The Beginner's Guide To Electric Guitar Gear - Guitars, Amps & Pedals

greetings i'm rob chapman and uh first of all apologies for my voice i'm on a day off in the middle of a tour it's a really stupid thing shooting a video mid-tour but why not i thought i would do um today i'm going to be telling you all about the basics of electric guitar gear equipment things that you might need to know if you're a complete beginner or even if you haven't even bought a guitar and you're really considering starting playing electric guitar or even if you've been playing for a few months i'm going to be telling you about guitars amplifiers different kinds of both effects pedals and some of the peripheral gear that will help you on your way to electric guitar domination insert lineable first of all i guess if you are a complete beginner or you're just about to buy your first electric guitar it's going to be great you're going to have a great time there'll be moments of complete frustration and moments of complete joy but you'll absolutely level up your life so well done let's start by looking at the different kinds of sort of normal electric guitar uh this is a telecaster this is one of the normal kinds of guitar normal kinds of guitars the phrase i'm using and i'm putting it out of my ass and really what i mean is there are four old ancestors from which all of the guitars kind of sprung up and evolved in electric guitar land so the telecaster was really known for its country roots in fact originally these were even used as bass guitars but now it's gone from much more just to country guitar and obviously country is a huge genre but also this covers things like rock like bruce springsteen some metal stuff it's a very versatile guitar quite a bright sounding instrument and it gives you clear great clean tones but if you drive it hard it's gonna rip your face off so telecasters are great you see them everywhere from bruce springsteen the stones some metal stuff really cool guitars very simplistic so let's start with the basics here's a volume knob if you turn this one right you're going to get more sound turn it the other way you're going to get no sound or less sound this is a tone knob so this gives you brighter sounds or darker sounds so with it full-on it's fully bright if you roll it off it's darker it cuts off some of the high sounds this switch is a three positional switch we call it a blade a three-way blade and what it's doing is swapping between these microphones that we call pickups and they take the magnetic sound from the strings and transfer it to the amplifier so what you get is in the first position we're picking up from this one pickup here which gives you a bright clear sound in the middle position it's both of them and then in what we call the neck position it's the top one which is a warmer sound because if i just strum this with the amplifier off and hold this by the the microphone that you can't see it's quite warm if i pick here and brighter if i pick here [Music] so it's picking up those natural sounds so what we do is for lead we kind of get a brighter sound so you cut through the mix and for rhythm and this is just very generally speaking sweeping statement this is a nice rhythm sound because it's warm and fat and kind of sits back a bit more bleed rhythm generally but not always in the middle position it's a mix of both this is the neck this is the body we call this a scratch plate because it prevents you from scratching the body but also it's a really simple cheap way of having electronics removed this neck is bolted on it's a very cheap simple basic construction for a guitar but it works really well because if you break a neck you can unbolt it put a new one on but unbolt it and fix the neck even so guitars are made from different kinds of woods this neck is made from maple and some people say different kinds of would give you different kinds of sounds now in terms of shape you can see this body has been cut away here and this bit we call horn this is called a cutaway because it's been cut away so this has been cut on one side and is therefore a a single cut kind of a guitar it's a flat top you see how flat that is so it's one piece of wood normally that's just been cnc'd flat and down the back of the neck you'll see a stripe and that stripe is where they've taken some wood out they've routed the wood out in in here they've laid a metal rod called a truss rod the truss rod can be adjusted at the top of the neck and what it does is it bends it flexes and it allows the neck to be pulled or pushed into position so that the neck remains straight despite the touring pain it will suffer with different weather changes moisture and temperature there you go telecaster now because this is a fender telecaster and they invented the telecaster to be polite a lot of people that make other instruments this shape will call them a t type t obviously standing for telecaster [Music] let's put the game channel on the amplifier on [Music] stratocaster okay this is another normal kind of guitar the fender stratocaster or as we in other guitar companies call it the s type because we refer to strats as an s-type um again it's very similar to the telecaster it's got the scratch plate this time it has two independent tone knobs and one volume knob as a one two three four five way positional blade because you've got three pickups this time again maple neck although these completely differ sometimes the necks and bodies made of different kinds of woods this one is a beautiful custom shop strat but it's a strat nonetheless and there are many different kinds of strats and teles and les pauls and sg's you'll find on the market i suppose the main difference between a strat and a tele other than the fact that it has three pickups that give you lots