Weird Tones

        Electric guitars are used in various forms and styles of music including pop, country, rock and roll, jazz or blues. These guitars are used largely in rock music, and are a bit more forgiving than are acoustic guitars. Depending on the venue, they are one of the most common guitars used in the 20th century.

        The strings used on electric guitars are steel strings as on acoustic guitars, but usually of a much lighter gauge so they are generally easier on your fingers. The guitars themselves are much heavier than are acoustic guitars. The wood is heavier and the electronic parts on the inside add weight to the guitar, as well. While the specific wood type for the body, neck and fingerboard is less of a factor in electric guitars, the wood chosen for a particular electric guitar does contribute its distinctive sound and as well as the feel of the guitar in your hands and even in your style of playing. The neck of the electric guitar must also take more stress due to the heavy body of the guitar.

        Because of the type of strings used on the electric guitar, they are considered to be easier to play. The lighter gauge of the strings for the electric guitar makes picking and strumming much simpler. The trade-off, of course, is the weight of the guitar and ability to be heard by larger audiences. Electric guitars are slightly more expensive than are acoustic guitars but quality electric guitars can be found in the lower price ranges, as well. The important thing to remember in planning to purchase an electric guitar is that they only sound good with an amplifier, so you must count on purchasing one of those as well as the guitar.

        While various historians would argue about the time frame, electric guitars became popular in the 1960's and 1970's. At that point, rock n' roll was the prevailing culture in the world of music. Electric guitars became a necessity in the competition with the amplified instruments used by jazz orchestras. They quickly became popular, even though there were some difficulties with their construction. The body of the electric guitar would vibrate because of the amplified sounds that came through the speakers, to which they were connected, causing what we know as feed-back. Electric guitars don't work with microphones, but with special pickups on the body of the guitar that senses the movement of strings. These pickups also tend to pick up the various electrical noises of the room, giving the guitar a bit of a "hum" which can be a very large or very small depending on where the guitar is being played. Several different designs for electric guitars were tried and left unused because of this difficulty in the decades before the 70's. However, the Les Paul by Gibson and the Stratocaster by Fender rose above the other models to help eliminate some of these difficulties and secured their place in electric guitar history.

        There are many types of electric guitars: solid body, hollow body and metal body. The solid body electric guitar is actually carved from hardwood and has a lacquer finish. The guitars with the metal bodies are affected by the "weight relief" holes that are bored into the solid metal guitars or they are chambered metal so that the guitar will not weigh so much. The hollow bodied electric guitars are said to add resonance and sustain to the guitar while being lighter in weight for the guitarists handling of the instrument. The hollow body electric guitars have the pick-ups mounted in such a way that they convert the combination of the string and the instrument's body vibration into the electrical signal sent to the amplifier.

        These guitars are great instruments to have around. They can be played for large audiences and their versatility of style is excellent. Earphones are a great addition to the guitar and the amplifier for the student who lives in the house with others that don't necessarily want to hear the instrument played all night or all day. With this one upgrade, the electric guitar is a great addition to the other instruments in my household!

The 7 things you need when starting out on electric guitar.

Apart from a decent guitar teacher or guitar tuition course, having a playable guitar and good sounding amplifier will go a long way towards keeping you motivated and enjoying the journey.

Here are the seven things you'll need:

1. An electric guitar.
2. A plectrum.
3. A guitar cable.
4. A guitar amplifier.
5. A guitar strap.
6. A guitar stand.
7. Electric guitar lessons

An electric guitar for a beginner:

Here's the first place I think we're all in luck. When I first started playing guitar, way back in 1976, a beginners electric guitar was something worth avoiding. Guitar building standards have advanced by leaps and bounds since then.

A general rule of thumb for getting a good beginners electric guitar is to look at guitar companies that are big names in the music equipment industry. They have a reputation to uphold, and if you know guitarists like I do, there's a good reason they want to make a good first impression.

You could buy a cheaper first electric guitar from a lesser known company, and you may get lucky, but my advice to you is to play it safe. A decent beginners guitar can last you well into the future, and even if you buy something really expensive to play on later up the road, it's always good to have a knockaround guitar that you enjoy playing as well.

Just to back up my point of view, I recently bought one of the cheapest guitars I could find, whilst visiting family overseas, and with just a minor setup, it's very comfortable to play, well built and sounds great.

A plectrum:

The kind of plectrum I would get is a normal V shaped plectrum. The ones made of nylon are fairly robust and wont break suddenly from hard strumming. They come in various thicknesses, so I would go for a medium thickness. I find the.67mm Nylon plectrum by Jim Dunlop to be about right.

A guitar cable:

Just as a general consideration, the better quality cables are usually standard thickness and the ones that wont last at all are thinner with molded plastic on the jack plugs. A better quality cable always has a removable cover by the jacks so you can see if the wire has disconnected.

The cable is the most abused pice of music equipment I know of, so buy a quality one, even if the electric guitar package you buy has one included. It will break.

A guitar amplifier:

Here's where the fun begins. Your amplifier is fifty percent of the sound and choosing just any little practice amp will make you sound terrible, no matter how well you play. Recently, I went out looking for a small practice amp to go with my beginners electric.

Just so you understand where I'm coming from, I hardly ever use an amplifier at home, as most of the time I'm in the recording studio and go straight into the mixing desk via a processor that imitates various amps.

There are some basic problems inherent in the idea of a practice amp. Firstly, a good guitar amplifier sound has a lot to do with the kind of speaker and the size of the speaker. The ideal speaker size is a 12 inch guitar speaker.

Practice amps generally come with a 6 or 8 inch speaker. These will sound tinny on the clean sound and buzzy on the overdrive, or distortion channel (if they even have one).

My advice here is to go for something that models a few different amplifiers to cover various styles of playing, and has a few basic effects, most important of which is reverb. Guitar amp modelling has been around for a while now, and it's the best way to make a tiny little speaker sound big and bold like a guitar amp should.

A guitar strap and a guitar stand?

These are just optional extras that you would probably want anyway. Nothing too special here to be concerned about so I would just get the cheapest. It's also good to practice playing standing up every now and then, cos that's what you'll be doing eventually.

Electric guitar lessons:

The way you choose to learn how to play electric guitar is really up to you. What I can help you with, is give you some basic advice and tell you of some things that helped me along the way.

The first thing that helped me was that I got professional instruction from a teacher right at the beginning. Whether you go for private lessons or get a DVD guitar course, it's important that you get started on electric guitar using correct technique.

Bad guitar technique at the beginning is very difficult to undo later.

Another thing that helped me progress a lot, was that I got involved with other musicians and learned to play in a band. As a beginner, you'll probably not feel ready to play guitar with other musicians, so here are 2 things you can do.

1. Find a friend who is also learning to play the guitar, and is possibly a little further along with it, and
2. Find a guitar course that gives you backing tracks that you can practice with. These are also referred to as Jam tracks.

I know that sounds like a tall order, so let me be a bit more specific. Although, as an electric guitarist you'll probably use a plectrum most of the time to play guitar, it's a good idea to learn a bit of finger picking as well.

Another thing that a lot of guitarists neglect to do, is learn how to read music. If you start out learning it, it'll become a lot easier a lot sooner and you'll be in demand as a guitarist with far more opportunities available to you later on, even if there are people who play way better than you on call.