Rooting out the problems. Setting up a Home recording studio for guitarists - Part 2

In the previous part ( Setting up a Home recording studio for Guitarists - Part 1 ), I ended listing out what the problems were to be not able to produce a studio quality song. Here they are again.

1) Significant amount Noise & distortion in the song.

2) Acoustic guitar track sounds anything but Acoustic.

3) Lead guitar don't have the Rocking punch in them. They sound 'obviously synthesized'

4) In the guitar solos, especially the second solo, sometimes it sounds like I was playing Off-scale wrong notes. In fact, it was irritating to listen that I had turned down volume of the
lead guitar at some locations near song ending.

There was another major issue (which is the harder to fix than rest) is 'Guitar Playing Skills' :)
This, I am in the process of fixing which I will talk about later :)



1) Significant amount Noise & distortion in the song.

There are more than many reasons for this.

- Poor quality guitar pickups & circuitry. My GB&A guitar has three single coil pickups, S-S-S configuration( see the image below), which is quite common with most stratocaster clones. But the main problem is that they are stock GB&A pickups of extremely poor quality(Pic to the right). This can be fixed to certain extent by replacing them with expensive pickups from DeMarzio or Seymore Duncan. But, its only possible to fit in Single-Coil pickups, where as what suit my purpose are Humbucker pickups.

(Bridge picup of my guitar -> )














( Above : S-S-S All single coil configuration on a Fender Stratocaster)


There is more hardware in the guitar that contributes to tone & quality. Volume / Tone knobs, etc. Needless to say, my guitar has extremely bad hardware for its price. Volume knob is useless. The circuits that modify guitar tone add in a shit load of noise when i set tone towards
trebile which is where most of the lead pieces sound good..

Oh, the best of all. Even the pickup selector adds into the noise contribution. I dont know what
I was thinking but, I tried the pickup selector tricks that Jimi Hendrix used to do all the time.
Well, two months later it went for a toss. I can still change change active pickup but, not in middle of a solo, as the switching generates noise like I just broke a microphone.

( WIP : This article is not complete yet )