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Electric Guitars 2009: Budget and Beginners

Getting ready for this years Christmas? Looking for the ideal guitar for the complete beginner?

Hopefully this article on what is available this year and what I personally recommend will help point you in the right direction.

The guitars in this article will be budget/beginners style guitars so the scores out of 10 will reflect that.

I’ll be looking at Electric Guitars in this article, I’ll also in future articles be writing about Acoustic guitars, Bass guitars, Guitar Gadgets and Software. Hopefully just in time for the Christmas season.

So let’s look at what’s available for between £100 and £250

Because this website is worldwide I’ll try and find links for USA and Europe for each item.

I’ll also try and get more than one link for each of my recommendations along with pros and cons and prices.

Electric Guitars Under £100

Nevada Stratocaster: During my teaching career I’ve seen a lot of guitars come through and none have suprised me more than Nevada. The Les Paul which used to be available at ToysRus was amazing in it’s build, tone and playability. The Stratocaster version is no different. Not in the same class as most guitars but in it’s price bracket you can’t go far wrong. Also the below price of £99 inclues an amp!!!

‘The Nevada Electric Strat Sunburst Guitar package includes everything an aspiring enthusiast needs to start playing electric guitar. The Nevada sunburst guitar is an awesome looking, high-quality instrument with great sound and playability, featuring three single coil pickups, 5-way pick-up switch,1 volume and 2 tone controls plus a tremolo arm for those classic electric guitar sounds!

The pack also contains a Nevada 10 watt practice amp featuring master volume, treble and bass controls, plus a handy headphone socket. Together with the included guitar lead, strap, plectrums and even a beginner’s DVD showing you how to get started, you have everything you need all in one box and at a great value price!’

6/10

£99 @ ToysRus

Left Handed £129.99 @ ToysRus

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Squire Bullet Stratocaster: I’ve had a few bullets as stand by guitars and they’ve generally been of good quality. That said I’ve not seen an awful lot of them around over the last few years so picking one up may be difficult.

7/10

£99 @ Amazon

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Electric Guitars Under £150

Squire Stratocaster: The Affinity Stratocaster from squire is a well built guitar that is ideal for the beginner as it is about the right price and is functional.

Dressed in new eye-popping finishes, these Fender®-designed Stratocaster guitars have a great look and feel. With a contoured alder body, bolt-on maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard (and a late ‘60s headstock), three single coils and a standard tremolo system – the Affinity Series® Strat® guitar has all the vintage vibe at a fraction of the price.

7/10

£129 @ Dolphin Music + £6.99 postage

£119 @ Gear 4 Music

£130 @ Thomann

$180.99 @ Guitar Trader

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Affinity Squire Telecaster: Telecasters are my guitar of choice, they’re a workhorse guitar with a real twang to them. Plus they look cool.

More practical than the stratocaster they stay in tune better and don’t have a tremelo bar.

Great for chords and rhythm playing. The affinity also comes with a maple neck with will give you a faster playing surface and is great for lead playing as well.

Fender Squire Affinity Telecaster MN MR electric guitar – solid alder body, maple neck, maple fretboard, 21 frets, 2 single coils and chrome hardware. Colour: Metallic Red.

8/10

£130 @ Thomann

£135 @ Gear 4 Music

$180.99 @ Guitar Trader

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Ashton Electric Guitars: Ashton are a strange one, I first came across them as acoustics which were very well made indeed.

Their electrics are very playable but feel really light weight. Especially the strat versions although the ‘Rocker’ feels and looks heavy duty.

Value for money especially the Guitar pack itself. Although experience tells me don’t expect wonderful things from the amps in any package.

Turn up Ashton The Rocker and crank out a rocking sound, live or in the studio. From the classic double cutaway shape of the Basswood body, to the high output Wilkinson pickups, Ashton The Rocker is one guitar thats made to be played loud!

£119 @ Amazon

Ashton guitar pack includes guitar, amp, case, plectrums and book.

£149 @ Amazon

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Under £200

Yamaha Pacifica: Yamaha’s guitars have also been my recommendation for a beginners electric guitar pricewise they are much more expensive but from a build, playability point of view they’re as good as it can get. Comes in lots of different colours.

