the age of 19, he decided to take a step towards a career in music. He applied to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and was accepted. There, he studied classical composing.
Absorbing his professor Wayne Horvitz’s lessons and music, he says, was “really pivotal for me. I learned a lot from him about how to use harmony and tonal ambiguity to evoke complex emotions, and he helped me break out of some writing tropes I had picked up from metal. Also, [I was influenced by] his estranged approach to American music, and methods of combining composition with improvisation.” Horvitz, who played with John Zorn’s Naked City, was a part of the Downtown scene of improvisers in the ’80s in New York City. “Through that entry point,” says Hayes, “I got really interested in free improvisation, and learning about other musicians he played with.”
Through his studies, Hayes was exposed to avant-garde and 20th-century classical music: Morton Feldman, Maurice Ravel, and Arnold Schoenberg; and medieval and Renaissance music, by Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, and Hildegard of Bingen. Today, he names Ornette Coleman’s album Skies of America, Charles Ives’ “Three Places in New England, III. The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” Nico’s “The Falconer,” and Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” as some of his favorite music. “I’m really drawn to extremes on all sides,” he explains, “and to artists and pockets of music that are idiosyncratic and culturally, or counter-culturally, severe.
“Transilvanian Hunger by Darkthrone is one of my favorites,” he continues. “There’s nothing else that really sounds like that, even within their catalog. It’s not really even a metal record; it sounds more like folk music from the center of the Earth or something.”
Hayes, who first met Bruun in 2017 for the recording of her album Mareridt, performed all of the guitar parts on Spine.
The main guitar Hayes played on the album was a customized Dunable Yeti. He requested a baritone version, with a custom pickup configuration: three split-coil humbuckers, each with a 3-way switch, for “optimal tone-sculpting. I wanted a guitar with a wide range, and a versatile instrument I could use for low metal and also for clean, cold baritone stuff, like the Cure or Glen Campbell-style deep baritone sounds. It’s really become my axe that I use for everything.”
To develop the guitar parts for Spine, Bruun and Dunn would confer on which tone they wanted, and then present a few options to Hayes. “Randall’s use of gear is always to accomplish specific creative goals, and evoke something emotional,” Hayes observes. Sometimes the process of arriving at those goals would begin with a piece of gear or an effect chain, and the guitar part would serve as a means to “activating the gear.”
“It’s a way to morph different styles of playing into one another, and exciting collisions occur when you’re writing or improvising.”—Will Hayes
Among Hayes’ pedals are a Klon clone, a vintage Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer, and a Hologram Electronics Microcosm granular looper and glitch pedal. He likes to get experimental when working with them and others in his collection. “I’ve gotten really into parallel signal chains in my pedal rig, and crossfading between them expressively. For instance, having a clean channel and a distorted channel, each with their own color and modulation options. And then I have this mixer pedal called a Wetter Box by GigRig, which takes an expression pedal, so I can mix between signal A and signal B in real time with my foot. It’s a way to morph different styles of playing into one another, and exciting collisions occur when you’re writing or improvising.”
Another method he uses along these lines is crossfading higher and lower octave chains, each with their own distinct modulation and rhythmic effect. He currently uses the Microcosm on his higher octave chain. “It samples what you’re playing and explodes it into a cloud of granulated fragments.”
Alongside Myrkur and his other session work, Hayes also performs as a solo artist, and creates music and sound design for film, dance, and theater projects. In his solo work, he’s explored audio-to-MIDI conversion, using the Virtual Studio Technology plugin MIDI Guitar 2 and the Fishman TriplePlay. The technology, which enables him to program synths, samplers, and arpeggiators using the MIDI generated by his guitar, now plays a significant role in his sound design and electronic music. “It’s funny, the way these products are marketed doesn’t seem to fully illuminate the creative potential of the technology,” he shares. “It can get really deep, especially through designing original sound. I’m excited to see MIDI employed creatively by more and more guitarists.”
“To me, the pioneering extreme bands were groups of kids who were spiritually searching.”—Will Hayes
And while Hayes clearly exhibits that adventurous nature in both production and artistic tastes, it’s clear that metal, the genre that got him into music in the first place, still speaks to him above all else. “There’s something really exciting about an overt expression of evil [in metal]. To me, the pioneering extreme bands were groups of kids who were spiritually searching. Making a song where you’re basically saying, ‘This is the most evil thing that can happen,’ is like its own moralistic backstop against real evil.”
