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Rig Rundown: Nine Inch Nails

Robin Finck and Alessandro Cortini create the perfect drug for NIN fans with a bevy of heavy-hitting custom guitars and basses and a high-tech hybrid setup that marries digital with analog.

When playing with NIN, Robin Finck tours with rackmounted MIDI preset switchable gear. The exception was in 2008 when he toured with Marshall heads and an analog pedalboard, which he said was exciting but too complicated. Finck currently uses a Fractal Axe-FX II XL.

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Billy Corgan and The Machines of God announce 'A Return to Zero Tour' kicking off on June 7th, featuring classic tracks and deep cuts from iconic albums. Tickets available for presale on April 1st. Don't miss this unforgettable experience! Tour dates include Baltimore, Boston, New York, and more.

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An easy guide to re-anchoring a loose tuning machine, restoring a ā€œlostā€ input jack, refinishing dinged frets, and staunching a dinged surface. Result: no repair fees!

Pardon my French, but I’m about to misethe hell out of some en scenein this article about do-it-yourselfĀ guitar repair. Buckle-vous up.

The Guitarist is in the middle of double-tracking a solo. It’s not quite right. Creative juices are flowing, but at any moment, the gate could slam shut. Their social media feed is stagnant, and the algorithm thirsts for content. The studio is 80 bucks an hour. That new boutique fuzz pedal would sound great on this track, surely? It would, of course, as these things are the cure for all problems, but it rests just out of reach.

Desperate for a solution, the Guitarist rests their perfect new guitar against the warm tube amp–only for a moment … but a horrible amplified bwaang from wood, string, and concrete’s violent meeting breaks the temporary silence as gravity muscles potential into the kinetic. The Guitarist breathes a defeated ā€œaw, man,ā€ like a loosened balloon farting hopelessly across an empty room. The gate closes, juices no longer loose, locked, impenetrable by any transistor-based effect. And it’s time to assess the damage.ā€

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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.

Compression might be the most misunderstood effect on your board—until now.

I was recently listening to three accomplished guitar players discuss the how, when, and where to use compressors in their guitar rigs. All three players had wildly different views on all aspects of compressordom, from where they should be used in a signal chain to whether they are even worth the hardware that holds them together.

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The least exciting piece of your rig can impact your tone in a big way. Here’s what you need to know.

Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will have a closer look at an often overlooked part of our guitar signal chain: the guitar cable. We’ll work out what really counts and how your cable’s tonal imprint differs from your guitar’s tone-control function.

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