Get Your Tone! Guitar & Amp Setup for Beginners

In this video we're gonna take a look at how to get set up with your electric guitar and amplifier so that you can get making some noise as soon as possible and be happy with your sound. We're really focusing on the amp in this video and uh really physical amps, any type of actual amplifier where you have dials and knobs on the device itself. App-based amplifiers are super popular these days, basically amp simulators, and we'll be focusing. on those in a separate video, but the principle's the same. The absolute minimum amount of gear you need is an electric guitar, a cable, an instrument cable, which we also call a jack to jack. This is a jack input that goes in our guitar. Plug the other end of the cable into the main input of your amplifier, plug in your amplifier, turn it on, and you should be able to get some. Noise, however, there are other things I'd coach you through so that you know exactly what sound is going to be coming out of that amplifier and you can dial in a tone appropriate to the song. We're not gonna go hugely in depth with all of that, we'll be doing that throughout the course. Think of this more as the guitar Shop demo that you can watch, maybe after you've bought some gear and you want. To make the most of it, or perhaps even before you've bought any equipment at all, maybe you already have an acoustic and you're looking at expanding to electric. How do you get all this set up? And I really want to encourage that anything is fine, even a mini guitar amplifier, something like this, you can plug into. All we're looking for is something that's gonna give you perhaps some overdrive. And perhaps a nice clean tone as well, but all these fancy gadgets are often simulating amplifiers that only did one sound that were created in the 50s, 60s or 70s, and often that was something like this and perhaps they would use the guitar input. To create the clean tone, and then this would be the overdrive or distorted tone or even just how softly or loudly. You pick. Can really have a massive impact on the sound, so that's why we're gonna be covering a lot of this where it matters, appropriate to the song or sound we're going for. More info about different electric guitar types in the next video, but let me talk you through my setup here and my recommended setup for you guys. I'm actually plugged straight into a tuner on the floor, which means that if I'm strumming and making noise. I can hit my tuner and then it mutes the sound so that I can tune in my tuner's on the floor. You can also, and it's a more affordable option, to get a clip on tuner and really a guitar tuner is the other essential thing. We have, it's essential to tune your guitar, see that has actually slipped a little bit from there. It's really essential to tune your guitar before every time you play, and even. In between songs. As if you go to gigs at all, you'll see the guitar either being changed or being tuned up between every song. That's just quite common. We have a full how to tune your guitar with or without a tuner video available. We'll embed the video down below, but a clip-on tuner's the easiest way to do that. Amplifiers often come with a tuner these days, and you can get them as a pedal, but the only advantage for it to be on a pedal is to mute your sound, and that would be if you're gonna perform with a band, really. The other thing. That I have on the floor in front of me is a channel switch, which is a 4-way channel switch which changes the channels of my Boss Cortana. If I click through from channel 1 to channel 2, channel 3, and channel 4, you'll see the light switch there, and that gives me 4 very different tones, but all that is doing is changing through the amp types and any other settings I have set on the amplifier. So let me show you that really quick. I have a crunch tone. Which is literally on the crunch amp setting, EQ neutral, EQ is just like your hi fi speakers or like you would EQ something uh on your phone or on on your computer. Bass increases the bass or decreases the bass, highs increase the high or sibilance sounds or decreases it amid, so somewhere in the middle. A lot of the sound of. Guitars are in the middle, but you're not gonna wildly change the type of sound or the tone of the sound that you're getting with EQ. You're just gonna make it sound more trebly or more bassy, more middly or less. You're not gonna totally shape your sound or the tone with the EQ but you will totally change it by changing the amp type. Let me go for a clean amp type now. That has totally changed from. This Even with keeping all the rest of the amp settings the same, I also have an effect on this clean sound. Which is called reverb, that is an echo sound, that is also on the amplifier itself. All the pedals doing on the floor is changing between the amp settings on the amplifier itself, I could press them, but if I'm playing a song and want to change a sound halfway through, that's what the foot pedal's for, but it's just changing sounds all on the amplifier, the amp setting or amp type or the amount of overdrive I have, and that reverb sound, that echo sound. It's all on amp. The other sound we can get from this that is one of my favourites is the brown sound setting, this is really heavy. So if I wanted to change between something that's clean, say I was doing something like Nirvana or Guns N Roses, so something with open chords. I can change. That is the brown sound setting, the gain or amount of overdrive there was the same, whether it was on the clean channel, the crunch channel, or the brown sound as this one's called. It's the amp type that's made the most difference there, cos it's like I've totally changed amplifying and plugged into something else, but all on the same one. So that's the advantage of having multiple channels or multiple amp types. The final one I've got, just to show off everything that's here, goes on the lead setting. And this actually has some delay or an echo effect on it, which you only really hear when you do a short, sharp sound. Which it has to be said, is very U2 or quite 80s, cos that's when a lot of these effects kinda came into the mainstream. I could add these effects to any of those sounds and that's the advantage of the amplifier itself. All of those effects that are on this