How to use your EQ to your advantage in a number of difficult gigging situations.
The Series Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: Strings Part 3: Compression Part 4: Pickups Part 5: EQing, at last! |
So at the end of this laundry list, the only variables left should be ones you canāt control: the room, the background noise, the club or festival sound systemāand some of that can be controlled if you know ahead of time what youāre getting into. If you are playing in a neighborhood bar, donāt take your $10,000 handmade Brazilian dreadnaught with phosphor-bronze strings and an internal mic, unless you can guarantee that nobodyās gonna be playing pool or pinball, celebrating their twenty-first birthday or confronting their soon-to-be-ex-wifeās new boyfriend after a few shots of Wild Turkey. This is common sense stuff, and admittedly guitar players are not often overly blessed with that. We tend to plan for gigs as we want them to be, not for what they are. Bottom line, if youāre not playing in Fantasy Land, you may need to EQ your guitar once in a while.
The Room is a Tomb
Sometimes the shape of a room or the way it is decorated can kill ya. My trio once played in a long narrow room with a tile floor, floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall, two standard plasterboard walls at either end, and more glass on the side where the doors were. The icing on the cake? A ceiling that sloped up from the outer glass wall to the inner wall with the doors in it, probably a twenty-foot run at about a 12:12 pitch. Talk about natural reverb. There was not one thing in that room that would absorb sound, until the people came in. We were trying to get acoustic guitar, bass and drums not only to balance, but not to sound horrible together in the room. There was no winning that battle. Thatās when your EQ tools become weapons of feedback destruction and nothing more. There was a persistent howl around my low-A string, and there was no tweakingāI had to pummel it into submission, which made my guitar sound obnoxiously nasal, so I had to pull back at around 1kHz to wipe the snot off the tone. Then of course all you could hear were the highs, and they sounded like teeth grinding glass, so we pulled back at 5kHz, and again at 10kHz, in order to keep from inducing migraines in the audience members. And what are you left with then? Really thin sounding mud.
But thatās an extreme example. I have also played rooms where I could just plug in and with everything flat the sound was perfect. Thatās not as rare as you might think, because I thought long and hard about what I wanted to sound like, and sculpted my rig to give me that.
Help me! Iām drowning!
Other times the room can be acoustically great, but the situation a social one so youāre competing with lots of other voices, clinking table wear, laughter, drunken laughter, and the occasional sporting event on the television. I remember a night, way back when I was a young dinosaur, when a bar had BeJae Fleming and me set up right next to the big-screen TV during March Madness. That was a night that continues to live in infamy. When youāre competing with noise thatās right in the middle of your frequency range, a lot of people just keep turning up, turning up, turning up, and thatās one way to handle it. Recently, there have been some acoustic amps that have come close to solving the problem altogether. AER, from Germany, was the first to change the way the sound waves came out of the speaker so you literally were not competing with the noise; you could just be like the oxygen in the roomāeverywhere all at once and perfectly audible (donāt ask me how they did it, because I have no ideaāI just know it works and that is a great happiness). In fact, using an AER AcoustCube, I have had kitchen staff come out to find out why they were hearing gorgeous acoustic guitar in the kitchen over the usual restaurant clatter and kitchen noise, and I wasnāt even turned up to 4. Any of AERās options, or Schertlerās Unico, the Bose L1, the L.R. Baggs Core 1 and the Fishman SA220, are all proving remarkably effective with these kinds of issues, and with all those options, you can probably find a solution in your price range.
If you donāt have access to one of the above-mentioned acoustic amps, then youāre going to have to tweak the high-mids and highs up little by little until youāre cutting through the noise like a knife, or youāre going to have to turn the volume up until your ears bleed.
Frankensteinās PA System
Sometimes your nemesis is the sound gear, and forgive me, folks, but Iām gonna do a little bitchinā here on behalf of my acoustic brethren. At almost every festival that I have played with multiple stages for multiple acts (the Country Stage, the Rock Stage, the Folk Stage), not only have they put the acoustic music next to the latrines, they have also given us the oldest, nastiest, most cobbled together sound systems imaginable. WTF? If youāre going to force people to listen to folk music while theyāre standing in line to pee, the least you could do is let them hear it through a decent PA system. Sheesh.
So how do you get good sound then? Sometimes itās just a matter of making it through the set. Hereās a laundry list of possible issues to be prepared for.
