Hi, I'm Todd the music coach and welcome to the instrument setup and Buyer's Guide for the electric guitar. electric guitar is a really fun instrument to get playing on and we're going to go over some of the basics of the different types of bodies and how the pickups work and how to actually connect the instrument to an amplifier. Now in a very basic sense, the difference between an acoustic guitar and electric guitar is how the sound is actually generated. Now on an acoustic guitar, the body is vibrating and the sound is coming out the tone hole. And on an electric guitar, there are magnetic pickups, which are simply measuring what's happening because the strings are made of metal when the string moves. The magnet is picking up the difference in the vibration and transmitting it through a cable to an amplifier when electric charts first started, they were missing Like this one over here, which is got a hollow section to it as well as magnetic pickups.

And so this is what's called the hollow body electric guitar. And one of the nice things about hollow body electric guitar is it has a very warm and resonant kind of sound to it because it's got the body is vibrating more, and the pickups are also doing the work that they're doing. Now, one of the drawbacks in early rock and roll they found was that because it had open tone holes, it tended to feed back a lot easier so you couldn't play it as loud without the sound of the feedback happening. So not long after that, in sort of loud as rock and roll music got louder and people wanted to play guitars with less feedback, solid bodies were developed. So this guitar is one solid piece of wood all the way through with spots for the pickups made inside of it. And again this they all have pros and cons solid body electric guitar can be definitely played at a louder volume without feedback.

But it loses some of the warmth because all you're getting is the experience coming through the pickups. With any instrument, how easy it is to play is going to be a big factor in how likely you are to continue and grow as a musician. So you definitely want to make sure that whatever instrument you're playing is in really good playing condition and that the strings are good and that the neck has been adjusted properly. So a common thing that happens is sometimes a student will say, Oh, my dad or my uncle had an electric guitar and it's just been sitting you know, in a case somewhere for years and he's just going to give it to me for free. And sometimes this can be great and you can have inherit a really great guitar and away you go. Other times though if it was a cheap guitar and it has been sitting for a long time.

It may not be very playable. may not sound very good. So one thing I recommend is take that guitar into a guitar store and have a technician or repair person have a look at it. And most repair people are very honest and they'll just tell you, it's going to cost this much money to get it in really good playing shape. And then once you know what that number is, it helps you decide do I want to take that same amount of money and just invested into a brand new guitar? In the hundred and 50 to $300 range, you can buy a decent electric guitar and sometimes they come in packages with an amplifier and a cable and a tuner all is one thing.

For example, Fender has their Squire series that will do that. And Gibson's low end guitars which are called EPA phones, they often package all that together, which if you're beginning can be great because you get an amplifier and you get everything you need all together in one thing, above $300 In the 300 to $500 range, you can get guitars that are a little bit of a higher quality, better sounding pickups, better sounding hardware, which are the tuning pegs. And so I often recommend if you're able to buy above the lowest price point, it's a good starting place. This guitar, for example, is about $500. And it's Gibson's lower end model, which is Epiphone but this is a copy of a very famous guitar called a Les Paul. And it looks the same, it almost sounds exactly the same with a couple of major differences.

One is the pickups which come with a guitar or lower end. But one of the great things about an electric guitar is you can change pickups quite easily. So I actually took the original pickups that came with a guitar out and replace them with these better sounding higher end pickups. And now, this guitar which was about $500 brand new sounds pretty close to the real Gibson Les Paul, which sells for about $2,000. So by adding a couple of hundred dollars worth of parts, I was able to upgrade the sound of the guitar even upgraded the the knobs on it as well because I didn't like the look of what came with it. Again very inexpensive and easy to do.

And if I wanted to the machine heads which were what the strings are wrapped around, I could even replace those for not very much money. The machine heads. If they're cheap, they'll they don't hold the tuning as well and they'll turn you'll turn them quite a ways before you hear the string actually move. The ones that come with this guitar word fine. So I just kept them but electric guitars are a little bit like cars you can sort of Hot Rod them in for a few hundred dollars here a few hundred dollars there make a relatively inexpensive guitar sound really good. Whereas with an acoustic guitar, it's kind of going to sound the way it sounds.

It's always good to make sure to keep your guitar well maintained. And for that I recommend at least once a year taking your guitar into a repair department and having a setup done. In a guitar setup, what will happen is they'll take the old strings off, and they'll clean the neck and they'll clean around all the pickups and the hardware, and they'll put new strings on and adjust the neck so that the neck is straighter guitars, the necks tend to bend out of place because there's lots of pressure being put on the wood by the strings. And when things like the seasons change in your house becomes more moist in the summer or drier in the winter, the wood will expand and contract and the neck will move a little bit. So in good to keep in mind to set aside a little bit of money to keep your guitar well maintained.

