Musician Resources

When preparing for a show, there are certain things you need to do to have a stress free gig. One of them is to carry out a sound check. When done properly, it gives you confidence that things will run as planned. In this article, we have compiled a long list of sound check items to give you an idea of what you can add to your pre-show routine in order to get things running as smoothly as possible.     Continue reading →

When you take a look at the big picture, the primary job of live sound mixers and studio mixers is the same – to combine signals and route them where they need to go. That said, they do feature key differences, all of which stem from how they differ in their intended use – recording versus live sound management. Once you begin to look at mixers with that in mind, you'll notice how much they are tailored to best suit their application. Below, we take a look at these key differences.     Continue reading →

The Sennheiser e609 Silver Dynamic Microphone is well regarded as a great guitar cab mic, and for good reason. Like Sennheiser created the mic with guitar amplifiers and other loud sound sources in mind. Sennheiser isn't the only one, though. As we took a look the Introduction To Microphones article, there are various types of mics that are made to work with certain applications. But did you ever stop to think, what is it about a particular microphone that makes it work so well on certain sound sources? Is it the microphone's polar pattern? Or maybe RFI rejection? We take a quick look at the e609 Silver to find out exactly why it works so well with guitar speakers in particular.   Continue reading →

You have probably noticed that humbuckers are often offered with covers and without. While a big part of that definitely has to do with looks and aesthetics, does it also have an effect on their tone? While many claim that it has no impact on tone whatsoever, the truth is it does, although nowhere near as much as other humbucker design factors. In this article, we take a look at the key differences between covered and uncovered humbuckers.     Continue reading →

If you have spent any amount of time looking at delay pedal, chances are you've bumped into the term "bucket brigade." A bucket brigade chip, also known as bucket-brigade device (BBD), refers to a distinct time analog delay chip that was developed by Sangster and K Teer in 1969. This chip provided signal delay that moved charge packets from one capacitor cell to the other. The signal was then split into two on entering the analog delay unit in a way that half of the signal was taken directly into the output while the other half passed through the chip. While Bucket Brigade chips can be found in a wide range of applications, they are best-known for their use in analog delay pedals.     Continue reading →