When the Pacifica 112 was launched in 1993, it turned the entry-level guitar market on its head. At the time, most guitars in its price-range featured low-grade appointments, often including cheap hardware, low quality pickups and plywood bodies.

The Pacifica 112′s quality hardware, custom wound pickups and consistently good setup said that this was a serious instrument built to sound great and play just as well. The striking natural finish gave away one more crucial feature – that this guitar had a solid body. In one move Yamaha had wiped away the certainty that your guitar would be made from cheap, heavy, bad-sounding plywood if your budget only stretched to £200.

9/10

£179@ Gear 4 Music

211 Euros @ Thomann

£179 @Dolphin Music

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Pack containing a Pacifica 012 Electric Guitar with a Yamaha GA15 amplifier, cable, instructional CD, Strap and bag.

Modelled on the best-selling Pacifica 112, the new, even cheaper 012 has a similarly contoured double-cutaway body, and the firepower of a raunchy bridge-position humbucker plus two clear-toned single-coil pickups. The five-position pickup switch permits selection of those classic in-between sounds, while the vibrato bridge is a well-proven vintage design with six individually adjustable saddles for accurate intonation and a slinky set-up.

For an inexpensive yet high-quality introduction to the world of rock guitar, you ll not find better value than the Pacifica 012.

9/10

£199 @ Gear 4 Music

Thomann do a bundle package at £226 but what a bundle,

Pack Includes:

1 piece(s) DADDARIO EXL110

1 piece(s) GHS FAST FRET

1 piece(s) THOMANN GURT6,4B

1 piece(s) MILLENIUM GS-2001 E

1 piece(s) YAMAHA PACIFICA 112 BL

1 piece(s) KORG GA30

1 piece(s) THE SSSNAKE GKP6

1 piece(s) THOMANN ELITE GIGBAG E-GUITAR

259 Euros @ Thomann

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Electric Guitars Under £250

Squire Telecaster Deluxe: So ok it’s just over £200 but there’s an awful lot of bang for your buck, plus ain’t she a beauty…

The Tele® Custom is an affordable hybrid of two popular Telecaster® designs. Fusing a ?72 Tele Custom with a Tele Deluxe, this guitar has two high-output humbuckers, a three-way pickup selector switch and independent volume and tone controls. The Squier Tele Custom also features a solid agathis body and bolt-on maple neck with maple fingerboard.

9/10

£209 @ Gear 4 Music

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Related Links:

Buying Advice: Electric Guitar

Guitar Accesories Under £10: Capos

Guitar Accessories Under £20: Tuners

Tags: advice, affinity, beginners, Buying, guitar, stratocaster, under £100, under £150, under £200, under £250 |

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Free Drum VST: CM-505 well almost.

Another great reason to get Computer Music magazine is the CM-505.

‘The CM-505 is a 24 note-polyphonic VST drum synthesizer. The instrument is designed specifically for creating synthetic drum sounds; no samples are used to create its sounds, not even a single cycle. The sounds created by the CM-505 have their roots in classic analogue drum machines. Although the CM-505 can replicate many of the sounds of these classic analogue drum machines, it also extends them into new sonic territory.’

The CM-505 comes bundled with loads of other free vst plugins on the disc that comes free with Computer Music every month.

Also the articles, reviews and tutorials make the magazoine worth it’s cover price alone.

The DVD disc crammed with lot’s of music making goodies just makes the magazine a great buy.

Computer Music

Tags: advice, computer music magazine, drum vst, drums, free vst plugins, make music, reviews, tutorials |

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Songwriting and Composition primer

Before I launch into this I should explain that although I’m not an expert I do have a small amount of critical success with my own songwriting.

Success in songwriting for me is not represented by how much a song makes in monetary returns or how many back slaps I get.

Success for me is in how honestly I feel about the song – I love all my songs – there’s something about everyone of them that I personally enjoy.

Success for me is being able to smile when I hear my songs finished and enjoy them.

Writing music is easy, writing songs presents much more of a problem.

Lyrics can for some be painfully slow in working out, whilst the melody is easy to come by.

For some though it’s the other way around.

Some find the idea of both nearly impossible to comprehend.

But with time, patience and practice writing music and songs can come.