If you're playing casually once a year is usually enough if you're playing more regularly, twice a year or even more depending on what your guitar needs. Because electric guitars tend to be quite heavy. If the straps come off the pins and drop, you're going to have more damage done than you would on an acoustic guitar. So for that I recommend getting a strap lock system. And basically what it allows for is that you have to have a special pin put in the guitar, which again, a technician can do. And then once the strap the other end of the strap lock is put into the strap itself, it clicks and locks together so that the strap won't just come flying off.

When you first get a brand new strap. It'll be very tight around where it attaches to the guitar but over time it'll get loose and it'll pop off sometimes. And again, if you're investing several hundred dollars or up to $1,000 in a guitar, having you know spending an extra $30 to get good strap locks is totally worth it because all it takes is you dropping Guitar one time for it to be damaged quite severely. Having a good guitar stand is actually a really important piece of equipment that's often overlooked. You'll often see people take their guitar when they're done playing with it. And they'll just leave it in front of an amplifier like that, or like this, or they'll sit in on a chair like this with the neck hanging out.

These are all recipes for real disaster when it comes to keeping your guitar in good shape. A good guitar stand is an inexpensive thing that can potentially save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars in repairs down the road, especially once you have a really expensive guitar. So a basic guitar stand like this is going to be sort of 20 to $30 and it allows you to just to quickly and easily set your guitar down. If you have to get up quickly or if you go to the washroom you're gonna answer your phone and not have to worry about it sliding off or getting banged into something. Some more advanced professional guitar stands are going to have their waited so that they close a little bit, which keeps the guitar from tipping over. This is this mechanism is a nice feature but not something you need in your home.

Definitely make sure to get it. The other reason is that, like the famous saying goes out of sight out of mind, if you're packing your guitar away and putting it in a case after every time you use it, you're less likely to be thinking about it. And it's going to be harder to a bigger barrier to start practicing or working on stuff. If you have to think Oh, I got to drag it out of the closet and take it out of the case. And so for a very small investment, definitely get a really good guitar stand and just have your guitar live in the same place all the time. Now electric guitars because there's most often two separate pickups or three, there's a toggle switch that controls which pickups are on and then you have separate volume controls and tone controls.

And this allows you to control the type of sound you're getting from the guitar. You can then Also change it on the amplifier itself. But for now let's just have a look at what happens on the guitar on an electric car. So there are four knobs and one switch the switch controls, which pickup is actually on. So when the switch is up, it's just on the neck pickup, which will give you more of a woody warm rhythm guitar kind of sound. When you put the switch in the middle, it has both pickups on and when you put the switch all the way down, you have the back pickup on which should give you more of a 20 bright sound than the knobs themselves.

This knob controls the volume for this pickup. And this knob controls the volume for that pickup. And then this knob back here controls the tone for the front pickup. And this one controls the tone for the back pickup. And on most Gibson or Epiphone style guitars Like a Les Paul or 335 it's the same setup. This is the same three way switch and the same setup of knobs.

And what it allows you to do is control not only the tone of each pickup but the volume so you can be playing on the bottom on the back pickup and have the volume be at full blast. And then you can set the volume a lot lower on the top pickup and then in the middle of the song, you can just click up and then you've got a quieter sound, or a darker sound. On a Stratocaster style body or Telecaster, most Fender instruments. They have a single volume that controls both pickups and the switch that works on a Telecaster much more like this. And on a Stratocaster it's actually a five way switch because there are three pickups in several different ways that it works. And again, you're going to find what kind of guitar and sound works best for you.

In a very general sense. The Gibson's and EPA phones will be more low end a little more rumbly kind of sound and a Stratocaster and a Telecaster. We'll be more 20 and clean sounding. And on the amplifier side, things like a Marshall or a mess of Boogie or a trainer will be a little woodier and a little a little bit bigger on the distortion side of things. And Fender amplifiers tend to be more clean sounding and more sort of funk and r&b really crisp kind of sound. Now, when deciding what kind of strings to put on your electric guitar, you're gonna have to think about things a little bit differently than if you've played acoustic guitar before.

Like the acoustic guitar strings, electric strings are rated between light, medium and heavy. However, they're not equal. So the light strings on an acoustic guitar are about the same as a medium string on an electric and this has to do with on an electric guitar, you never need to be hitting the guitar really hard to get a big sound because you have an answer. amplifier and you can just make the volume larger. So there's no need for a really really heavy guitar string on an electric. Also, electric guitars tend to be set up with the strings closer to the neck, which makes string bends and lead playing a little bit easier.

