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DIY

Mastering Modulation: The Distinctive Sounds of Chorus, Phaser, Flanger & Vibrato
DIY: How to Use Flanger, Chorus, Phaser & Vibrato on Guitar — Plus Modulation in Modern Music!

PG's Nikos Arvanitis explains and demonstrates the individual sonic qualities and contrasting characteristics of the most-used modulation effects on guitar by citing the Police, Heart, Prince, Nirvana, Whitesnake, and Pearl Jam.

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Steve Albini in the control room at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.

Photo by Kevin Tiongson

Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.

“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”

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This sharp fiesta red Strat and Pro Reverb sang beautiful Knopfler-esque melodies, but all that glitters isn’t gold.

A search for a fiesta red Stratocaster and a Knopfler tone didn’t turn out the way our columnist hoped it would.

The latest chapter of my quest for perfect sounds is a love story filled with surprises and valuable insights worth sharing about a fiesta red Stratocaster with a maple neck. Along the way, I’ll explain how I used it to dial in a timeless Mark Knopfler tone from old-school Fender amps.

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The symbol for shoshin.

Photo by Robert Boni

Undoing the belief that mastery is the goal can enable you to truly unleash your creative potential.

The great Zen master Shunryū Suzuki once said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.” Reflect for a moment on how we spend the majority of our lives constantly accumulating, winnowing, and refining, with the majority of our efforts geared towards attaining greater and greater efficiency through massive repetition, which in turn deeply ingrains habits. This is considered to be the path towards mastery. But it is also the path towards fewer and fewer choices, an unconscious reliance on those ingrained habits (the good and the bad), and diminishing creativity.

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Pickup specs are often written to be user-friendly. But how can players make informed decisions on pickup combinations without phase and polarity details?

Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage! This month’s column is about phase and polarity, two pickup parameters we talked about in detail some time ago, but which could use a thorough review. From numerous emails and requests, I know that this can be a very confusing subject. So, here’s a story that happens every day, all around the planet. Maybe it sounds familiar to you:

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