Sound

I know nothing about sound quality or anything. I started reading about different things like feedback. I'm going to get a whammy bar but that is as far as I know when it comes to manipulating sound. I want to buy a pedal soon but not sure what's what so I'll save that question for another day.

What I wanted to know is what is the purpose of bass, mid, and treble? I was messing around with the equilizer and it seems to me that the higher the treble, the better. I always leave them at the half way mark because I don't know what sounds better. I tried to experiment but everything just gets muddy and I can't tell what each one adds to the sound. Well I guess bass is pretty easy to hear but the other two I have no clue. I know, pretty basic huh.

Does anyone know a magazine or web site I can go to, so I can understand more about effects.

try turning the bass and treble up high and middle much lower, and use alot more gain than volume, that's what i use for heavy metal. there are alot of different settings, you'll learn alot by just experimenting. Other things you should experiment with are clean/distortion -sound, swithing between neck and bridge pickups and using a tremolo/whammy bar. Think of treble as the opposite of bass , middle is a bit harder for me to explain, in english anyway Good luck. ;)

Originally Posted by: scarface84Other things you should experiment with are clean/distortion -sound, swithing between neck and bridge pickups and using a tremolo/whammy bar.

What are neck pickups? I know what bridge pickups are. Does that depend on the kind of guitar you have? I have a fender strat.

If you have found a setting you like go for it. There are some traditonal eq settins like above with the mids scooped, but in the end its your ears that matter. In terms of effects to alter sounds, i suggest looking into a wah pedal, a whammy pedal, and chorus pedal firstly...

Would I have to buy all those pedals separately or can they come in a all in one sort of thing? Thanks for the advice, I’ve read of players who have used those effects before. I believe Jimmy Hendrex was the first to use the wah pedal.

I just recently figured out what that switch on the side of my guitar does. My guitar stopped working because some wires came loose and I sodered them back together and for the first of playing for about a year that switch I was curious about finally worked. It gives it a sort of bluesy sound (I guess). Anyways, very cool. :)

A strat has 3 single coil pickups; neck,center and bridge pickups. Most guitars have neck and bridge pickups and some have center pickups (usually single coil).
People use these differently, personally, i like using the bridge pickups when playing rythm especially when playing the the top 3 strings E,A and D, and the neck pickups when i'm playing solo on the treble strings G,B and e. I use the center pickup for songs that you would normally play with an acoustic guitar. You don't have to spend ****loads of $$$$ on different pedals, just buy a guitar processor or effect or whatever it's called. I have an X-vamp ($80), it has wah, auto wah, chorus, flanger rotary,different amp simulations and an expression pedal. I've heard that POD is a good guitar proccessor too.

Originally Posted by: CW14NOOOO!!!
Mids are the most important frequency on the guitar! I wouldn't recommend putting them below half-way, or else it'll sound like your head's in a vacuum or something. For bedroom use, it doesn't matter so much, but in a band situation, mid scooping is a bad idea.

Actually, without turning the mid down it doesn't sound like heavy metal, and i learned some of the basic settings from my old amp manual, this was one of them. I use higher mids and lower bass and treble for other styles than heavy metal.

Originally Posted by: CW14
The switch on the side of your guitar is the pickup selecter. There should be 5 different postions it can be set to.

1 - bridge pickup
2 - bridge + middle
3 - middle
4 - middle + neck
5 - neck

For a nice clean blues sound, I think position 4 sounds best.

WOW! I didn't know that. It makes me feel more confident when I do something and fully understand it.

There has actually been some discussion about mids on one of these threads. I think that you were in one of these discussions CW14. I did experiment and found that the treble and mids turned up sounds pretty cool. I also turned the mids down and the treble and bass up, and it sounds cool with ditortion. I read that Kurt Cobain turned the mids all the way down when he played. But seeing from this site not everyone is thrilled about his playing so that can be left for the long thread about Hendrex and Coabain being more revoluntionary.

Forgot to mention that you should use both distortion and a high gain setting when using the heavy metal EQ-settings, it's sounds a bit lame otherwise.Add a little reverb too if your amp has it. Btw, i'm not a fan of kurt either.

I have a Digitech GNX3 and while I paid $500 for it when it was new, they're down to like $300 because of the release of the GNX4. There's only slight differences between the two. That's pretty much the "all you could want in one package" processor...go to their website and check it out. http://www.digitech.com .

it'll sound like your head's in a vacuum or something.

I've never heard it worded like that before, but you're right.

Treb: 10 Tone control on strat: 0
Mid: 0
Bass: 7
OD: 10 (....OD stands for OverDrive.)

I have a strat with three single coils, and I mainly use the middle and bridge pickups. It should look like this: ____/__. The settings above are good for Metal and Hard Rock. For a nice clean sound I'd go like this:

Treb: 7 Tone control on strat: 10
Mid: 4
Bass: 5
OD: 0
Rev: 6 (....Rev stands for Reverb)

Good luck! I hope this helped you out a bit. :D