Getting the most from your guitar
Ok, I’m assuming here you know all the names of the parts of the guitar and the basics of what they are for, lets have a look at some forgotten tips and hints:
Volume Control
The volume control is a much-overlooked resource. I want you to go and crank your amp up with a distorted sound and keep the volume on your guitar up full. You should be hearing a pretty roaring rock tone. Ok what if we want to then get a clean sound. Obviously you can do it with the use of effects pedals to add distortion to a clean sound, but a much more musical way of losing the distortion is simply to turn down the volume on the guitar, after about half way down you should hear the sound clean up nicely without significant loss in volume. It works a treat and for years I used a one channel amp set to dirty and used the volume pot to work as a clean channel.
If you have a pickup selector switch like you find on Les Pauls and similar and two volume controls, you can set one volume control low, normally the neck sounds best, and set the other to full, then you have lead and clean sounds at the flick of a switch!
Another cool trick if you have two volume controls is to turn one off, and you have a kill switch arrangement, which can be used to get those cool Tom Morrello or Randy Rhoads effects.
Nut
The Nut is a big source of your tuning problems, if you have an ordinary plastic type nut a good way to improve the smoothness over the nut is to fill the slots with pencil graphite, in essence just colour the slots in and this will help keep you in tune. Obviously this won’t work if you have a Floyd Rose style locking nut.
Bridge
If you have a strat type ‘floating bridge’ i.e. one which has a tremolo arm attached and goes up as well as down, you are in territory for potential tuning disasters. If you can deal with the loss of raising the bar a good tip is to turn your guitar over and tighten the plate that is holding the crews in the cavity at the back, this will have the effect of pulling the bridge flat with the body, this will help keep it in tune and also the effect of the bridge touching the body can assist sustain.
Obviously this wont work if you have the Floyd Rose style floating bridge.
Whilst you’re in there, it’s worth putting some foam in between the springs, this doesn’t effect the usage of the bridge but it does stop the sound of the springs ringing when you strum the guitar hard.
Strings
The general rules with strings is that the bigger the string the better it sounds, but the harder it is to play. You have to make a judgement yourself on what is best. Most pros use a 10 or 11 gauge set up which is a nice compromise. Stevie Ray Vaughan famously used to use 13s or bigger while some of the 80s shredders used an 8 or 9 gauge. Here at UnCAGED we would recommend an 11-46 set of strings as a basic set up.
Don’t forget if you change the string size you may need to adjust your bridge resistance and your truss rod.
Picks
Take all of your soft picks and throw them away. Soft picks just take all the energy you are putting into your guitar and instead of converting it to useable energy through the string it is converted to useless energy dissipated through the pick flopping about. They are particularly useless when it comes to any lead playing. Go and buy hard ones that are comfortable enough to sit in your hand. Here at UnCAGED we have no hesitation in recommending the Jim Dunlop Jazz III XL as the finest pick available!