He continues, “I’ve noticed for many musicians and producers in creative music right now, metal is a bit of a lingua franca. There is power to this music that really doesn’t exist anywhere else, so for people who have spent their lives seeking out transformative sonic experiences, it’s no surprise that the canon of extreme metal is so important.”
I bet you saw yourself in the opening scene of Twenty-Four-and-Three-Quarter-Inches of Woe, which may be the title of the screenplay I just started to write, most likely due to the fact that you’ve made a similarly boneheaded mistake with your instrument.
Unfortunately, my storytelling skills didn’t save a nice new Epiphone Casino from sliding off my amp, meeting the floor, and earning some damage on the way down. Yeah, that’s a true story, and I’m sure something similar has happened to you as well. It can happen to anyone who plays guitar for long enough, but there’s no need for despair yet.
If you’ve been victimized by gravity like I have, as long as the damage isn’t major, you can fix a lot of things yourself. I’ll use my felled Casino as an example. It suffered a loosened tuner, an input jack that fell inside the guitar, a damaged fret, and a few dents in the finish. While I work, I’ll provide some suggestions for supplies and tools to keep in your home repair kit, just in case you ever need them.
Tools for the Tasks
We ordered all of the tools we used in these repairs, excluding the painter’s tape and the toothpicks, which we picked up during lunch at Jack’s Bar-B-Que, from StewMac.
The essentials:
• ESP Multi Spanner
• Archtop Guitar Helping Hand
• Guitar Tech Screwdriver Set
• 3 Corner Fret Dressing Files
• Ultra Thin Master Glue
• GluBoost Fill n’ Finish
• Rectangular Sanding Kit
Can’t Tune It like That
First, let’s take care of the loose tuner, since it’s currently in no shape to reliably hold string tension. The tumble knocked it sideways, which loosened the screws holding in the key, which caused the wood around the screws to strip. It’s alarming to see, but this is a very simple fix.
Add to Repair Kit: Round toothpicks, water-thin CA glue, glue applicator tips, safety goggles
[Note: For the unfamiliar, CA is short for cyanoacrylate. It’s commonly referred to as “Super Glue,” but since that is a brand name, not the generic, I’ll refer to it here as “CA glue.”]
First, remove the tuner by backing the screws out, then pull the tuner from the headstock. My Casino’s tuning keys use a press-in bushing to hold the post straight in the headstock, so no further disassembly is required. However, if you experience this issue with a guitar with more modern-styled tuning keys, you’ll need to use an appropriately sized wrench or socket to remove the screw-in bushing before removing the key.
Next, break a toothpick in half, insert the thicker end into the hole where your mounting screw used to be. Break it off flush with the surface, and repeat the process with the other hole.
Safety goggles on: It’s CA glue time. Trust me, you do not want to squirt this stuff into your eye. Fit an applicator tip to the glue bottle and practice your squeeze on a scrap piece of paper or wood, far away from anything you don’t want glued to your guitar or yourself. This stuff is magic—it will bond things you never intended if you aren’t careful.
All you need is a very small drop, so practice until you can confidently flow out just a small controlled amount. Once you’ve mastered that, drop a small amount of water-thin CA glue into each filled hole. It will soak through the toothpick into the surrounding wood just enough for this quick fix. Let it cure for at least 15 minutes, but longer is even better.
Pop the tuner back in and drive the screws straight into the toothpick-filled holes. The screw will compress the toothpick into the existing wood and create new threads strong enough to hold your tuner in place.
Congratulations! You fixed it well enough to at least make it through a session. I’ve done this on several guitars that lasted years with no issues, so you should be confident in your work.
Hit the Road, Jack
Look, there’s no way to sugarcoat this. Fishing an output jack out of a hollowbody guitar is a pain. You can do this. All you need is patience and a few handy gadgets.
Add to Repair Kit: flashlight, multi-spanner, small drywall anchor, “helping hand,” small screwdriver
Your first task is to locate the jack inside the guitar. Odds are it didn’t fall far away from where it needs to be, since it’s probably wired to one of your control potentiometers. Use your flashlight to shine some light inside the f-hole to help find it.
