Latency is the most common technical issue that affects a home studio. Just a small delay can make it impossible to play guitar when monitoring through your DAW. Here’s all about latency and what to do to decrease it to an absolute minimum.
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The compressor is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal when mixing your tracks. Almost all DAWs come with at least one compressor plugin. At the same time it’s probably the most misused. If you’re like me, you probably have a basic idea of what a compressor does, but no clear […]
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If you do most of your playing at home and don’t have a band (my band is currently just two guitarists jamming on Sundays for instance, on break for the summer at that) but still want to make songs, you are going to be using virtual drums. You should consider yourself lucky, because nowadays there […]
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If you start playing guitar regularly you will inevitably be confronted with maintaining and adjusting your guitar. At the very least you will be changing strings (unless you’re like a guy I know who didn’t change strings on his strat for five years – not recommended!). If you’re not happy with your guitar setup or […]
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This is the third and final part of a series. You’ll find the previous parts here: Writing Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs Writing Your First Song Part II: Recording and Arranging The Other Instruments Having recorded your guitar tracks and decided the order of the different parts you are ready to put them […]
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Using software amplification simulators, or amp sims for short, is becoming increasingly popular. The benefits are many, you can tweak your sound endlessly, switch between different amp sims trying to find the best tone for your song. A drawback is that an amp sim not properly tuned can generate digital artifacts giving away that it’s […]
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A challenge for almost all beginners is to learn the notes on the fretboard. The notes on a guitar are inherently more difficult to learn than on a piano, since you don’t have the help of white and black keys. But here’s what worked best for me: 1) Learn the notes on the low E […]
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It is my great pleasure to present this guest post from Dan Vuksanovich, who runs the site Why I Suck at Guitar: It can be daunting for an aspiring rock/metal guitarist to feel adequate these days. There was a time when a few tasty pentatonic licks might turn heads, but the rock guitar game changed forever […]
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This is the second part in a three part series. You find the first part here: Writing Your First Song Part I: Creating Riffs. When you have a bunch of riffs you need to arrange them into a song. A song normally has (all or some of) the following building blocks (borrowing a bit from […]
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This is the first of a three part series about writing, recording and mixing your first song. I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but this will get you started. The obvious first obstacle is coming up with a song, writing the chords and notes. Composing, if you will. So where do you […]
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