Hi, and welcome to the ultimate guitar tone School. My name is David Wolf and I am super excited about this course as I really don't know of any other course like it anyway, I mean, there are many, many books on guitars, amps and effects and time. But I really don't know of any other video courses that attempt to put this all together under one massive course. So route, we really have our work cut out for us here. And here's probably something that came into my mind very early on, as soon as I started to understand the scope of this project. Now, while I've played guitar for, you know, many, many years, I probably should be better than I am.

But I've been playing guitar for quite a while that this subject is so vast that I wanted to get as many opinions and experts and world class experts as I could and I did I flew all around the world and spoke to every expert that I could get my hands on. We flew to Fender headquarters in Corona, California. We went to Gibson's artist relations in Hollywood. met with Mike Matthews out in New York. He's the founder of electro harmonics. I saw Bob Bailey with boss pedals.

Brandon Montgomery of Bluto turn at makers to the stars, Santana, amongst a bunch of others, right? Uh, Paul Jackson Jr, guitarist with tonight's show and American Idol and a million albums. You know, he knows a lot about how to get time. I also sat down with monster recording engineer, Andrew ships on mixing guitars, and his experience mixing guitars with YouTube Metallica, chili peppers, Black Sabbath and Johnny Cash and how to record the perfect guitar tie and then I brought in my mate, James rooster, awesome and Nashville veteran and affects board design to the stars and he bought man he brought in his massive guitar amp and pedal collection and we go to town, recreating the best tones that have been really iconic tones. For decades this training has been about I'd say about 18 months in the making, and we're all super proud of it. Here's how the course is going to be broken down.

First up, we have an overview that asks, basically what is tone, what are pure tones and what techniques equipment and signal chains and processing creates all of those really rich harmonics and overtones that we all crave. Then we get on to pretty much everybody's favorite subject and that is Guess what? guitars right? What kinds are there? What kinds of pickups They're things like active and passive circuits. And then we'll move on to amps, and then discuss how amps work.

Other solid state or tube amps or valve amps they call them elsewhere in the world. We look at things like gain stages and distortion, tones, DAX, and EQ. also affects loops and how you configure them. We then follow that closely up with speakers and how they work, what types are out there, and how that widen what type of cabinets they're placed in terms of open back or close backs, and then also how you make them all up. Now a big section will be the effects portion and we'll break them all down one by one, we have a ton to go through here. Things like gain modifiers DAX processes, modulators, like chorus and flanges even wow was Then we go through filters and EQs pitch modifies delays, loopers and reverbs.

And a big part of this will be breaking down them kind of into effect types and really understanding how the order of those effects really, really make make a difference. And I'll teach you some rule of thumb that will get you in the right direction in terms of those factors. And we'll get some other people chiming in with some in depth interviews with some of the biggest pedal makers on the planet, including boss and electro harmonics. And then moving on from there. We'll look at what type of guitar rigs there are out there. Things like wet dry rigs, guitar switching amps switching series or parallel loops, where you know, there'll be a lot to go over there and then this brings all of this training together.

At the end when we look at iconic tones through rock history and pull apart exactly how to get the tones of the folks that you want to emulate, if you want to know how to say get at Eric Johnson's tone, or maybe a Hendrix tone or YouTube time this section wraps up all the stuff that we've learned in the previous sections, and allows you to, could I say, Yeah, pretty much kind of plug and play the right combination of guitars, amps, and processing to get the kilotons that we all love. Now, at the end of this training, if I could just get this through there, you're going to be gone through a lot of stuff here, but I guarantee you'll be an absolute master a guitar tech. But before we begin, let's actually see where we've come from. So to start from the beginning, we actually don't have to go back that far.

While forms of guitars, like liars or harps share the same lineage They go back thousands of years, the birth of the electric guitar actually was back in the 1930s with what became to be the Rickenbacker company. But the the idea behind this whole relationship between electricity and magnetism, I mean, you see this relationship. If you've ever pulled apart a pickup, or say a dynamic microphone or even a speaker, I did this as a kid all the time drove my brothers crazy that if you move a wire over a magnet, it creates a very small electrical signal, move it back and forth, and you get alternating current or AC. Now, if you've ever connected up up a meter, you could actually see the needle move. Now, on the other side of this, if you place an alternating current down a wire that is placed near a magnet, that wire will produce a magnetic field that will Want to move that wire and if that's connected to say cone of a speaker, for example, it will move that cone back and forth.

