Guitar Electronics for Dummies

Most amps have:
Gain - preamp volume, which is where you get the distortion from. Like using a megaphone to shout into a microphone.
Volume - power amp volume, which converts to ringing in the ears, higher numbers mean more ringing, lower numbers mean less ringing.
Bass - how much boom boom you like in your sound
Middle - Adjusts how much of the normal shouting tones you have
Treble - Adjusts how much of the little boy shouting tones you have

Just play around for a while and when you have any specific questions, we're here to answer them - although how serious some of the answers will be I can't say. :lol: :lol:

The best way to learn electronics depends on your own personal learning style.Then find a course that is designed to help you learn about components, circuits, and the use of electronics. The emphasis is on providing information starting at the absolute beginners level, I say this because some gadgets and guitar amps can have high Voltages that will put a hurt on you. There are plenty of sites like this one Learning Resouces.

To name a couple of books.

Basic Electronics
Author: Bureau of Naval Personnel

Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics (3rd Ed)
Author: Stan Gibilisco

joe

Gain is the ratio of input to output. An input signal of 1 amplified to an output of 10 would be a 1:10 gain. For you, what you need to know is what it does not so much how it's done.

An amp will have more than one stage of amplification. The gain knob will will be gain for the first stage of the amp or the "pre-amp" stage and the volume knob will be the gain for the amps "finals" or the last stage of amplification before the speakers.

So? A lot of the "rock and roll" sound came from amps that were turned up so loud that they would distort. I won't go into the why because that would take a lot of explanation of how tubes work from those old amps. In a modern amp the gain will allow you to overdrive the first stage of the amp to get that distorted sound without having to push enough volume to blow you out of your house.

I am an electronics tech that has been working on radars for the last twenty-five years. I have worked on tube, solid state and computer driven systems over the years so I've got a bit of experence. If you want to try to learn electronics Radio Shack used to have sone pretty good books for beginners. Be advised if you don't have a good grasp of algibra your going to have a hard time with most electronics text books. Good news is you don't need to be able to build an amp from a car radio and a box of odd parts to play.

The best thing to do is to READ THE MANUAL that comes with the amp then play around with the knobs, switches, and buttons on both the amp and the guitar till you find the sound you like.

Then there are effects pedals, but get a good handle on the guitar and amp before you start worring about those things. If you start out trying to get the same sound as Eddie Van Halen right out of the box your going to be disapointed. Shoot for the sound of B.B. King, Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughn, they used simple gear and got a long way with it. As you progress add "stuff" slowly, master what you have and then add effects.

Thanks guys. I'm actually not too interested in learning about the guts of electronics but there are a lot of effects and doo-hickies out there and I was just hoping to learn what some of them did.

Great explanations of gain! My amp came with VERY little in the way of a "manual" so I needed the help :)

Well the thing is the physics involved in music and the physics involved with electronics are VERY closely related. Both are dependent on wave theroy. Both are bound by the same mathmatical formulas. The sound harmonics that make a guitar what it is also govern the sounds you will get from a tube amp like the harmonics that make a banjo what it is make a solid state amp what it is.

Notch filters, reverbs, delays, fuzz boxes, ect all do something different to the electrial waves coming from your pickups going to your amp.

It's to bad the software that these forums work on won't accept the graphics my electronics modeling software generates. Otherwise I could show you what a phase shifted or cliped waveform looks like.

Even if you just pick up a book on radio theroy and give it a quick read you will find a lot of the mystery involved with sound will get a lot clearer. The same basics apply just in a different form. Sound is a lot slower than electriciy but most all of the principals apply to both.

I have been away from music for a long time and am just geting back to it. I learned electronics long after I had "dropped out" of music. I am finding now that the application of the principals I use in my everyday work in electronics are making music much easier to understand.

oldiron,

you can take a screenshot of the software and save it as a jpg file (at worst, you could use "Imaging", the freebie software that comes with Windows).

I've tried that before for another forum and the results were less than acceptable for ilistrative purposes. My electronics modeling program is old and uses a CAD format that windows recognises as a text file rather than a graphic. Doing a screen capture, saving as a jpeg then uploading to the web server where I can re-address to post on a board looses so much definition that it's mostly mud buy the time it gets displayed. Sorry. I need to invest in some new software. Problem is this stuff is professional enginreering software that is very expencive and I'm saving that money for an Epiphone Riviera.

What format do you use in the cad program? I have graphics software and could possibly convert to jpg for you

A .png would probably be a better choice if the image has only a few colors.

Well after a little surfing around on the net I have found enough electronics instrution sites that have the graphics I could "borrow" or link to that I could probably do something. It has been a long time since I had aprentices to teach but I might be able to bust loose a few long neglected skills.

If I start this I want everyone to understand just what I'm going to try to accomplish. That is to give musicans enough knolage of electronics to understand the relationships between music and electronics. I am NOT going to try to teach electronic maintence or design. If you get out your tools and open up the back of an amp and start trying to soup it up YOU ARE GOING TO GET HURT!!! I cannot stress that enough. You need instruction that I cannot provide over the net before even thinking about taking tools to electrical devices. This is serious bussness. People have been killed because of small mistakes when working on guitars and amps. DON"T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!

I have some other bussness to take care of so I'll be back in a while.

Well after geting a little bussness atended to and getting Les Paul & Chet Atkins going on the machine I guess we're ready.

The first thing I need to cover is the language we will need to use. Just like music electronics has it's own language. What I'll be giving you is the TAB version. For those who have a more indepth understanding of the subject I am trying to keep this as simple as possible. I am a true believer in the principal of KISS (keep it simple stupid) so I won't be going into RMS and other things that are not needed to get the idea of what's going on. With that out of the way let's get going.

The first terms we are going to need to understand are:

Voltage= Electrical pressure. As in the pressure in a water pipe.

Amprage, or amps or current ( they all refer to the same thing)= Electrical flow. Like the AMOUNT of water you can get out of the faucet.

Watts or decibels = Power. The voltage and current together give units of power in either watts or decibels. Think of a garden hose and a fire hose. With the same pressure (voltage) the fire hose will move a greater volume (current) of water than the garden hose will, therefore more power (watts)

D.C. (direct current) = A steady, level of voltage and current. You get D.C. from a battery. Normaly I would spend a lot of time explaning D.C. to beginners but because we won't be building guitar amps out of old car radios that's about all I'm going to say about it for now.

A.C. (pay close attention here) = Voltage & current that vary up and down together in a maner like a wave (as in sound wave). This is where music and electronics begin to come together and how sound can be transmited electricly and turned back into sound again. Here is a neat little aplet to play with
http://www.udel.edu/idsardi/sinewave/sinewave.html First uncheck the red and the sum to see what a sine wave (or pure tone) looks like then play around with it. A sine wave is the mathmatical expression of the rise and fall of the voltage. Don't worry about the math, it dosen't matter at this point.

Quesions?

If you're going to be explaining all this anyway, maybe you should do it as an article rather than putting it in the forum, where it will disappear into the past after a while. That way, it would be easily available to people for years to come. Here are the submission guidelines, in case you're interested.

Cool, I write for a west coast motorcycle newspaper in the summer when we have bike events going in Alaska and I get a bit "stale" in the winter when I'm not writing as much. (Kind of like guitar practice eh?) I'm really trying to develop enough as a writer that I could shuck the 8-5 and write for a living. Need to practice more, sound familar?