of different possibilities for tone has a tremolo now what this is is a bridge that the string is attached to and goes through the body so there's the bodies routed all the way through the strings go through the bridge and you can push the bridge back or pull it forward with a bar we call a whammy bar or a tremolo bar tremolo arm and it slackens the strings off or pulls the strings tight you don't do this way a lot of people when i started teaching years ago i used to think that you put the bar in and you do this but you don't you push it down and put it up and it slackens the strings off and pulls them tight to give you different kinds of uh pitch from the strings so the differences in tone are dramatic the strat can give you really bright sounds or really warm sounds and some really in-between woody sounds kind of hollow sounds let me show you one i've tuned the beast so now she's tuned this is how she sounds we're starting as ever if it's in the back position the blade it's the first pick up next one up is the two next one is the middle position then it's a blend of these two and then it's the front neck pickup neck bridge middle start with the bridge [Music] [Applause] one up gives you an in-between sound and it's very woody [Music] [Applause] [Music] middle position last middle [Music] neck position the warmest [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] great guitar s type strat this is double cut cut in two different places double cut you'll see these terms popping up and all sorts of different guitar design because these guys really initiated this again it's a bolt on neck construction this time there's no stripe down the back of the neck in fact what they've done is they have taken a a piece of wood on the fret board the bit that the frets are pushed into and laid it on top of the neck making a sandwich but before they laid it on they put the rod down the middle so you can't see where the rod has gone but the rod is in there trust me there you go strat ocaster s type from fender okay moving along this is a gibson les paul standard so it's a great guitar and they're all great guitars whereas the stratocaster and the telecaster had single coil magnetic pickups um these have double or humbucking or hum cancelling pickups what that really means to a beginner is that these are louder and they don't give you the hum that sometimes we find with electric guitars is caused by the lighting you get some of the dimmer switches and things and just bad bad electricity dirty electronics you find sometimes you get a hum when you plug the guitar into the amplifier with hum buckers you tend not to sometimes you still do they're much louder they give you more uh push into the amplifier if you're using a valve amplifier it pushes a part of the amplifier we call the preamp it gives you more gain so traditionally people using humbucking guitars use them all for rock metal that kind of thing but they're used for everything there are no rules in rock and roll okay other than if it moves and you don't want to use this four controls this time we've got two tones and two volumes which is really handy because you can set the guitar up in such a way as to give you a rhythm sound and a lead sound by just flicking a simple switch let me show you how that works so if i put both the tones all the way up but i bring both the volumes all the way in and i pretend that down which is this bridge pickup is my lead tone because it's brighter then i want my rhythm tone to be quieter so i'll back it off [Applause] so this was my rhythm pickup this was my lead pickup so if i go [Music] see it's louder now when i flick to my lead pickup [Music] [Applause] and that's a very simple and useful way to set up a les paul now of course you can also affect the tones you could make the rhythm tone darker you it will be anyway but you can make it much darker or you could match the lead tone to the rhythm tone so for example now i've made the lead tone almost as dark but not quite [Music] so you get a match of tones but again you can change the volume so i can have the rhythm quieter and the lead louder so there's all sorts of things you can do with the two-time team volume configuration on a three-way switch not a blade a switch one right middleway bottom way and again they label it rhythm and then treble which i thought was kind of interesting this bridge is very different from the strap bridge or the or the tele bridge the strings go over these saddles and then latch into this bar at the back here so there's a little ball on the end of the electric guitar string uh electric guitar string is a very deadly weapon that will kill every finger you own as soon as you allow it to one end is very sharp and one end has a ball on it like this if this was a string this is a ball and you thread the string through the holes there and the ball holds it in place it latches in place and then you thread the string around the pegs at the end here differences in wood well les pauls tend not always to be made from mahogany but on top you can see there's a slight curve and that's because they put a cap a thick cap of maple on top not always and this maple is carved generally by cnc to give you a nice carved top so it's an arched carved top the fretboard or the board they've laid on top of the neck here is made of rosewood although it can be ebony it can be maple it can be all sorts of different kinds of wood and the neck is also mahogany the neck all the way up here and it's glued in to the body so the neck has a tenon and it's buried in here and a little bit under the pickup and glued in place so it's a glued on neck pros and cons well if you break the neck you're kind of screwed i mean you've got to take it to a luthier get it fixed obviously you would do anyway but you need to