Electric guitar question about volume and 'learning' sound

I see Rob got all the good stuff said :slight_smile:

I find that the volume varies based on guitar and amp. for me I use 6-8 for most stuff related to basics practice. Here are some guides:

  • you want your guitar signal to be fairly high, but leave room to increase it with the volume knob when you want/need (as Rob said). Doing this will make you lower the amp volume and the noise you naturally get from an amp will be a lot lower than your guitar sound.
  • the GAIN on the amp controls the input to the early stage of your amp. The amp has several gain stages. Use this mostly to control how distorted you want the sound to be.
  • the VOLUME on the amp controls the input to the final stage of the amp. This can give you distortion on the final stage if you want, but for home it is useful to just keep the sound level low enough to stand next to.

Using a clean sound will help you hear mistakes. For strumming, distortion will sound very noisy and not so pleasant. Generally, the more notes you use in a chord, the less distortion you want so it sounds nice. When you get to power chords, you’ll see what I mean.

That IS a really pretty guitar!

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