I found mine wedged against the treble side of the rim, a little farther away than I can reach with my fingers. This is not zesty. I am unhappy but equipped and determined.
The tool I described as a “helping hand” becomes useful here. It’s essentially just a bent hook at the end of a handle made out of pliable heavy wire. Several guitar parts suppliers sell something similar. I got mine from StewMac for a reasonable price, but if you want to be thrifty about it, there’s no reason why you can’t cut and bend a wire coat hanger.
Take a few deep breaths, and working through the f-hole, use the hook end of your helping hand to gently pull the output jack back toward where it was mounted. Bend the helping hand however needed to reach the jack as easily as possible.
I managed to pull the jack back enough to put a small screwdriver through the jack’s mounting hole and then through the jack itself. That screwdriver will act as a guide while I lift the jack back into place with the helping hand.
You should expect this will take several attempts. Try not to get frustrated. With enough patience, you’ll be able to get the jack back where it belongs. Once you have the jack in place, carefully thread the washer and nut back onto the jack. It shouldn’t take much effort to thread it back on. Just be careful not to cross-thread the nut.
Now that the nut is threaded on enough so it won’t fall back in, the challenge is to tighten it without twisting the jack itself to avoid breaking any wires. I’ve seen and used a few different methods to accomplish this, but I came across one recently that I really like.
This is where you’ll use your drywall anchor. Get one small enough to fit inside the jack without using too much force, then tighten the screw in the anchor so that it spreads to fit tightly inside the jack. This will hold it steady enough to tighten the nut with a multi-spanner tool or an appropriately-sized wrench.
I like a multi-spanner for this job, because it’s always the right size and is slim enough to not be clumsy for operations like this. Like the helping hand, lots of suppliers sell something similar using different names. Mine is made by ESP and also arrived in my StewMac tool box. I use it all the time for all sorts of tasks.
Once the nut is tightened, unscrew the drywall anchor, remove it, and test the jack for sound by plugging your guitar into an amp. A positive result should be obvious at this point, but if you don’t hear any signal, or an excessive consistent buzz, get in touch with your local repair tech.
Got a Dent In My Fret, Man
Honestly, face-first is probably the best way a guitar like my Casino could have hit the ground. The damage could’ve been far worse. Check any forum for endless complaints about Gibson/Epiphone headstock breaks. But I do need to address some damage to a fret caused during the fall.
The issue here is that plain steel electric guitar strings—like your G, B, and E strings—are considerably harder than most frets (my stainless steel fret contingency, put your hands down and let me finish), so it’s possible for a string to leave a small sharp dent in a fret if you hit it with enough force. This specific issue might go unnoticed until it’s time to bend a note at that fret, then you’ll feel and hear the string catch it. No good.
Before we get started: Having allof your frets carefully levelled, recrowned, and polished is alwaysa better solution than partially levelling just a few frets. But considering the entire premise we’ve constructed, which is a situation where we just want the guitar back in action relatively quickly, a partial fret level on the upper frets is perfectly fine as long as it’s done carefully.
Add to Repair Kit: Crowning file (three-corner or rounded), assortment of sandpaper (400 grit to 800 should be fine), 0000 extra-fine steel wool (optional), fretboard conditioner, permanent marker.
First thing we need to do is identify which frets need the work. Let’s say you have a nick in your 17th fret on the treble side under the B string. The goal is to bring the height of that damaged fret and all the frets past it down until the nick disappears. After that, remove the strings before you begin working.
To accomplish this, mark the damaged frets and all frets past it with a permanent marker. A trusty black Sharpie works great for this, but any darker color works fine. For this repair, we only need to work on the treble side of the frets, so that’s all you need to focus on. Also, use some blue painter’s marking tape to protect the area of the guitar near where you will be working. Small slips of a file or sandpaper can cause some nasty injuries to the guitar’s surface.
Next, level the damaged fret and all frets past it (moving toward the bridge) with something stiff enough to not flex under pressure. I keep an old credit card—a nice sturdy one—with a bit of 400-grit sandpaper glued to one side along the shorter edge, 800 grit on the other side. Start with the 400 and work your way down, being careful not to use too much pressure. Let the sandpaper do the work.
You’ll notice the ink is removed as you sand. The way to make sure you’re keeping everything level is to stop frequently and observe the new clean areas on top of each fret. Each one should be about the same width.
