Guitar Tone

Tuning down is extremely common today. In fact it’s almost a quaint curiosity when a band chooses to perform in standard tuning. But it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, almost everybody played in standard tuning (E A D G B E). But guitarists, like Indiana Jones and astronauts, are always striving for adventure and discovery, and this...

Back in the late 1960s certain factions in the amplifier industry went to great pains to introduce radical, new solid-state guitar amps and to promote them, partly at least, on the premise that they were “sturdier than fragile tube amps.” Tubes can be fragile if you don’t treat them right, certainly, but look after your tubes and the amp they...

INTRODUCING THE BLACKOUTS MODULAR PREAMP MAKE ANY PICKUP ACTIVE! Get the extreme gain of active pickups—with any pickup. Just swap your volume pot with a Blackouts™ Modular Preamp. It combines the high-output, low-noise Blackouts™ preamp with a quality volume pot and our Liberator Solderless Pickup Change System for quick connections. Get your own sound—with your own look. The genre-defining crunch...

Mention open tunings and some guitarists’ eyes glaze over – especially if they’re from the rock world, where standard tuning lives up to its name or, perhaps, dropped D or even-tempered half- or whole-step across-the-fretboard detuning comes into play. But in blues and folk music, and in some of Led Zeppelin’s greatest recordings like “Kashmir,” which is in D-A-D-G-A-D, open...

Ever since Jimi Hendrix conjured up “Purple Haze” with an octave pedal, a distortion box and his wiry imagination – and made one of the most eloquent anti-war statements with the pure sonics of “Machine Gun” – electric guitars and effects pedals have been kissin’ cousins. If you’re new to the world of effects or if you stepped away for...