Working with Guitar Effects

Guitar effects can be a great way to expand the sound of your instrument and let you explore all of your creative impulses. With them, there are virtually no limits to what the guitar can emulate or produce in terms of tone and texture, this is why it is important to consider using them and which ones you need.

Guitar overdrive is one of the most common effects and although it is simple and basic, there are a lot of creative ways to use it that most people gloss over. For example, there is one jazz guitarist who uses a bit of overdrive to make a flute like sound with his instrument. Since the flute tone has the imperfections of breath involved, to emulate it on the guitar you need to add in a little bit of some kind of distortion. Overdrive works well for this and can give the guitar tone a nice additional aspect.

Of course, most people know about overdrive and distortion for the more extreme rock uses, but there is a lot more to it than that. The band My Bloody Valentine redefined how intense overdrive and distortion could be thought of, and used them to create dense but delicate walls of sound that characterized most of their songs. When you really start to experiment with things, you will find a lot of things to do with just guitar overdrive alone.

Drawbacks of Guitar Charts?

Something that I have been thinking about lately are possible drawbacks to using guitar charts both in your own studies and when teaching a student. The problem is that when they learn a scale by the visual pattern they don't really understand the notes they are playing and they are unable to really hear them one by one. Patterns can get you going quickly, but they do not work well in the long run when you need to do more and more complex things on the instrument.

The better way to learn things is by ear so that you can play them in any part of the fretboard. When you learn the guitar by ear you don't just develop the muscle memory to play certain patterns, but you develop an actual ear for music and you learn to connect you fingers with your ear. You also become better at improvising because it forces you to make more mistakes and tactfully recover back into the proper notes. This is great practice that will pay off in the long run.