This will take a while. A 400-grit sandpaper does not remove material quickly, 800 grit even less so. I’m suggesting this technique because working slowly makes it more difficult to get yourself in trouble. Several suppliers sell mini files for spot leveling, but I don’t recommend starting there because they remove fret material pretty aggressively.
Eventually you’ll notice the little divot in your 17th fret is almost gone. Now’s time to switch to 800 grit to finish the job. You guessed correctly: This will take even longer, but it’ll leave a nice finish without removing any more material than necessary.
Great! Now you have five flat-topped frets. That won’t sound very good, so now you need to re-crown them, giving them a rounded profile to match the other frets. I like to use a 3-corner file to slowly round over each side of the fret, working from the fretboard up, but if you feel like dropping some serious flow on a specialized crowning file, this job can be a lot easier. Be sure to get the marker back out, ink up each fret, and stop filing when just a tiny sliver of ink is left on top of each fret.
Use a piece of 800 grit paper to remove any file marks and smooth out each fret. If you have finer grits, you could work your way up to 1200 or so, but don’t go too hard or you could undo your work. You just want the frets clean and smooth. At this point, I like the way frets feel after a quick buff with 0000 steel wool, but the mess left behind does rightfully deter a lot of repair techs. If you opt in for this, be sure to tape off your pickups and consider finding a second location for this step.
Work in some fretboard conditioner if you like (skip it if you have a maple or synthetic board; no need for that here), put some new strings on, and check your work. Play every note on these frets, to make sure they ring out without any buzzes. It may not look perfect, but as long as the guitar sounds good, you’re okay until it’s time for a full level/crown/polish job.
Not Finished Until It’s, Uh, Finished
Now for the last souvenir from my Casino’s short journey to the floor. I noticed a few spots along the rim of the guitar where the finish was damaged. Specifically, it looks like the guitar hit something with an edge on the way down hard enough to put a couple of jagged dents in it, right along the binding.
Funny, that’s actually what binding is intended for–protecting edges and corners from damage. Anyway, we need to discuss a few things about guitar finishes.
For the purpose of this article, I’m only going to discuss repairs to the clear coat, since that’s where my damage is. Most guitars now are finished using polyurethane or lacquer for the top clear-coat layer.
Speaking verygenerally, lacquer finishes are softer and less durable, which makes hiding repairs a lot easier if you have the skills and patience. Polyurethane finishes are hard and tough in every way: hard to damage and tough to hide repairs regardless of skills or patience.
I happen to know that my formerly mint-condition Casino has a polyurethane finish, which means I’m going to lower my expectations with this repair. Instead of trying to make it look like it never happened, which will take a lot of work, I’ll just try to keep it from getting worse over time, which will take considerably less work.
It also means I won’t be discussing how to repair lacquer finishes, which is a bit more in-depth, requires a lot more patience and practice, and is therefore not really recommended for the average DIY’er—at least not in the scope of this piece. So if your guitar has a lacquer finish, I don’t think this part applies. Let someone else take care of it, or maybe skip this part and learn to love your guitar as is. The latter is still an admirable move.
Add to Repair Kit: Nothing! You already have what you need from the previous repairs. Feel good about that.
Since the damage is a pronounced dent with sharp edges in the clear coat, all I really need to do is seal it with an appropriate material. And the material appropriate for repairing polyurethane finishes is—you guessed it—CA glue, because it dries hard, clear, and quickly, much like polyurethane.
Step one: Use painter’s masking tape around the area of the damage, just in case the glue runs when applied. Step two: Put glue on the dented finish. CA glue will fill in all the small cracks within the damage and seal the existing finish. Be careful; use the smallest-drop-possible technique you perfected when fixing the tuning peg, and give it plenty of time to dry.
That’s it. That’s all I need to keep the finish from continuing to chip the more I play it. Yes, I saved the easiest one for last, as a little treat.
Obviously, this isn’t a particularly beautiful repair, so I could go above and beyond by using thicker CA glue—for example, GluBoost Fill n’ Finish—to fill it in completely, sand it level, and polish the area back to the original mirror gloss. Dan Erlewine has a few excellent YouTube videos outlining this exact method that are easy to find, and I encourage you to try if you’re so inclined. But for my purposes, this will do.