Issue 1: Your pickupās fantastically high-tech onboard preamp is overdriving the antiquated mixing board. Oh, I hate it when that happens. Travel with a good DI that has a multi-band EQ. Turn down your pickup to about 5 at the onboard pre, and the XLR out on your DI should give the board a signal it can live with, but your guitar may sound a little lifeless. You can try to boost 400Hz to warm things up just a touch, and boost the highs around 5-10kHz, but go easy and in teeny increments because the warmth can turn to mush or incite feedback (especially with a system of questionable parentage), and too much 5kHz can make your guitar sound brassy, brittle or worseālike a cheap POS.
Issue 2: Piezo quack bouncing off the porta-johns. Ah, the dreaded piezo quack. Cut between .8 and 1.6kHz, to get rid of the nasal tone, and at 5kHz to cut some harsh and brassy tones. Another option is to have a good magnetic soundhole pickup that you can temporarily install in a crunch. Otherwise, surgical cuts in the mids and delicate shavings from the treble range can reduce the quack, and hopefully leave enough brilliance and sparkle in your tone to keep you mostly satisfied.
Issue 3: The speakers are blown and every time I play an A or G chord it sounds like the speaker is... farting. Been there, played that gig. Cut the very low bass by 3 to 6db, and then work gently on the lows and into the mids, from around 240Hz to 400Hz to find the exact location of the offending frequency. Take out only what you need. This is one of the most frustrating PA nightmares of all, because in addition to sucking your tone, it forces you to contain your dynamic range to prevent more distortion, which sucks the energy out of your performance.
Issue 4: The rock band headline act on another stage is coming through my monitor louder than me, and I canāt hear what Iām playing. Yeah, I played with Cheap Trick once. Well, they were on the other side of the river, but they were louder in my monitor (and in the mains) than I was, so that counts, right? Solution: pray for a reasonable stage manager, accept the paycheck with a smile, pack up and go watch Cheap Trick.
General Rules
The 400Hz range is sort of like Viagra for guitars. More makes them woodier, but if it sustains for more than four hours, consult a recording engineer...
The .8-1.6kHz range is where you get that nasal, reedy, unpleasant tone that makes you screw up your face and say, āEww.ā If it troubles you, dial it back by 3db but stop short of 6, just until you no longer feel an uncontrollable urge to sneeze.
When you start approaching 5kHz youāre getting into the ābreathā sounds that a guitar makes. If you cut too much here, the guitar sounds a little asthmatic and constricted. Too much here can cause you to have brassy, whiny tone.
At 10kHz and beyond youāre talking about sparkle, glitter, a coating of silver frost on a brilliant winter morning. In a very bright room youāll hear that as brittleness, and youāll want to pull that down a little, but in a dull room, youāll find it brings your tone to life.
The best way to learn about how these frequencies affect your guitar isāyou guessed itāto listen. Get a good EQ or DI with at least a 5-band EQ, set everything flat, and then start dialing things in and out and listen to how the tone changes. Eventually you will get a feel for it, and youāll remember what makes your baby sound as good as it can. Then when you encounter a bad room or the worst sound system ever, youāll be ready to sound as good as you can.
Framus Hootenanny Re-Issue Guitars: John Lennonās Favorite Reimagined | PG Plays
Join PG contributor Tom Butwin as he explores all-new versions of the Framus Hootenanny 12-string and 6-string acousticsāmade famous by John Lennon and now available with modern upgrades. From vintage-inspired tone to unique features, these guitars are built to spark creativity.
This Japan-made Guyatone brings back memories of hitchinā rides around the U.S.
This oddball vintage Guyatone has a streak of Jack Kerouacās adventurous, thumbing spirit.
The other day, I saw something I hadnāt noticed in quite some time. Driving home from work, I saw an interesting-looking fellow hitchhiking. When I was a kid, āhitchersā seemed much more common, but, then again, the world didnāt seem as dangerous as today. Heck, I can remember hitching to my uncleās cabin in Bradford, Pennsylvaniaāhome of Zippo lightersāand riding almost 200 miles while I sat in a spare tire in the open bed of a pickup truck! Yes, safety wasnāt a big concern for kids back in the day.
So, as Iām prone to do, I started digging around hitchhiking culture and stories. Surprisingly, there are organized groups that embrace the hitching life, but the practice remains on the fringe in the U.S. Back in the 1950s, writer Jack Kerouac wrote the novel On the Road, which celebrated hitchhiking and exposed readers to the thrill of maverick travel. Heck, even Mike Dugan (the guitarist in all my videos) hitched his way to California in the 1960s. But seeing that fellow on the side of the road also sparked another image in my brain: Yep, it always comes back to guitars.