have a real neck repair you can't just unbolt it and put another one on you've got to be careful with the les paul they're weighty you don't want to drop them it's not good for the neck but other than that they're an incredible rock machine great cling tones and great really known for sustained singing solos and rock riffs so here's a bright clean tone for you [Applause] here's a middle position [Applause] here's a neck position let's give it some game [Applause] [Music] neck position [Applause] [Music] in the middle you'll notice it's much louder there's more gain from the amplifier if it's valve great guitar we call this a single cut shape other brands will call this a single single cut shape like the telecaster and it's much heavier in weight much louder less pool well a bit like the holy trinity of star wars films the immortal three the only three the strat telly les paul form really the forefathers electric guitar but there are others many others that are tweaks on designs and eventually evolved into the massive smorgasbord of guitars you've seen now here's one of them this is an sg so the sg by gibson is like a les paul because it's got two humbuckers it's got four controls it's got similar wood spec um it operates in pretty much exactly the same way because really it is a les paul but the body is slab like a telecaster like a t-type it's double cut like a stratocaster but then it's glued on like a les paul so it's a combination of all three elements in a way and it has the strats pickguard so what they've done is they've taken the les paul and they made it much much lighter in weight and they added easier access to the upper fretboard by cutting away the bottom just like our friend the stratocaster now something else i forgot to mention on the left paul is that they have what we call binding so either side of the frets that go across there's this plastic binding that kind of covers the ends of the frets to ensure that you don't get any sharp frets on your hand sg is a great guitar sounds very similar to a les paul but a little bit different because the way the body is constructed but this is a good example of a different kind of an electric guitar from the holy trinity the three that you must possess known as soon as possible [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we talked about electric guitars let's now talk about electric guitar amplifiers and essentially there are two or three different kinds of amplifier you need an amplifier well you don't need one but if you want to play to lots of people you need an amplifier you can just play them acoustically in your bedroom and i did for years and it sounds cool and it's really good work for you but if you want to play lots of people amplify the signal you need an amplifier now let me talk about the two essential kinds of amplifier the first one is what we call a combo so here's a very popular combo nowadays this is the blackstar hd5 and what this represents is everything you need in one small useful package it is the three sections of an amplifier the preamp the power amp and the speaker so the preamp is the section where the sound can be tweaked to have more gain or less gain or brighter or darker tone and sometimes things like reverb occasionally chorus if you're lucky some amplifiers are different kinds of things built into them but this for example just has reverb gain like overdrive things that make it sound like a dirty signal like rock or punk and the the treble the bass the mid frequencies very important to remember put lots of mid in the signal i'm helping the world one person at a time and um because guitar players are the mid trebley area of a band we're not the base area of a band that's the bassist's domain um so put a lot of mid in your signal as you can see all the controls are on top nice and easy it's fairly lightweight you can take it to a little pub gig if you put a microphone in front of it you could absolutely gig a little tiny combo like this and it contains the preamp which is where the sound is sort of chosen sends the signal to what we call the power amp where the sound is converted into a big signal that gets pushed through the speakers where you hear the sound preamp power amp speaker now in a valve amplifier which is kind of what this is although it isn't entirely and what that definitely is they use little vacuum tubes we call them valves in england i think you call them tubes in america and you drive these they're like light bulbs you put a voltage through them and they provide you with tone with sound and with overdrive if you push them hard and in the preamp section if you push them hard they give you gain they give you overdrive they give you this great crunchy soaring supersonic sound in the power amp section they do the same but very very subtly and the louder you drive an amplifier the more the power amp section provides you that ringing bell-like sustaining tone otherwise it's just clean so there are some amplifiers that almost don't really have a preamp section they're more like a power amp and a speaker with like a volume control and those are very old amplifiers and you have to drive them very very very loud to get any kind of singing sustain from them whereas modern amplifiers that have a pre-amp section a pre-amplifier section they're easier because you can have them over driven at lower volumes so combo pre-amp power and speaker all-in-one and they're very affordable normally very practical they sound great this one definitely sounds great however uh it is fairly practical to have the preamp and the power amp separate from the speakers this is an example of that this is a preamp and a power amp and then this is a speaker so the preamp and power amp are in a little box we call a head and what this means is that i can