Accidents will happen if you’re actually playing your guitar, but they’re no cause for panic when they do. Even though the guitar isn’t perfect anymore, it’s perfectly playable, and I can get by with it for now. I broke it, so I fixed it, which is something I hope you feel empowered to do should you break yours.
Next time, I’ll use a good guitar stand.
The typical controls on a compressor can be confusing and often misunderstood. At the heart of the MXR Studio Compressor is the ratio control, which offers up four levels of squish.
Their conversation made me reflect on compressors more generally, and their standing as probably the least understood guitar pedal effect. There is a long-running joke about the guitar player who spends 30 minutes dialing in his compressor before the sudden realization that, for all the knob twisting, the pedal itself has never turned on. Most players have put on the compressor dunce cap for at least 30 seconds—if not 30 minutes.
When compared to effects like distortion and delay, compression can be as esoteric, nuanced, and arcane as a clandestine funk-guitar society’s secret handshake. In my experience, a large swath of guitar players cannot even detect compression until they are sonically beaten over the head with it. And of those who can discern the bludgeoning, many don’t know which knob to turn to achieve a more subtle effect. We guitar players should have known we were in trouble when many professional compressors came with buttons labeled “auto.” If even our know-it-all, front-of-house cousins need a crutch, what hope do we have?
Compression originated in the recording studio, where professional engineers were both its inventors and primary users, so its controls tend to be more technical than your amp’s bass, middle, and treble knobs. Let’s break down some controls in the simplest terms possible.
Introduced in 1972, the Dyna Comp had two simple controls: output and sensitivity. It’s far from transparent, but added a musical coloration that made fans out of Bonnie Raitt and Lowell George.
Threshold: This setting determines what gets squished and what doesn’t. Everything below the threshold passes through unchanged. Everything above the threshold gets squished. This is often labeled “sustain” on many guitar pedals. Sometimes, as the sustain is turned up, the compressor’s threshold point goes down, lowering the bar for what gets compressed, and more effect gets applied to your dry signal.
Ratio: How much compression is applied to signals above the threshold. A 1:1 ratio would mean no compression. At 2:1, for every 2 dB over the threshold, the compressor will only let 1 dB through. Some classic compressors have a ratio around 30:1. This means that above the threshold, you can increase the input signal significantly but receive only a small increase in output. Boom, you’re chickin’ pickin’.
Attack: This adjusts how fast it takes the compressor to get to work. A shorter attack means the clamping action happens immediately, while a longer attack time lets a brief burst of signal through before they start applying the aforementioned compression ratio.
Release: After the signal drops below the threshold, the compressor takes a certain amount of time to stop compressing or release. A longer release lazily hangs on and stops compressing when it gets around to it. Shorter releases get out of the way faster, and the next transient can get through uncompressed before being re-attacked.
Makeup Gain (or Output Level): The compression process naturally limits gain. To match the energy level of your uncompressed signal, you may need to boost the compressor’s output. Compression evens out the peaks, and makeup gain can compensate for any perceived differences in level.
Threshold and ratio are the heart of the compressor’s function. Threshold decides what gets compressed and ratio determines how much it’s compressed. Attack and release are about how fast compression is applied and how quickly it stops being applied. By controlling these, you are controlling how quickly transients are attacked and how slowly transients are released. Every guitar compressor has an attack and release time, but many designs hide these controls via internal, fixed component values. The designer has benevolently dictated what setting you should use. Output level lets you make up for all that crushing by adding level to compensate.
This is just the beginning of compression. We’ve got the knobs, we know the function, and next time we’ll discuss how we can use this dynamic darling
Today, the choice of guitar cables is better than it’s ever been, and you can choose between countless options regarding color, stability, plug style, length, diameter, bending strength, shielding, etc. A lot of companies offer high-quality cables in any imaginable configuration, and there are also cables promising special advantages for specific instruments or music styles, from rock to blues to jazz.
Appearance, stability, longevity, bending stiffness, and plug configuration are matters of personal preference, and every guitarist has their own philosophy here, which I think is a great thing. While one player likes standard black soft cables with two straight plugs, their buddy prefers red cables that are stiff as hell with two angled plugs, and another friend swears by see-through coiled cables with golden plugs.
“We often want to come as close as possible to sounding like our personal heroes, but we fail because we’re using the wrong cable for a passive guitar.”
