START A HOME
STUDIO
TODAY
Part I:
The Basics
words By: Yoel Kreisler
42
There is an odd contradiction happening in the world
of guitarists today. We spend hundreds of hours and
thousands of dollars researching every facet of gear
imaginable to get the best possible tone. We pour,
debate, and argue over the differences between
Alnico magnets, NOS tubes, speaker choices, pickup
height, vintage versus new production, fret material,
and just about every part of our tone we can think of.
We make sure to use only true-bypass pedals, buffers
in the beginning and ends of our signal chains, and
vintage-correct pickups, down to the plastic. Yet when
we upload a video of ourselves on YouTube covering
a solo, or record a jam of ourselves for SoundCloud,
all of that tone that we spent hours tweaking and
re-tweaking so it could be the best, is recorded on
the same microphone you use to make calls. It’s
further compressed to an online streamable format,
making the tone you worked so hard to get almost
unrecognizable. If you spent so many hours and so
many hard earned dollars on your rig, shouldn’t other
people hear it as it was meant to be heard?