I tune to E and B standard - no special reason, that's just what I've gotten used to. I used to use D standard and drop C a lot, but I suppose I got away from those since I stopped jamming to Death and Darkest Hour songs with people.



D'Addario is the only brand I've seen with pre-packaged sets made for downtuning, with a sufficiently heavy low end. After two weeks, their baritone strings made my guitar sound like it was under water.

SIT Power Wound sets are sharp and bright, they stay good for a long time too, but they can be tough to find in the sizes you want, especially heavier sizes. I can only find SIT single strings on juststrings.com, and they have a flat S&H charge, so I have to order ~10 sets at once. They sound great for low tunings though and they don't get muddy.

Ernie Ball strings are probably the easiest to get, they tend to be sharper than D'Addario. EB strings wear out more gradually in sound, while D'Ads tend to stay playable, but they get muddy really fast. "Not Even Slinky" 12-56 are probably the best set for C tuning, but the bottom end is a bit light. Most of the big music sites in the USA have their single strings available pretty cheap though - 3 packs of the heavier gauges are $3.99.



The tension rod probably needs to be loosened a bit to provide more relief. If you are not familiar with this, you can easily break your guitar by adjusting it improperly. You can find some articles/guides on it with a google search for "tension rod adjustment". If you do opt to adjust it yourself, go 1/8 turn at a time, re-tune the guitar, play it for 15 minutes, then make further adjustments. The tension rod is literally a piece of metal inside of the guitar's neck that bends the wood, so it's easy to damage a guitar if you aren't very careful with it.

The other possibilities for fret buzz are the height of the bridge, and (rarely) the height of the strings at the nut. I suggest you read up a bit on bridge height and truss rod setup, intonation (changing the scale length at the saddles on the bridge) - you can find info simply by googling any subject.

The best advice I can give to younger players looking to upgrade beyond practice gear is to entirely ignore retail stores or online dealers. Unless you absolutely NEED a new amp or whatever immediately, take your time and look on craigslist and talk to other people in your scene. People are always tone chasing and switching their rigs around all the time. Sooner or later, you will find an instrument or amp that suits you and your style of playing at a fraction of the cost. 5150 (in various incarnations) amps for example, retail for almost $2k here in canada. However, a perfectly working used one goes for around $700!!! Even if the tubes were shot and it needed a re-cap you`d end up payng just over a grand for the whole shebang.

Also, learn how to make and repair your own stuff as much as possible. If you`re still in high school, taking a semester of woodshop and electronics will help you far more as a guitarist than music class will. If you learn how to do some basic soldering (which is just about the easiest thing in the world, I tought my girlfriend in about 45 minutes) you do not need to pay some boozer "guitar tech" ridiculous sums to swap out your pickups, or pay for overpriced patchcords made of unobtanium. A friend of mine made a halfstack for one of his woodshop projects out of birch ply and it turned out splendid. He probably saved about $500 and it took around 5 hours of work all told (mostly because he didnt really know what he was doing and learned as he went)

If you have a tube amplifier, learn a bit about using a multimeter so you can bias them yourself. That way instead of changing amps, pickups, pedals and Odin knows what else to find the tone you hear in your sleep you can try different brands of tubes comfortably. This isn`t just audiophile hooey, it makes a BIG difference as to what tubes you use in each position.

Fun Fact: Many mid to upper tier amps come with cheap shitty chinese tubes from the factory. If you`re lucky, you`ll get Sovtek which suck slightly less but last a long time. I personally prefer JJ tubes for metal. Eurotubes.com has just about the best prices for them, and they have absolutely awesome customer service and advice. I`ve asked their help when troubleshooting amps all the time and they have always been courteus and helpful. The new Tung-Sol tubes are also pretty sweet. I like to stay away from companies like Ruby or the other rebranders. They just buy in bulk from either Russia or China and test them into different "grades" and then slap their logo on them and charge a premium. A problem with that is that since all you know you`re buying is a "Ruby Grade X" tube, you HAVE TO buy from them if you end up falling in love with that particular sound. That`s bullshit.

Youtube and Google are your friends!

I'm just starting out, and I've learned the chords D, E and A.
Could somebody recommend me an easy song that uses some (or all) of those chords ?

