What You Need To Know When Buying A Guitar Amplifier

The first year I taught private guitar lessons the mother of a 10 year old student asked me where she could find a Marshall full stack for her son. He had specifically asked for this particular amplifier. (This is the amp you see on stage at Woodstock.) Obviously, I suggested something slightly more compact and less powerful. At the same time, nothing is more frustrating than playing with a drummer and not being heard because your amp is too small. The following article is designed to help you make the best decision about what amp to buy.

Lets begin by clearing up a few misconceptions:

How to play Guitar

This article will cover the basics that most all guitar teachers will teach in their first few lessons. If you are already taking lessons this will make a great review and if you have never played before this is the place to start.

A quick overview on the parts of a guitar:

                                              

So your child wants to learn to record, what now?

The days of giant tape machines and mixers that would not even fit in the back of a minivan are long gone. In fact, you can fit everything you need to have a recording studio into an average size back pack. What makes buying recording equipment so difficult is the millions of options you have to choose from. As a matter of fact, if you hop on one of the main recording equipment websites, you will find 256 different interfaces (one of the main parts of a modern studio). So out of the hundreds of options, which is right for you? That is what this article will explain.

Studio Design Part 2

So we have finished our recording studio! You can read all the planning materials on our Studio Design part 1 post here .

Our recording studio has 3 rooms: a Control Room, a Tracking Room, and an Overdub Booth. Here are pictures of the room before we got started.

The Overdub Booth before we got started 

How to Motivate a Young Rocker to Practice

What do eating Broccoli, doing homework, and practicing an instrument all have in common? They are all hurdles you have to get your child to do. If your child is taking music lessons and not practicing at home you are wasting your money. The good news is, getting your child to practice may not be as hard as it sounds. So before you give up, read on and learn how to make music lessons a great experience that your child will carry with them for the rest of their life.

How we built our acoustic diffuser

So the first question a lot of you may have is... "what in the world is an acoustic diffuser?". You can read about the basics of acoustics in our Studio Design Blog. The general point of "acoustically treating" your control room (the room with the computer or mixer where the engineer sits) is to try and minimize any effects or colorization the room may have. I am sure you have noticed the change in your voice when you walk from a carpeted living room into a tile bathroom. The tile is brighter, more echo-y, right? Every room changes how sound, well, sounds.

When you are mixing music you want to be listening to the sound coming out of the speakers. If sound from the speakers is bouncing off walls and the engineer is also hearing those reflections is makes mixing much more difficult.

If sound hits a blank wall it will just bounce off that wall at close to the same force that it hit.

Diffusers scatter a sound wave when it hits the wall, reducing the power of each reflection, keeping the reflections from bouncing all the way back to the engineer. 

Studio Design Part 1

Murfreesboro Rock School is getting ready to settle into its new space and we are beginning to design the layout of the recording studio. We are having a ton of fun and decided to share with you the process as we go.

The most important thing to consider when designing a recording studio is the acoustics. Having a control room that sounds good is very important. If the low frequencies in the room are not balanced or if there are to many reflections bouncing around you can not make a good mix.

I am going to try and keep things as simple as I can, if you have any questions or would like for me to explain things in more depth, do not hesitate to email me I would love to help.


Okay, so to begin with, the control room is 12' X 12' X 8' (WXLXH) and mainly concrete walls (a rough start...)