Category Archives: News

Blending folk and metal together into a cohesive unit is a challenging task for anyone, let alone the bass player left to keep it all together. We caught up with Niclas Etelävuori from Amorphis and talked about the new album, his process of creating his bass lines, and more.

Every now and then, friends come over with complaints about their guitar: the tone is wrong, the playability is off, tuning stability issues and sometimes even cosmetic issues are brought to my attention. I’m happy to address all issues, but some issues are so easy to solve that I think it’s wise to write this…

When describing tone, many guitar players use a myriad of terms to describe the sonic qualities they perceive  I want to take a closer look at some of those terms and try to explain what they mean. It is worth mentioning that most terms relate to ‘feel’; the feel a pickup gives you is crucial…

D-TAR is a sister company of Seymour Duncan, and consist of partners Rick Turner, co-founder of and luthier to the stars, and Seymour Duncan, the electric pickup maker. D-TAR stands for Duncan-Turner Acoustic Research and focuses on acoustic guitar products like pickups and preamps. The Mama Bear is sort of a specialized digital preamp and direct box for acoustic guitar, but it really does much more than that.

Ask someone about their favorite heavy metal bands and it shouldn’t take long to hear Lamb of God. Since their founding in 1990 by Willie Adler, his brother Chris, Randy Blythe, Mark Morton and John Campbell, they’ve put out six studio albums and continued to tour around the world even despite recent troubles in the…

I think Randy Jackson said it best, when he said “Ha! Slapping, the ketchup of the bass world!” and it rings true. Walk into any music store and you will usually hear SOMEONE slapping away on a bass (and in full disclosure, sometimes that’s been this guy). It’s fun, relatively simple and while there are…

One often-overlooked factor in the feel and playability of a guitar is the frets. There are various properties of the frets that can really change how the guitar plays. Let’s have a look at some of them, and what they mean for your guitar’s playability.

I put two Classic Stack Plus pickups in the neck and middle positions of my Strat, and a JB Model Trembucker in the bridge. I set up some fancy switching to split the pickups at appropriate times, and to change the volume pot from 250K to 500K when the humbucker was active.

In the first installment, we talked about using your volume knobs (or your blend) to create tonal variety in the event that you walk into a gig and are told that your amp (read: main source of tonal sound) will not be used and that a DI and set of headphones are now your best friend. But as we all know, it’s rare that a bass will have JUST a volume knob. Today we’re going to talk about the passive tone knob, or for you lucky guys with more, passive tone knobs.

At some point, a working musician will walk into a gig, amp in hand, and be stopped. They’ll be handed a DI and a set of iffy headphones, and be told that “this is your rig.” No questions, or arguments. Please take your amp back to your car. And believe it or not, this is starting to become a regular occurrence, to the point where I bring my own headphones and preamp/DI of choice. But enough about that.