Hey Razzlemacher -

Good questions!!!

You are a better guitar player for manipulating the volume knob rather than relying on a footswitch for a volume boost! I find it awkward to adjust my volume on my guitar while I'm playing. The knob on my strat is stiff and on my LP, the adjustment dives down once you get past a certain point. I perfer the crutch of a footswitch.

The disadvantage of turning down your guitar volume knob is that if you are playing with a high gain tone and are drving the amp into distortion, you will get less gain and distortion when you adjust your guitar's volume knob down. In certain situations, that can work to your advantage since it gives you a way of adding or removing "dirt" from you tone. If you are playing clean, it shouldn't matter much, though even there the "punchiness" of the amp will be less with the guitar volume down.


I don't recommend 3 guitar players, 2 works really well. If you watch the video closely, you'll find the player on the far right of the screen isn't doing much. He perfers to only play lead (grrrr), so he would turn his guitar down when playing rhythm and mime playing and turn it up when his solo would come up. Way to be a team player, right?

For 3 guitars to work, you have to carefully specify who is playing what and divide it up. You have to do that with 2 also, but it's more important with 3. We tried that, but he just didn't seem to be interested.


A sidebar since you are probably confused at this point :-). What happened was we all signed up for an "adult rock band" program at a local music store. So we all got thrown together this way, except for the lead singer - he's from our drummer's husband's band and sat in to do us a favor. All of us except for that 3rd guitar player are continuing on as a different band called Radio Gap. Fortunately the singer we "borrowed" really likes what we are doing and is sticking with us. We have a rehearsal studio booked for 2 hours a week to rehearse and build up our setlist.

Feel free to fire any other questions you have my way. There are certainly more experienced folks on this forum; I'm learning just like everybody else here. I'll help as I can though...sometimes it's helpful to get insight from somebody in the trenches alongside you.