Let me present to you a guitar thatās ready to go hitching: the Guyatone LG-180T, hailing from 1966. The āthumbs-upā headstock and the big āthumbā on the upper bout always made me think of thumbing a ride, and I bought and sold this guitar so long ago that I had forgotten about it, until I saw that hitchhiking dude. Guyatone was an interesting Japanese company because they were primarily an electronics company, and most of their guitars had their wooden parts produced by other factories. In the case of the LG-180T, the bodies were made by Yamaha in Hamamatsu, Japan. At that time, Yamaha was arguably making the finest Japanese guitars, and the wood on this Guyatone model is outstanding. We donāt often see Guyatone-branded guitars here in the U.S., but a lot of players recognize the early ā60s label Kentāa brand name used by an American importer for Guyatone guitars.
With a bit of imagination, the LG-180Tās āthumbs upā headstock seems to be looking for a roadside ride.
Kent guitars were extremely popular from the early ā60s until around 1966. The U.S. importer B&J fed the American need for electric guitars with several nice Kent models, but when the Guyatone contract ended, so did most of the Kent guitars. After that, Guyatone primarily sold guitars in Japan, so this example is a rare model in the U.S.
āUnless you are a master at guitar setups, this would be a difficult player.ā
This headstock is either the ugliest or the coolest of the Guyatone designs. I canāt decide which. I will say, no other Japanese guitar company ever put out anything like this. You have to give the Guyatone designers a thumbs up for trying to stand out in the crowd! Guyatone decided to forgo an adjustable truss rod in this model, opting instead for a light alloy non-adjustable core to reinforce the neck. Speaking of the neck, this instrument features the most odd-feeling neck. Itās very thin but has a deep shoulder (if that makes any sense). Totally strange!
Another strange feature is the bridge, which offers very little adjustment because of the three large saddles, which sort of rock back and forth with the tremolo. Itās a shame because these pickups sound great! Theyāre very crisp and have plenty of zing, but unless you are a master at guitar set-ups, this would be a difficult player.
This could be why the LG-180T only appeared in the 1966 and 1967 catalogs. After that, it disappeared along with all the other Yamaha-made Guyatone electrics. By 1969, Guyatone had gone bankrupt for the first time, and thus ended guitar production for a few decades. At least we were blessed with some wacky guitar designs we can marvel at while remembering the days when you could play in the back end of an explosive 1973 AMC Gremlin while your mom raced around town. Two thumbs up for surviving our childhoods! PG
There's a lot of musical gold inside the scales.
Intermediate
Intermediate
ā¢ Develop a deeper improvisational vocabulary.
ā¢ Combine pentatonic scales to create new colors.
ā¢ Understand the beauty of diatonic harmony.Improvising over one chord for long stretches of time can be a musician's best friend or worst nightmare. With no harmonic variation, we are left to generate interest through our lines, phrasing, and creativity. When I started learning to improvise, a minor 7 chord and a Dorian mode were the only sounds that I wanted to hear at the time. I found it tremendously helpful to have the harmony stay in one spot while I mined for new ideas to play. Playing over a static chord was crucial in developing my sense of time and phrasing.
The following is the first improvisational device I ever came across. I want to say I got it from a Frank Gambale book. The idea is that there are three minor pentatonic scales "hiding" in any given major scale. If we're in the key of C (CāDāEāFāGāAāB) we can pluck out the D, E, and A minor pentatonic scales. If we frame them over a Dm7 chord, they give us different five-note combinations of the D Dorian mode. In short, we are building minor pentatonic scales off the 2, 3, and 6 of the C major scale.
Viewing this through the lens of D minor (a sibling of C major and the tonal center for this lesson), D minor pentatonic gives us the 1āb3ā4ā5āb7, E minor pentatonic gives us 2ā4ā5ā6ā1, and A minor pentatonic gives us 5āb7ā1ā2ā4. This means you can use your favorite pentatonic licks in three different locations and there are three different sounds we can tap into from the same structure.
If you smashed all of them together, you would get the D Dorian scale (DāEĀĀāFāGāAāBāC) with notes in common between the D, E, and A minor pentatonic scales. Ex. 1 uses all three scales, so you can hear the different colors each one creates over the chord.
Ex. 1
Ex. 2 is how I improvise with them, usually weaving in and out using different positional shapes.
