Setting Up Volume and Tone Of Your Guitar

Almost every guitar has a volume and tone knob for guitarist to adjust. Some tone hungry guitarists tend to play around with these knobs in order to achieve their favorite sound. It's all good. However, as a beginner, my advise is to max out the tones and volume knobs. Like many of my previous entries, my main reason for this is for beginners to concentrate more on their playing instead of their tone so much. But once they are quite advanced, then they can then explore more on these knobs.

Below are the knobs that are usually found in a guitar:

Fig. A: Guitar Knobs, Volume and Pickups

As you can see, the 2 knobs shown on the figure on the top is actually the Volume and the Tone Knob. The Pick up switch is actually a toggle switch which is used to change which Pick Up sound to use.

Pick up switch can also play a part in shaping your tone. As for which pickup is used best for beginners, I have no preference. However, what I would suggest to beginners out there for this situation is to use the right pickup for the type of song that you're playing. If you play rock/metal sounding music, usually the bridge pickup is used. For mellow sounding songs, the neck pick up (the one nearer to the fretboard) is used instead.

Hope that helps beginners out there.

Cables

One of the things that most beginners and some experienced guitarist failed to realize is taking care of their guitar cables. Taking care of it the proper way will lengthen the cable's life, saving some money from getting new ones. Another thing to note is that if the cables were not taken care properly, there is a high chance that it will fail you during one of your performances.

Here's what some guitarist do to keep their cables:


Notice that the cable is tied. Tying is not a good practice to keep the cable properly. This is because, the wires inside ithe cable is actually being bent and after repeated bendings, it will definitely cause the wire to be broken. So, do not keep your cables this way.



Fig. A: Wrong way to keep guitar cable


This is one of the right way to keep your cables properly. Notice that there isn't any bendings made to the cable. That's because the cable is coiled neatly in a round manner.




Fig. B: Correct way to keep guitar cable

So do keep your cable properly, especially the beginners. Like I said, it is important for starters to concentrate more on the playing instead of wasting money and time on such things.