So if you're coming from an acoustic guitar, don't assume that you can just buy the same thickness and the same brand and it'll feel the same. The considerations to have are how much lead playing the expect to be doing and how much rhythm playing the expect to be doing and rhythm playing is like playing chords and accompany the more lead playing you're going to be doing you may want to consider on the lighter end of the string for the string bending ability and also just ease of use and how fast you can play. The downside. The lighter the strength, the lighter you go in strings, the more often they break and the less they stick. in tune. So those are considerations to think of.

But like with anything you want to always have in mind, comfort and playability as a factor, that guitar should never feel like you really are having to work against it, you should always feel like you're working together with it. Now on all of my guitars, I like to use coded strings, which are they just have a little synthetic coating on them, which allows them to last longer, and how we sound a little bit brighter like they do when you first get them. The thing that makes strings go dull and break ultimately is your fingers are, you know, sweating and there's salt in your sweat and the more you touch them, the more they're going to break down the metal. So the coating just allows them to last a little bit longer. A question I often get is how often should I be changing my strings. Again, it has a lot to do with how often you're playing.

And a good general rule is if you're using a regular guitar string that doesn't have a coating, I would say you probably going to want to be changing it every couple of months, maybe every two months. And if you're playing all the time, you're going to need to change it more often. And if you're using a coded string, you can change it every three to four months depending on how often you're playing as well. And I like I have all of my guitars have coded strings, they're a little more expensive, but I just find with so many guitars and so much playing that I'm doing I don't have a lot of time to be changing strings constantly. also find the last a little bit longer in terms of they don't break quite as easily as the regular guitar strings do. Now guitar picks are also a very personal part of your sound.

I know many guitar players who play on really flappy light picks and they sound amazing. And lots of guitar players to play on really, really hard picks and they also sound amazing. As a very basic guideline. The more flappy or flexible the pick is, the easier it's going to be to strum harder and faster on the guitar without knowing The strings have a tune. And the harder the pick is, the easier it's going to be to play individual notes quickly and cleanly. So when thinking about what kind of pick you want, it's often good to think about what kind of playing Are you going to be doing are you going to be playing a lot of improvising and lead lines or you're gonna be playing a lot of chords and rhythm parts.

I personally like to go in the middle, my picks are point eight millimeters, and they're what you would call like a medium hard. And it's because I don't like to have to change picks for different styles of playing. I like to have one pick that does both. To a good degree. It does neither of the extremes perfectly, but it does everything up to a good standard. thing I could recommend is go into a guitar store and they'll usually be a big wall of baskets full of picks, and just take a couple of dollars.

They're about 25 cents each usually to buy and buy a bunch of different ones and take them home and really try them out and see which ones feel right to you. And then once you have the pics that you know you like you can go back to the store and buy a whole bag of that one kind of pick for very for a lot less money. And then you've got the pic that you like. Now with guitar prices, you're going to find that at the low end, you can have sort of in the two to $300 range is going to be very low end guitars, a lot of which are copies of more expensive famous guitars. Then when you go above that price point you're going to have in the three to $500 range, you're going to have the higher quality, lower end versions of famous guitars, which is like this one right here.

This is Epiphone, which is Gibson's lower end guitar, but this is Les Paul plus top which is their high end low priced guitar, if that makes sense. So this guitar is about $500. For the full price, sort of famous guitar models, this is a Gibson 335 Which is Gibson sort of flagship one of their flagship guitars, and it's about $3,000 to buy. So, you're going to always be thinking about what kind of budget Do I have and what kind of experience level do I have? owning a really expensive guitar right away is not recommended also, because you're learning how to take care of it. And you don't, if you make a mistake on a less expensive guitar, you're going to not feel as bad about it.

But the trade off with how expensive a guitar is, is you want to make sure it sounds good and you feel good playing it. One way to tell a really cheap guitar is how the frets feel as you move up the neck. If they feel really sharp, then you're dealing with a very, very cheap guitar that's not going to feel all that great to play. And I definitely recommend not to go you're going to see that in places like Costco and Best Buy. They sell guitars they sell even Gibson's and fenders and things like that. I don't recommend buying an instrument from a store that doesn't specialize in instruments.