swap the head between different kinds of speaker now actually you can kind of do that with combos or some combos as well there's a cable you can put in the back and you can attach it to an external speaker but not always and they're quite heavy if you get big ones a little tiny head is great nowadays you don't need very big amplifying heads back in the 60s or the 50s or early 70s you needed huge 100 watt 200 watt heads because there were no pa speakers there were no pas you didn't mic up a guitar signal you went straight through 10 15 8 whatever big speaker cabinets and drove it straight into an audience and you needed hundreds and hundreds of watts nowadays most venues will mic up your speaker and put it through a pa so you don't need big amplifiers and lots of watts and this is a good example this is a 20 watt pv head it's going into this 412 but what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the signal from the 412 and i'm going to get rid of that and i'm going to plug the head straight into a 2 by 12 or two 12 inch speakers uh rather than four 12 inch speakers so that you can hear the difference and it makes you realize that the speaker cabinet makes up a big part of the overall sound that you hear so i've got a little two by twelve speaker one twelve inch speaker here one at the bottom i'll put it in front of the four by twelve it's exactly the same settings but i'm plugging straight into the tuba 12. here's how it sounds with the same [Applause] [Music] settings [Music] hey [Music] wow [Music] [Applause] [Music] sounds completely different huh different not good because tone or the way things sound is subjective it depends on whether you prefer pizza or indian or chinese or thai food i love them all i love all the different kinds of tones so that's a two by twelve speaker cabinet opposed to a four by twelve there are pros and cons this is much lighter weight than a four by twelve if you're micking up a speaker in either cabinet you're still micking up a speaker it's the sound of the speaker you don't get the sound of the the air around you unless you back it off or use lots of different microphones so live this may very well sound pretty much the same as this if we're just putting a mic in front of the one 12 inch speaker cone so on the front of most amplifiers you'll find two switches these are quite important there's a power switch and a standby switch and the reason for this is that we need to warm up part of the internal circuitry before you really turn it off so you put the power on first and you leave it on standby for a little bit now some people will tell you five minutes ten minutes one minute you know basically leave it on for a bit and then you turn it on once the the tubes the valves and everything is warmed up and it's ready to go a bit like some cars you see moving along the panel of the front you'll see a pretty standard layout most amplifiers have what they call two channels a cleaner channel and a dirtier channel and they normally will share an eq like a bass a middle and a treble eq now like i said guitars aren't really bass dominant in the mix so i've not got a lot of bass in there this amp is quite bright so i've taken a little bit of mid out by the way anywhere from five down i would call out and anywhere from five in i would call in so i've got a little bit of mid out but that's unusual for me and then treble i put a bit in this has got reverb which makes it sound like it's in a big room or a big hall like echoes kind of vibe um forget this for now this is the overall volume of the amplifier how loud the overall amplifier is this drives the power amplification section and then i have a button here which changes the channel between the clean sound and the dirty sound of the amplifier and this is how much dirt or how dirty the sound is how gainy rocky punky the sound is this is how loud channel one is the clean volume so let's rove around and look for some peripheral bits accessories and things that you're going to need as well if you're starting out i've got a lot of them here so this is going to be kind of cool so starting with picks and strings now i use a very particular kind of plectrum but i don't want you to think that you need to use this this is just what i use this is quite a thick quite thick plectrum um and it doesn't move it doesn't bend at all see how thick it is very thick sorry my nails are dirty from gardening um it's got a very sharp end and i find this really useful for playing rock and metal because the plectrum doesn't bend it's a constant not a variable and i find that useful in playing the best plectrum to use is the one that you prefer to use it's all there is to say on that use whatever you find works best for you because everyone's got a different kind of feel i know great players these thin plectrums great players use thick plectrums sharp dull experiment i've got thousands of different kinds before i settled on that and i've been playing for years and like 20 20 plus years so i start off with whatever you buy experiment enjoy it straps so this strap is made of leather but you can get different materials now what's different about this strap is it has strap locks now there are different mechanics behind how these work this one is pretty cool it's got a button we press it it releases the strap from the the end here actually this is for a different mechanism but doesn't make a difference so you push it in it locks in place press the button it releases that's good because the last thing you want is to spend you know hundreds of dollars on a guitar or pounds and then drop it because the strap didn't hold it honestly please buy strap locks such a useful thing i dropped so many guitars as a kid such a pain in the ass strap locks so moving on to things like cables and strings