"Don't Do That!" - Reimagining Electric Guitar

     The electric guitar. What a concept. You grab an axe, plug it in, flip the amp off standby, feedback starts rollin in and...  obviously we know what happens next. A chord is struck! Six vibrating strings upset the magnetic fields generated by copper-wound pole pieces, generating a voltage in the alnico or ceramic cores, which is then sent through a cable to an amplifier and BLAMF! You are now rocking super hard. It's pretty cool. 
     When we consider all of the minutiae taking place between the moment of that strum and those sound waves reaching your ears, one may feel intimidated, or maybe just ambivalent, which is totally fine! Many a great guitarist has considered little more than their amp and guitar to rockin results. But wooooah can it be fun to get into all of those micro-processes, or altering your signal with a slew of stompbox effects, or making up your own chords, or, in general, just doing things with your guitar people tell you not to.
      Try new things, try new tunings, instead of playing out of your bridge pickup all of the time, try slamming the treble on your amp and playing out of the neck pickup. Throw a reverb pedal before your distortion pedal and get scared! Use your pick like a bow, I don't know! There are so many different approaches you can take to this ridiculous instrument; so many unique ways to craft a sound that is more personalized and expressive for the player, but to me it seems like few dare to. 
     So I guess I'm gonna occasionally update y'all with some of my own anecdotal experiences, or ideas I've tried that I thought were neat, alarming, confusing or whatever really. Anytime I hear a guitarist coax something "legit-fresh" out of their instrument, I get a little giddy, and ultimately I hope to get some other players out there to see the versatility of sound available to them. Anyway, here's a dope video of Nels Cline demoing a cool Zvex pedal we have in stock:

-Alex

Alex works the sale floor at Sylvan Music five days a week. He uses way too many effect pedals and spends most of his time plumbing the depths of sound and annoying his neighbors.

---