boss unit are also available as stump box effects, as separate ones. And of course the advantage there is if I don't like the delay sound that the amplifier has or if my amp doesn't have any effects at all. You can buy them individually. Buying individually tends to be a little bit more expensive, sometimes a lot more expensive, but you can get the exact effect or type of effect or brand or anything like that, that you want. These all need to be individually powered, but they can be powered by batteries. Some styles of music, particularly anything from the 80s or perhaps 90s, are quite effects heavy, so you might need a lot of these or might need an effects amplifier, an amplifier. With effects built in to kind of recreate those sounds. If you do find that you like bands and songs and guitar sounds that have a lot of effects to them, especially if you're a fan of eighties and nineties, uh music, particularly in the rock or pop genres, then perhaps something, oh, let me lift this up. Perhaps something like a multi-effects unit could be handy. This, as you can kind of see, is like a lot of stomp box effects, this is literally how this one's designed. Uh, my old boss ME 70, so multi-effects, just means we've got a lot of stomp boxes on them, even wah pedal or volume pedal, things we wouldn't expect to be built into the amplifier because this is a, a more customised unit. And really from there, you can buy as much gear and spend as much as you want. But before you go buying anything bespoke or anything where you're spending a lot of money, think why you want to get that sound and what sound are you going for? And it is massively influenced by the style of music you're into. If you like really stripped back uh guitar sounds and bands without a lot of effects, you don't need all this stuff, especially when a lot of this stuff might come preloaded onto an amplifier and you can click through some presets, find your favourites, and leave everything alone. The real trick with this is to most of the time I. Have my pickup selector, no matter what pickup this is selecting or any dials on the guitar where we have kind of a switch like this, just keep it down and everything onto full. So 10 is the number facing me or everything on the guitar, like you've screwed on a jar top, clockwise, clockwise, clockwise for everything, and that means you're pretty much. Get the loudest, brightest sound, and you want to do that as soon as you turn everything on. And even before you do that, you might want to tune it before everything gets loud. To talk you through how to go about crafting a tone which will go into more depth, but now I've demoed it, I feel I can say this. We've got to think about any electric guitar sound as a signal chain coming from your guitar or from your hands or from your pickups, through the lead, going into the guitar at the left-hand side. And then it gets affected by anything you add along the signal train, along that, along all those dials, from gain to EQ to effects, and then at the end to the final master volume. This is a big amplifier, but it can actually change the wattage of this amplifier, and I've got it down to 0.5. Cas literally 0.5 watts is plenty loud enough for this room. I've actually got this at speaking volume. You can hear, I can hear myself and you can hear me above it. You don't need to be super loud, even if you're playing with a band and stuff, you'd be surprised how not loud you need to be, cos you can mic things up, you can, I've got a microphone on the guitar amp here, so that can be amplified as loud as we want. It doesn't have to be huge, I can literally make this amplifier louder than this if I put this through a Pierre speaker or a big speaker system. So keep that in mind, you don't need a huge thing. And I've got the master volume quite low so that the volume is uh manageable. It's, it's something, it's it speaking volume. The left-hand side, the first thing I go into, after the amp type, after I've selected a crunch amp or a clean amp, or a lead or brown sound, amp, the next thing I go into is gain, and more gain is basically the equivalent of more overdrive or more distortion. So changing that dial's gonna clean up the sound, it's almost like literally turning down your guitar's volume. Is the same as turning the game to the right or then to the left. EQ for most amps, just leave everything at 12. Keep it vertical so that they're basically doing nothing, unless you want it to be less trebly, in which case turn the treble down, you know, less high frequencies or more bassy or more boomy, in which case. Turn the bottom up, but really, you're not gonna shape the sound hugely with with EQ certainly not compared to amp type or guitar type or anything else. We can then add effects. Most people add too many effects, so this is quite a lot of reverb or echo. And most people really coat their sound. And there's lots of echo on everything, you don't need that most of the time, we actually just want this kind of crunch. A little bit of overdrive, but not a lot, and then you can really hear what your fingers are doing without it just being covered in noise. And echo and delay all the time. And that's all we'll talk about for now, I don't want to overwhelm you. Please ask your questions in the live streams that we offer and the Discord. In the next video I'll be talking to you more about guitar types. If you want to just get straight on with playing, you can click on the, for the rest of this beginner's course and maybe come back to plenty of the other videos that we have on the website for different effects, amp settings and that sort of thing, but we'll leave. Leave it there for now, that's our guitar shop demo, and I'll leave you with the thought of whatever gear you have right now is the best gear for you because you can just make a start right away, there's nothing stopping you. And I would recommend continuing with whatever you have now before expanding and only expand or change your guitar or amplifier or anything like that when you have very good reason to. But when you do have that good reason to, there are so many options available, and try them all in real guitar shops, try them out, make some noise, take your choice for the budget that's available, and that's the best way to get started, at least with guitar amps and gear.