There was a persistent howl around my low-A string, and there was no tweaking–I had to pummel it into submission, which made my guitar sound obnoxiously nasal, so I had to pull back at around 1kHz to wipe the snot off the tone. That’s when your EQ tools become weapons of feedback destruction and nothing more. We were trying to get acoustic guitar, bass and drums not only to balance, but not to sound horrible together in the room. There was not one thing in that room that would absorb sound, until the people came in. The icing on the cake? A ceiling that sloped up from the outer glass wall to the inner wall with the doors in it, probably a twenty-foot run at about a 12:12 pitch. My trio once played in a long narrow room with a tile floor, floor-to-ceiling windows on one wall, two standard plasterboard walls at either end, and more glass on the side where the doors were. Sometimes the shape of a room or the way it is decorated can kill ya. Bottom line, if you’re not playing in Fantasy Land, you may need to EQ your guitar once in a while. We tend to plan for gigs as we want them to be, not for what they are. This is common sense stuff, and admittedly guitar players are not often overly blessed with that. If you are playing in a neighborhood bar, don’t take your $10,000 handmade Brazilian dreadnaught with phosphor-bronze strings and an internal mic, unless you can guarantee that nobody’s gonna be playing pool or pinball, celebrating their twenty-first birthday or confronting their soon-to-be-ex-wife’s new boyfriend after a few shots of Wild Turkey. So at the end of this laundry list, the only variables left should be ones you can’t control: the room, the background noise, the club or festival sound system–and some of that can be controlled if you know ahead of time what you’re getting into. That is a pretty long list of stuff you can play with before you ever plug in that, taken together, can make a huge difference. We’ve talked about types of guitars for specific applications we’ve talked a little bit about wood choices we’ve talked about changing string types to brighten or darken your tone we’ve talked about using compression to help the guitar pop out in a mix we’ve talked about pickup types and when you might need a good preamp. The Series Part 1: Getting Started Part 2: Strings Part 3: Compression Part 4: Pickups Part 5: EQing, at last!īefore we dig in, let me restate something from an earlier column in this series: The goal is to not have to EQ a guitar at all when you plug in, but to have your tone nailed so you don’t need any EQ help to sound great.
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