i've got a few in here so again use any brand that you can afford or that you like i'm using these they come in different gauges so they come in in numbers that's out of the gauge zero nine would be the thinnest string um four two would be the thickest string so thickest on the on the low base side thinnest on the treble side and they range from sort of um from like an eight on the thinnest or seven or eight and they go all the way up to um sort of i mean i'm using 52 on the top sometimes 60 which is good for if you want to drop tune your guitar so because i tune my guitar very low to get that kind of metal sound and fit them in my vocal range i need thicker strings to tune lower to maintain the tension so the thinner the strings the softer they are the thicker the strings the harder but you can tune them lower now i showed you some pickups you can buy them separately so here are some pickups i've got that i'm going to put in something quite a few pickups and these are all individual these are all seymour duncan but there are loads of great brands out there like i don't know emg and di marzio bare knuckle and great brands and you can take these pickups and you can learn how to wire them in to your guitar to get different kinds of sounds these make up a big part of the sound pickups amplifiers so it's important to experiment here's the strap locks i use important to experiment with the sound you can get from pickups i guess lastly kind of an important thing is a case now if you're going to be playing out a lot and you're going to be traveling in a car and getting to venues a case is a really good idea they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes depending on what you buy and how much you've got some guitars come with a case like this guitar here some of them don't and you need to buy a case like this is a second case i bought i believe that's for a prototype guitar and there are some pretty good brands like gator make pretty good hard cases so just make sure that when you buy your beautiful guitar that you keep it housed in a hard case if you can so lastly and by no means leastly and this is going to destroy your wallet over years and years and years and well done it would be fun this is a pedal board now what i've got here are things that will affect the tone of my amplifier by plugging them into two different areas so the first area you can plug through is you put your guitar with the lead in here it goes through here through here into the amplifier into the front of the amplifier the input and what you can do there is things like wah-wah like the whackle-backlebacker kind of pawn sound or overdrive or distortion things that make it sound more rock metal punk things like a tuning pedal are great in the front um tuning pedals are really important by the way um although it's great to learn to tune by ear as well as with a pedal but then in the back of most amplifiers there is a section that sits in the power amp part of the amplifier not the preamp and that's what we call the effects loop and for that we put things like chorus or delay or reverb sometimes the amplifier won't have its own reverb you know a flange all these different kind of colouring sound effects and they go straight into the power amp section avoiding the preamp and they give you different kinds of tones and the effect sleep was on the back of an amplifier you'll find a send which goes to the in and then the then the send from this goes into the return of the effects loop so here's the back of the amplifier and you can just see the little valves or tubes there that would glow up when it's on here is the effects loop i spoke about there's the send and the return sends on top returns on the bottom now normally these are side by side but this amplifier does it slightly differently so you would plug in here and go from the send to the in of your pedal go through the pedals and it goes back into the return and this goes through the power amp section over here we have the speaker impedance so this is um quite important you match this to the speaker you're using so you want to read the the manual you've got to make sure this is good disclaimer disclaimer this is set to 16. most 4x12 speakers like this will be 16 ohms sometimes you get a 212 and it might be 8 ohms like this you can set it to 8 ohms but basically read your manual find out which one you need to use there's the fuse and there's the power good luck enjoy playing the guitar it's a great thing and uh if you have any questions you know what put them in the comments section below because the guys that watch these videos are really supportive really cool really friendly we're a community and we love each other so take it easy good luck with your journey and i wish i could start again because i'd enjoy it all over again take it easy guys i've been rob chapman chapezone if you've got a finite budget yes do you spend the bulk of it on your guitar say a thousand pounds yeah let's say okay i can go with that let's assume we have a thousand pound budget uh do you spend the bulk of it on your guitar and you buy a cheaper amplifier or do you spend the bulk of it on your amplifier and you buy a cheaper guitar so we've got a grand beach we're in anderton's in guildford and we're very excited because i'm on the toss which means i get to have the good end the good amp and the affordable guitar but

Channel: Rob Chapman

Views: 1,894,044

Keywords: Rob Chapman, Chappers, tutorial, Monkey Lord, Chapman Guitars, Guitar, Rock, Blues, Orange, Marshall, Lesson, Tuition, Gear, Demo, review, Andertons, Gibson, Fender, dorje, Beginner, guitar lessons, guitar gear, guitar lesson, electric guitar, guitar for beginners

Id: p7qIBoo63w0

Length: 36min 8sec (2168 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2016