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4 Essential Upgrades For Killer Tone
From novices to professionals, every guitar player gets on a quest to achieve a killer tone. While skills of playing the guitar might help you get close to the tone you want, there are some upgrades that will support you further. There are quite a few upgrades that you can do to get the right tone. We often find out that these upgrades are so obvious that many of us forget about using them. We have talked to some great guitar players about the basic upgrades that will help you get a better sound and they have all come up with some common steps to be taken. These are the ones that are more about getting the right equipment for the pedal board than about playing the guitar. So here they are, the most essential 4 upgrades to get just the right tone:
1. Get a good cable:
Good cables can be the key to a better tone. If you listen to guitar players talk all around the world they are going to vouch about the wonders a good cable can do. Once you replace your cheap cable with a good one you are going to see a noticeable difference in the signal speed and get a more clean sound. Cables with high performance capacity will greatly handle the signals that come from your guitar. While shopping for a cable look for the ones with ‘low capacitance’. If you buy a very long cable its capacitance is going to increase and it will only make you lose higher end. So do not buy extra-long cables, go for lower capacitance by buying just the length of cable you need to cover your signal chain. Buy a cable with better insulation, it will help you get a better tone and will also help in better noise management. Keep the cable free of strains, coils and kinks for easy flow of signal.
2. Use true bypass loopers:
True bypass loopers can help you keep the integrity of your guitar tone. True bypass loopers are quiet affordable. You need to know if your pedal has true bypass. If the bypass is off then the signal will not go through the internal circuit of your pedal rather it will only go through the input to the output. It will make the effect of the pedal rather nonexistent. Unless you have a true bypass looper your tone is going to suffer from signal degradation and sound coloring might occur. A pedal board that has only the minimal pedals like the wah, tuner and overdrive might cause the sound to degrade if there is not any true bypass. These problem can be overcome if you use a looper and group the effects of your pedals. Also, the looper will allow you to group two effects and use them together. This mix can result in a better tone.
One thing to keep in mind is that if your pedal board have quite a number of true bypasses, you should also use a buffered pedal in the signal chain for a better response of high frequency and decrease the amount of signal loss.
3. Properly organize pedal board:
A properly organized pedal board is absolutely necessary for getting that perfect tone you are looking for. To get that tone you need to know which effect goes best with the other. While specific order of pedals will create the perfect sound, putting them haphazardly will totally ruin your tone. Though there are no set rules to organize your pedal board there are some chain of effects that do not go well together and those are the rules you need to know. At first the pedals should be placed in such a way that they are easily accessible to you while playing. Try to know the various orders that the pedals go well together. Experiment with them to find the right order you need to give you the tone you are intending to create. The most common rule is:
Wah>compression>overdrive>equalizers>pitch>modulation>levels>echo. This, or orders similar like this, will help you control the signal more easier, create the boost, delay, phase or echo that you need. Once you learn to set the signal chain the correct order you will see a noticeable difference in your sound. Also, while you are getting new pedals try to ensure the amp configuration and the output of pickups match the setup that you use. This will make your pedal give a higher performance.
4. Use good quality power supply:
We can’t stress enough on the need of using a good quality power supply. We understand that adapters like 1 SPOT or daisy chains are popular to use in pedals. But trying to get the power supplies that have outputs independent of each other will be more helpful. It will not only help you get rid of ground loops but also decrease the amount of noise to a minimum level. The wiring, being independent, will help you get a clear idea of which one is going where. This will ensure that you will be able to identify problems or faulty connections as immediately as possible. If you plug all your effects into one power strand and connect to the power supply then you will find it really hard to diagnose any problem that may occur in the power supply or power chain. This will surely not look good if you are in the middle of a live performance! Better management of power supply will give you more leverage in producing the effect you want.
Just as we have mentioned before, a very little of us aim to buy the best cable in the market or get individual power supplies. But these can create a major difference in the delivery of sound and managing the effects. We have mentioned here the most common 4 upgrades. Surely there are more. Remember that there is no end to the ways you can improve and upgrade your equipment, so keep looking for more.
You can read more information about Chaining Guitar Effects Pedals For Awesome Output by click here