Because the people who work there are not going to know very much about them. Those guitars might have been sitting for a really really long time. There's no one to set them up properly. So I would steer clear of it. Even if you're like, Oh, I'm in Costco, and there's a really great deal on a real Fender Stratocaster. I would steer away from it.

Even as a professional musician, I wouldn't buy a guitar from a place that is not selling guitars. Not connecting your guitar to the amplifier is done using an instrument cable or what we call a quarter inch cable. Depending on the guitar body that you have, you may want to check out what are called right angle cables. So this cable has one end that has a right angle and one end that straight. Most instrument cables are the same on both ends and look like this for like les Paul's and 330 fives and guitars where the input is on the bottom of the body like here. I recommend using a right angle cable because the profile of it is a lot smaller so it's less likely to be banged into than if I did this.

So I have a cable like this, it's much more likely to get banged into from all sorts of areas and snap and break. So, right angle cables are a great option for this kind of body type also for the 335 as well because it's in the front of the body like that. Another thing you're going to want to do is feed the cable through the strap and then put it through. And the reason being is once it's set up like this, if there is any tension, what's going to happen is is the strap lock and the pin are going to minimize the tension that's going right on the jacket itself. So it's good to always run that through like that to give it a little bit more protection for a guitar like a Fender Stratocaster, which has the input jack built into the body. This is the recommended kind of cable.

Whenever you're plugging anything into an electrical instrument, it's always good to make sure that the master volume is turned all the way down. And when you have your amplifier on, another important thing to remember is that at any time, you can pull the cable out of the amp, and it won't affect the sound. But if you do the same on the guitar, you're going to hear this which of the instruments turned up quite loud can be really jarring and hard on everyone's ears. So always make sure that whenever you're plugging or unplugging out of the guitar itself, that the volume on the amplifier is off or the entire amplifier is turned off. with electric guitars, the relationship between the guitar and the amplifier has the biggest effect on what kind of sound you're going to get. And that's why some electric guitars, we'll see better with some amplifiers than others.

And your own personal sound on an electric guitar takes time to develop because your sense of what sounds good to you is personal. And so in this way, it's a little tricky for one person to recommend to another, you should buy this guitar and put it with this amp and set it this way, because your own sense of sound is going to direct you. So be careful with lit you know, getting advice from other guitar players is great, and they'll tell you like I like to play this guitar with this amplifier and I like to set it this way. But always be willing to experiment and try and find the sound that speaks to you. The relationship with the guitar and the amplifier, in a very basic sense happens by the magnetic pickups, picking up the sound, transmitting it through an instrument cable and into an amplifier.

And then once you're in the amplifier, there's all sorts of processes that happen before the sound makes it to the speakers. And there are two basic kinds of amplifiers there are what are called solid state which have a circuit board and are, are entirely circuit board based. And there are two amplifiers, which use vacuum tubes to process the sound. Now, guitar electric guitar purist will tell you the only kind of good amplifier is a tube amplifier. And in a sense, what they're talking about is, you know, most classic recordings you've heard, especially early rock and roll are all on tube amplifiers because that's all that existed. And the tubes give a warmth to the sound and a little bit of natural compression and they sound quite beautiful.

The downside with tube amplifiers it's a little harder to control the sound because the more you The more you put gain through the tubes, the more they distort. And so you have to have the right amount of wattage for the kind of place kind of room you're playing in in order to control that The sound. So my personal preference is I like to play what's called a hybrid app which has a tube section, but the power is solid state. Because the kind of performing that I do, I have to play sometimes in big, huge large outdoor shows. And I also have to sometimes play quietly, and I want to be able to control my tone so that I can have whatever level of distortion or clean sound I want at any volume. The size and volume of an amplifier is measured in wattage and wattage on a guitar amplifier is very different than on a bass amplifier.

So it's important to remember there are apples and oranges, they're not exactly the same thing. Not all watts are the same. So on guitar amplifiers, this one right here is 80 watts, which is very loud. This amplifier is loud enough that I can play a huge outdoor shows and it's I can be 4050 feet away from it and it's very, very, very loud. So Now the upside of that is it's great. It's can be loud, I can also control it and play it as quiet as I want.

The downside is is that an amplifier, with this many watts is quite heavy. So this amplifier is about 50 or 60 pounds, and it's got two speakers in it. So unless you have a car to drive it to a rehearsal or to a friend's house, it's not very practical. So when you're starting out, you may want to get a practice amplifier, which will usually be in the 20 to 50 watt range, most of the ones I've been seeing coming out now are 30 watts. And a 30 watt amplifier is going to give you lots of volume and usually be around under 10 pounds these days, they're quite light, they'll have one speaker in it. And it's something that you could put your guitar in a backpack strap and grab your amplifier and you could be able to walk or take the bus if you're going to a friend's house or something like that to play music.

