{"id":6641,"date":"2015-06-27T00:23:09","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T07:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=6641"},"modified":"2015-06-27T00:23:09","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T07:23:09","slug":"why-i-love-gear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/why-i-love-gear\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Love Gear…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love guitar gear – amps, guitars, pedals, slides, picks, strings, straps, cases, cables… you name it, I’m into it.<\/p>\n

But guitar gear can be a frightening thing if you’re new to the sport…<\/p>\n

A lot of money can be spent, and like most things there is a point of diminishing returns. Does a $400 pedal sound $300 better than a $100 pedal?<\/p>\n

Well, it will to one person and it won’t to another. So no matter what recommendations you read or what videos you see showing off the latest gadget or gizmo, you have to try it for yourself to see if it does what you want.<\/p>\n

Most gear falls into 1 of 2 categories: it gives a sound you want, or it solves a problem.<\/p>\n

Problem solvers are easy – tuners, buffers, noise suppressors… these are things that “fix” your signal more often than not. You might include things like EQs in that category as well but an EQ can be there to solve a problem, or it can be there for something else entirely.<\/p>\n

But often times finding something that gets a sound you hear in your head or on record is tough. We’ve all been caught chasing the tone of someone else and it’s darn near impossible to do in some cases.<\/p>\n

So before you spend a whole lot of money and waste a whole lot of time, here are some things I’ve found useful in my years of chasing gear:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. This thing likely isn’t your last… We all like to say that “this guitar is the last one I’ll ever need” but that’s rarely the case. And especially if you’re new to the guitar (like, less than 5 to 10 years of playing) your tastes will change and your ear will change as you grow as a player. What you want from an instrument, pedal, effect, or amp, will change over time and what you buy now likely won’t fit the bill down the road.<\/li>\n
  2. Buying something “just in case I like it” never works out. If I don’t have a specific purpose in mind for a guitar, pedal, or amp, it will end up in the closet.<\/li>\n
  3. Almost everything will need extras. Guitars need cases, amps might tubes, pedals will need a board to live on or a power supply or an endless supply of batteries. Try to find out what the extras are before you get too carried away.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now I don’t necessarily want to push you in one direction, but I’ve always had good luck ordering from Sweetwater and it just so happens that they offer an enormous amount of stuff. Plus they often have videos of the products they sell so you can see and hear what it does.<\/p>\n

    If you’re curious, just go to their website (or Guitar Center, or Musician’s Friend, or many others) and just click the “Guitar” item on the nav bar and look around.<\/p>\n

    Sometimes I find things I didn’t know existed but when I see them I know exactly what problem they’ll solve for me and I can’t imagine how I didn’t realize that sooner.<\/p>\n

    Now if you happen to find that beautiful new guitar you’ve always wanted, you won’t hear me trying to talk you out of it so don’t email me asking for advice on it… that’ll get expensive \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I love guitar gear – amps, guitars, pedals, slides, picks, strings, straps, cases, cables… you name it, I’m into it. But guitar gear can be a frightening thing if you’re new to the sport… A lot of money can be spent, and like most things there is a point of diminishing returns. Does a $400 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6642,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641\/revisions\/6642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}