Regarding reliability, all these parameters are important. Who wants a guitar cable making problems every time you are on stage or in the studio? There are also technical parameters like resistance, capacitance, transfer resistance on the plugs, and more. Without making it too technical, we can summarize that, sound-wise, the only important technical parameter for a passive guitar circuit is the capacitance of the cable. Sadly, this information is often missing in the manufacturer’s description of a guitar cable, and there’s another thing we have to keep in mind: Most manufacturers try to offer cables with the smallest possible capacitance so the guitar can be heard “unaltered” and with a “pure” tone. While these are honourable intentions, they are self-defeating when it comes to making a guitar sound right.
Let’s take a trip back to the past and see what cables players used. Until the early 1980s, no one really cared about guitar cables—players simply used whatever was available. In the ’60s and ’70s, you could see a lot of ultra-long coiled cables on stage with players like Clapton, Hendrix, May, Townshend, Santana, and Knopfler, to name just a few. They used whatever was available, plugged in, and played without thinking about it. Ritchie Blackmore, for example, was famous for notoriously using incredibly long cables on stage so he could walk around. Joe Walsh and many other famous players did the same. Many of us have these players’ trademark sounds in our heads, and we often want to come as close as possible to sounding like our personal heroes, but we fail because we’re using the wrong cable for a passive guitar. So what are we talking about, technically?
It’s important not to look at the guitar cable, with its electrical parameters, as a stand-alone device. The guitar cable has to be seen as part of the passive signal chain together with the pickups, the resistance of the guitar’s pots (usually 250k or 500k), the capacitance of the wires inside the guitar, and, of course, the input impedance of the amp, which is usually 1M. The interaction of all these in a passive system results in the resonance frequency of your pickups. If you change one of the parameters, you are also changing the resonance frequency.
”Ritchie Blackmore, for example, was famous for notoriously using incredibly long cables on stage so he could walk around.“
You all know the basic formulation: The longer the cable, the warmer the tone, with “warmer” meaning less high-end frequencies. While this is true, in a few moments you will see that this is only half the truth. Modern guitar cables are sporting a capacitance of around 100 pF each meter, which is very low and allows for long cable runs without killing all the top end. Some ultra-low-capacitance cables even measure down to only 60 pF each meter or less.
Now let’s have a look at guitar cables of the past. Here, capacitances of up to 400 pF or more each meter were the standard, especially on the famous coiled cables. See the difference? No wonder it’s hard to nail an old-school sound from the past, or that sometimes guitars sound too trebly (especially Telecasters), with our modern guitar cables. This logic only applies to our standard passive guitar circuits, like those in our Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, SGs, and most other iconic guitar models. Active guitars are a completely different ballpark. With a guitar cable, you can fine-tune your tone, and tame a shrill-sounding guitar.
“No problem,” some will say. “I simply use my passive tone control to compensate, and that’s it. Come on, capacitance is capacitance!” While this logic seems solid, in reality this reaction produces a different tone. “Why is this?” you will ask. Thankfully, it’s simple to explain. You might be familiar with the typical diagrams showing a coordinate system with "Gain/dB" on the Y-axis and "Frequency/kHz" on the X-axis. Additional cable capacitance will shift the resonance frequency on the X-axis, with possible differences of more than one octave depending on the cable. A cable with a higher capacitance will shift the resonance frequency towards the left and vice versa.
Diagram courtesy Professor Manfred Zollner (https://www.gitarrenphysik.de)
Now let’s see what happens if you use your standard passive tone control. If you close the tone control, the resonance frequency will be shifted downwards mostly on the Y-axis, losing the resonance peak, which means the high frequencies are gone. This is a completely different effect compared to the additional cable capacitance.
Diagram courtesy Professor Manfred Zollner (https://www.gitarrenphysik.de)
To summarize, we can say that with different cable capacitances, you can mimic a lot of different pickups by simply shifting the resonance frequency on the X-axis. This is something our passive tone control can’t do, and that’s exactly the difference you will have to keep in mind.
So, let’s see what can be done and where you can add additional cable capacitance to your system to simulate longer guitar cables.
1. On the cable itself
2. Inside the guitar
3. Externally
In next month’s follow-up to this column, we will talk about different capacitances and how you can add them to your signal chain with some easy-to-moderate modding, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