So for that I recommend getting a very small practice amplifier. When you get into larger, amplify Buyers you also may see heads and cabinets which are separated. Again, unless you're playing really, really large shows and you need to have multiple cabinets I would recommend going with a combo amp which is simply everything's all built into one unit. Now when you're buying an amplifier, another thing to think about is how much money you want to spend and what kind of amplifier you're looking for. Much like the guitars in the sort of 200 to $500 range, there are lots of great small amplifiers almost all of them will be solid state. There are some very small tube amps being made in the sort of five to $600 range.

And then once you get above that in the 500 to $1,000 range, you're going to get many more features like a real reverb tank and sometimes like a hybrid amp like this one which will have to be and solid state and also you'll get into having more than one speaker which kind of gives your sound a much bigger and rounder sound. Again, I recommend the beginning ghost go with something small and portable, especially if you don't have a car, a guitar amp can be a very heavy thing. So you don't want to be carrying something around if you're trying to make music with your friends or travel from one place to another. If you're starting out practice amplifiers and low end amplifiers are going to be almost always solid state, which is a great way to get started again, because it allows you to control the overall volume.

And it also allows you to have headphones, which will disable the speakers. This is a really great function when you're just beginning so that you can decide at any point I want to play quietly or I want to practice especially with electric guitar where you could practice quietly in your room and not disturb anyone else as long as you were playing with headphones. So it's a great feature to make sure you have on any beginner amplifier and with any amplifier that you get to try out, really play around with the different tones and see what it can do. The good amplifier will give you a lot of different sound options. I find that if an amplifier can only do one or two basic kind of sounds, I, I don't find it that useful because I might be in a situation where I want a different sound or the room I'm in is really bright, for example, and I want to be able to bring up more of the bottom end of the sound and some amplifiers are more versatile than others.

So one last thing about amplifiers is if you live somewhere where there is a music store, usually you can rent them for very cheap, I often rent amplifiers and try them out and get them home and really change around the sounds. an amplifier is one of the hardest things to really check out in a music store because you need to really hear it clearly with nothing else coming in your ears to really hear the tones and the sounds. So I often just rent it for a day or two days and just bring it home and really try it out and find the right sounds for me before I decide to spend the money. Although All amplifiers are slightly different from each other. They have the basic same inputs and controls. So let's have a closer look at the front with the inputs and the knobs and also the back of the amplifier.

Now the front end of this guitar amplifier has the input on the far left side. And then the sound travels through the normal channel which has its own gain, which determines sort of how much distortion and crunches happening. It also has a clean and crunch button option which will give the AMP a little bit more or less of distortion. And then standard three channels EQ which has bass, middle and treble. Then there's a second channel which is called a boost channel. So you can turn it on or off with the push of a button or use a footswitch on the back which will turn it on or off.

And then it has a gain stage like the other section did and the three band EQ bass, middle and treble. It has a contour which will change The color or the the kind of style of the distortion itself, and then it has its own master volume just for this channel. It also comes with two different stages of overdrive so it has more or less overdrive. And this stage is tube amplified. And the other stages are solid state amplification. So as we move over, there's an effect send and return, which allows you to send your guitar signal out to external processors like reverbs and compression and all sorts anything basically anything and then return it back into the amplifier before it hits the master stage, which is it has its own volume for how much of the effects loop is in the mix.

There's a reverb which goes which determines how much reverb you getting in your signal. And then this amp has chorus built in which again is pushed button operated or foot pedal controlled. And you can control how much chorus how deep it is and how many, how much it's oscillating as well. And then finally, there's a master volume which controls the total of all of the channels together. And like with any electric instrument, you really want to make sure that your volume is set to zero or very near zero when you're turning the AMP on or off, and certainly when you're plugging instruments in or out. Here we have the back of the amplifier, most of it is open.

And you can see that there's two speakers. These are 12 inch speakers. Over here we have a reverb tank, which is what allowed us to have the reverb sound and the amplifier. We have a footswitch input which controls the overdrive and chorus on this particular amp. And then we have a direct out which is our left and right and on a lot of guitar amps This one is definitely I would include that the direct out quality is not very good. So if you need to have your use your amp for recording or for on a bigger stage, you definitely want to make sure that it's miked and you're not trying to use the direct outs and then all the way over Here on the far left side we have our power cable input.

And this is the same format or style of cable that you see on a desktop, computer or monitor.