Ex. 2
The next idea is one I stole from a guitarist who often came into a music store I worked at. On the surface, it's very easy: Just take two triads (in our example it will be Dm and C) and ping-pong between them. The D minor triad (DāFāA) gives us 1āb3ā5, which is very much rooted in the chord, and the C major triad (CāEāG) gives us the b7ā9ā4, which is much floatier. Also, if you smash these two triads together, you get 1ā2āb3ā4ā5āb7, which is a minor pentatonic scale with an added 2 (or 9). Eric Johnson uses this sound all the time. Ex. 3 is the lick I stole years ago.
Ex. 3
Ex. 4 is how I would improvise with this concept. Many different fingerings work with these, so experiment until you find a layout that's comfortable for your own playing.
Ex. 4
If two triads work, why not seven? This next approach will take all the triads in the key of C (CāDmāEmāFāGāAmāBdim) and use them over a Dm7 chord (Ex. 5). Each triad highlights different three-note combinations from the Dorian scale, and all of them sound different. Triads are clear structures that sound strong to our ears, and they can generate nice linear interest when played over one chord. Once again, all of this is 100% inside the scale. Ex. 5 is how each triad sounds over the track, and Ex. 6 is my attempt to improvise with them.
Ex. 5
Ex. 6
If we could find all these possibilities with triads, it's logical to make the structure a little bigger and take a similar approach with 7 chords, or in this case, arpeggios. Naturally, all the diatonic chords will work, but I'll limit this next idea to just Dm7, Fmaj7, Am7, and Cmaj7. I love this approach because as you move further away from the Dm7 shape, each new structure takes out a chord tone and replaces it with an extension. I notice that I usually come up with different lines when I'm thinking about different chord shapes, and this approach is a decent way to facilitate that. Ex. 7 is a good way to get these under your fingers. Just ascend one shape, shift into the next shape on the highest string, then descend and shift to the next on the lowest string.
Ex. 7
Ex. 8 is my improvisation using all four shapes and sounds, but I lean pretty heavily on the Am7.
Ex. 8
This last concept has kept me busy on the fretboard for the last five years or so. Check it out: You can take any idea that works over Dm7 and move the other diatonic chords. The result is six variations of your original lick. In Ex. 9 I play a line that is 4ā1āb3Āā5 over Dm7 and then walk it through the other chords in the key. These notes are still in the key of C, but it sounds drastically different from playing a scale.
Ex. 9
In Ex. 10, I try to think about the shapes from the previous example, but I break up the note order in a random but fun way. The ending line is random but felt good, so I left it in.
Ex. 10
While all these concepts have been presented over a minor chord, you can just as easily apply them to any chord quality, and they work just as well in harmonic or melodic minor. Rewarding sounds are available right inside the harmony, and I am still discovering new ideas through these concepts after many years.
Though the above ideas won't necessarily be appropriate for every style or situation, they will work in quite a few. Developing any approach to the point that it becomes a natural extension of your playing takes considerable work and patience, so just enjoy the process, experiment, and let your ear guide you to the sounds you like. Even over just one chord, there is always something new to find.
Building upon the foundation of the beloved Core Collection H-535, this versatile instrument is designed to serve as a masterpiece in tone.
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The Core Collection H-555 features a set of Custom Shop 225 Hot Classic Humbuckers, meticulously wound in-house with carefully selected components, and voiced to deliver added punch and richness while preserving exceptional dynamics and touch sensitivity. Seamlessly complementing the H-555ās semi-hollow construction, they blend warmth and woodiness with refined, articulate clarity.
The Core Collection H-555ās aesthetic has been elevated with multi-ply binding on the body, headstock, and pickguard. Its neck, sculpted in a classic ā50s profile, delivers effortless comfort and is adorned with elegant block inlays, seamlessly blending style with playability. Gold hardware complements the aesthetic, exuding elegance while presenting the H-555 as a truly premium and versatile instrument for the discerning player.
Available in Ebony and Trans Cherry, each Core Collection H-555 is beautifully finished with a nitrocellulose vintage gloss that features a subtle shine and gracefully ages over time. An Artisan Aged option is also available for those seeking an authentically well-loved look and feel, achieved through a meticulous, entirely hand-finished aging process. The new Core Collection continues Heritageās tradition of world-class craftsmanship, offering a true masterpiece in tone and design for discerning players. Each guitar is shipped in a premium Heritage Custom Shop hard case.
Key Features
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