I’ll be honest there’s no science to it, it just takes a lot of practice a bit of grimmacing and an awful lot of self editing.

Structure, dynamics and arangement are all important factors in songwriting.

Alongside melody and lyrics they can be what grabs the attention – the style in which you perform the song is also a huge factor.

Imagine a disco song performed by a death metal band – um probaly not the best example as that would probably work on some level, but you get the drift.

Once you’ve got a song together you may be looking at recording it, now how you record your song depends on your arrangement.

I’ll be writing about each component in songwriting and composition over the next few weeks.

I’ll be talking about structure, arrangement, chord progressions, key changes, lrics, melody, dynamics, style and ideas.

There’s a whole lot more but I’ll hit those as I go.

Tags: advice, composition, how to write songs, lyrics, songwriting, tips, writing music, writing songs |

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Setting up – Mastering Effects – Home Recording Tips and Advice

If you are trying to Master your own tunes you will be wanting to know which effects to use and what order to use them in.

Truth is there is no set way to set up your mastering effects.

It’s all about your ears, does it sound right?

2 previous articles on this site.

Mastering for fun – Primer(link)

Mastering How?(link)

——-Mastering Setup——

Let’s look at mastering for the beginner.

Add a Limiter to your fx chain, typically the limiter will go at the end of you mastering fx chain.

Why?

Well it’s not a set in stone rule but if you’re trying to get your track to level out and increase the overall volume of your track a limiter or limiting effect will with a little care and good ears get this for you.

Some setups will include placing a compressor set at a low rate at the beginning of your fx chain.

Free Limiter Plugins(link)

More about the Limiter – Setting Up(link)

What you place inbetween is down to choice, typically this is usually an EQ effect.

So a simple setup could be,

Compressor – EQ – Limiter.

That said removing the Compressor at the beginning is not out of the question.

If your track is well mixed and your eq is spot on then the EQ can be removed as well.

It’s about what suits.

Usually an EQ is added to lift a track in some parts(boost) or to remove problems(cut).

Free EQ Vst Plugins(link)

If you do boost – be gentle – if you find yourself having to correct too much then you need to look at your mix.

Using EQ a roll off around 40hz(link) can usually give you a bit more room for volume as the lower frequencies tend to take up much more room in your overall levels.

What does ‘Rolling Off’ mean?(link)

Other than that messing around with eq is again up to taste, but be careful with your boosts – whatever you boost has an effect elsewhere in the track – gentle boosts are a safer way of massaging your sound. If you find yourself doing more then you may have a problem in the mix.

Learning more about bandpass filters and types of eq is necessary – get your ears used to what happens to instruments and mixes when you apply eq – drastic and dramatic settings can be helpful to tune your ears but they will be often be damaging to your master – if in doubt leave it out.

Use eq for gentle lifts and cuts only.

—Adding Other FX—

There are many other Effects that can come into play when mastering,

Multiband Compressors

Distortion/Tube/Tape Saturation

Maximisers

Exciters

Reverb

Each of these effects have their own uses, the order in which you use them again is down to taste.

For example a Reverb before an EQ will be affected by the EQ so decide wether that is what you want.

Remember It’s all dependent on sound not so-called rules.

Imagine a big reverb going through a limiter – what will happen?

If you compress a high pass eq what happens?

Adding distortion into your mastering FX chain does exactly that – think about it.

Sometimes it can have a warming effect – too much and it will distort.

Be gentle but at the same time keep in mind what you want to achieve.

A good mix can be killed by bad mastering.

Start off simple, listen and learn.

1. Decide on the sound you want – will it be part of an album of songs?

2. If so that has a bearing on your mastering – eq’s have to match – your volumes will depend on the order/playlist of your music.

3. Take your time – bounce your mixes first – find the order of your songs – then listen on as many different types of stereo listening equipment as you can.

4. Were all the songs recorded around the same time/studio/equipment? Look at point no.2

5. Get a few commercial songs to A/B and Compare against – take notes – use analysis plugins – LISTEN!.

6. Take a few weeks off – don’t master straight away – yeah I know me neither but run a basic master off if you must – just to listen to – but then take a few weeks away – do something else and go back to it – if you have a few songs to record finish those off before you master any more.