Saturday, September 17, 2011

Guitar Gear

I have pretty much all the guitar stuff I need for now. That's not to say I don't want more of course, but for my abilities I have a good set of gear.

First, of course, are my guitars. I have a black cutaway Art & Lutherie acoustic, and a faded cherry Epiphone Custom SG electric. Two guitars is probably overkill for me, but it's nice having an acoustic and an electric for the different sounds and styles of playing. I actually want to get another electric guitar as well, a stratocaster type, but that's getting greedy. Maybe later when I get better.

For amps I have Peavey Vypyr modeling amp and a Vox AC4TV tube amp. The Vypyr is capable of a ton of different sounds and is really fun to experiment with. I have the 30 watt version which goes way louder than I need it to. I never turn the volume more than about 1 or 2, and it goes to 13.

I just bought the Vox AC4TV because I wanted a low-wattage tube amp to play with, and I found a used one at a price I couldn't turn down. It has a great sound to it, and really lets the sound of my guitar shine through. 

I also use an iPad. I watch a lot of videos and learn from tabs, and found my laptop was pretty clunky and inconvenient to use while playing guitar. My Android phone worked really well for this, but the screen is pretty small for my old eyes to see tabs properly with, and even videos were sometimes difficult to make out.

My first instinct was to go with an Android tablet like the Asus Transformer, but in looking at the music apps available for the iPad I had to go with the Apple product. There are way more music related apps available on iPad that simply have no equivalent on Android, like Garageband or Ampkit. Maybe this will change in the future, but I have to go for what works for me now.

I'm really happy with the iPad for videos and tabs, and use the Ampkit link to connect my guitar to it. Garageband is amazing, and Ampkit is great as well.

Now the problem is to learn to play better, and no equipment in the world is going to replace practice.

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