And sound waves that are analogous to that electrical signal will come out of that as best you can. That's why we call it an analog signal. It's analogous to that AC signal. Anyway, the earliest guitars were very, very simple. And really, when you think about it, they had to move in tandem with the development of a guitar amplifier amplifies or else you just have, you know, pretty much kind of one side of the equation and rock and roll would have been this loud. So we went from the earliest fry pan design to other smaller manufacturers to Gibson make Memphis production model called the S 150, which had a matching amplifier in 1936.

The Epiphone was also on the pitch But one could probably make the argument that the early 1950s was when everything changed in terms of mainstream adoption of electric cars and when Leo Fender introduced, the broadcast assumed to be renamed the Telecaster due to a trademark clash with gretch, which also made a broadcast a set of drums. Now, there are many other footnotes to early guitar designers, people like sa dobra, Vega audio, Vox and value time but a lot of these applications of these designs were in a lap steel and Hawaiian style plan but what really makes fenders contribution Stan, pretty much head and shoulders above the rest is that his earliest designs have endured. Now that you can just go down to your local music store and pick up a Telecaster today, I mean, not a lot has changed those early designs with that good and also one thing I think, also because we have a massive catalogue of music that record on these Teles this, these strats les Paul's for that matter and a number of other guitars that we've become kind of accustomed to how these guitars sound, and they become pretty much kind of like the touchstones or the standards by which all other guitars compared.

Anyway, we will learn all about the different types of guitars in the next section, but I just wanted to impress upon you that pretty much just a couple of things here. The electric guitar when you think about it in terms of all of human history, it's very much a young invention and to the sheer simplicity of this design has made it a fairly constant and static type of instrument. I mean a few things have changed, but a simple, elegant design. When you think about it tends to defy the deck case. Okay, so we'll look over the single signal chain from the pic to the speaker, and just see all the variables along the way. Look at all these variables.

The major variables along the signal chain are guitars, amps, effects, speakers, and microphones. But of course, you can break down each area much further by asking questions like in the case of the guitar, what type of guitar we're going to be using, what type of pickup configuration is that going to be? What type of strings are you using? What type of picks are using or even nails if your finger picking what techniques are you striking the string when you're playing Heck, who's playing the guitar? That's a big one here. Now all this stuff happens before the signal even hits the the AMP Look at all this stuff, just you know, within the guitar.

And you know, I'm probably leaving a lot of stuff out here. Then we go over to apps, what type of apps are going to be solid Settle to how many different gain stages are they going to be? How many watts? What type of tone stack is that in that app? Is there any other time shaping there? Then we move on to effects.

This is a huge category that's broken down into a number of different broad types. First off, we have a game and our dynamics, modulation, pitch shifters, delays, reverbs, and lupus. And then we round out the signal chain as the signal finally is transformed from its electrical signal to its audio analog through speakers. And of course, there's a lot of configurations here what type of configurations is it just a single speaker or is it a four cab also is the back open or closed? What is the power handling also the impedance and of course the tone can then be referred finally Through microphones in the case of recording a guitar tone or sound reinforcement in the case of a PA and we have some decisions there. What type of microphones are we using?

What type of blend? Are we blending between these microphones? And of course, what is the placement or positioning of these microphones? Now as we interview tons of folks within the industry, in this training, more than a few have come back to the idea that tone is in the fingers will give you all the tools to go out and find the right gear that that will work for you but your signature time, we much more than just just a specific combination of guitars, pedals and amps they're just really so many variables from pic to speaker and as in pretty much any chain of or set of variables. There are some that move what I'd like to say they move the needle much more than others. I'm just personally I'm not the type of guy who's going to get into a cage match, you know, arguing over the total transformation that you know one pick max over another one that was only made by Tibetan virgins back between the spring of 67 in the fall of 68 you know what I mean?

That you go to any guitar form and you'll see a bunch of people who are totally religious about the stuff. Look, I know that everything does make a difference. But stuff is really so well made. Nowadays, you actually have to look hard to find junk you know, used to be junk made it you know, 2030 years ago, but your average $50 guitar today is made you know, better than half the guitars that made rock and roll history in the 50s 60s and 70s. So, in other words, be happy. We'll teach you how to get the tone that you're after how all these parts come together, and how to reverse engineer famous, iconic turns to give you all the knowledge that you know once you know this stuff and you'll be able to take this knowledge for the rest of your life in this awesome hobby.

Can you believe that we get to do this? I mean, I just I just love this is a passion that we can call out and so let's get started.