Great White Buffalo by Ted Nugent ! Amazingly fun song to play and a kickass tune too.

Great advice!

I went out and bought a new guitar today; a Cort X6 superstrat design with a Floyd Rose type vibrato arm. I have fallen in love with it; the intonation is perfect, with the string going very mildly out of tune, the neck is a nice and flat D-profile, though it is a bit shorter then normal, and its an H-S-H setup with coil-tap. Does anyone else have this guitar, and if so, what's your experience?

It seems hard to play from I've seen on the tab...also I could only find tabs for it, not chords.
I can only play easy stuff, like: Oh Christmas Tree, Ode To Joy, Jingle Bells chorus, Silent Night the version that uses only 1 string, Come as you are by Nirvana and some other bits of easy songs.

Learn to play barré chords. You will find them much more common than open chords. After you've learned that, finding songs to play is quite easy.

could anyone tell me what guitar tuning cemetery rapist use? it kind of reminds me of lividity's guitar sound but i don't know what tuning it is in.

Can anyone give me advice on learning left handed guitar? I plan on buying one soon since guitar has always interested me.

Learning to play left-handed is no different to a left-handed person than right-handed respectively. Unless you are left-handed or ambidextrous, don't do it.

I'm left handed
Finding a good left handed guitar is a bitch though

No, he meant that even though you are a left hander, learning left handed guitar will be just as difficult to you as a right handed person. just learn it the regular way. You won't find it awkward because your hands haven't gotten used to either way.

That might hold some water, but that's not what I meant. I was actually quite confused by allureoftheearth's question. If I was left-handed, I'd definitely learn to play a lefty guitar.

I'm looking for help with tremelo picking, my picking hand gets very stretched out feeling. I've noticed it helps to rest part of my hand on the bridge (on the strings I'm not playing) and also to vary which part of my wrist is the "center" of the movement. All the same I'm having trouble. Any other tips?

My only advice would be to begin practicing at a slow tempo and gradually work your way up, making sure that your picking hand stays relaxed. It's clichéd but it works.

I feel I should stress the importance of stretching and warming up before playing. You will develop tendonitis if you play for long periods of time without it and it will suck ass.

The feeling you're describing often comes from your hand tensing up too much when you trem pick. You've probably heard this, but you only need to hold the pick hard enough that it doesn't fall out of your hand or move. When you start playing at a really high speed, you tend to hold the pick harder, which tires you out faster. Also, when you trem pick, try to use only the tip of the pick - jazz picks have pointy tips, and the nylon ones give you a really fast release too.

The other advice, which I hesitate to give unless you're comfortable with your technique, is to use your elbow a bit while trem picking for long stretches. While alternate picking and down picking, pretty much everything else should be done with your wrist, trem picking, especially across multiple strings, can be helped. It takes some time to work out the transitions to tremolo picking, but if you're doing more than a few notes, it can help. This works for me, may not work for you, and a lot of people who don't play extreme metal will tell you it's terrible technique.

I've got to agree with Ilwhyan. I'm left-handed and I just learned to play a right-handed guitar. Guitar is so unnatural to anybody starting off it doesn't matter what your dominant hand is. Add the issue with finding a good left-handed guitar and not being able to use anybody else's gear because it's the wrong hand and you'll regret going lefty when you had the choice.

If people have had success with it, try learning guitar right handed. Every lefty I know has had many complaints about finding guitars, there's less of a selection and they're more expensive. If you want to try them out in a music store, you might find five out of 100 guitars are lefty, if you're lucky, and you'll probably see even fewer up for sale used.

I feel that learning right handed is probably going to be the way I go. I would just need to work my right hand more so I'm able to move it and be more flexible with it.

I'm actually right handed,but I play a lefty guitar because I had an accident and I no longer have a pinky on my left hand. It wasn't really more difficult to learn than I expected,I think anyone can learn either hand really but if I had a choice I would still have gone with right handed because there's just so many more guitar options.

For those interested, Martin Goulding has a bunch of stuff online from the old 'Modern Metal' and 'Metal Bootcamp' series he did. A bunch of picking/legato etc excercises plus a bunch of 'in the style of' riffs for various bands.

Anyone got any advice on getting an output with a really crunchy, crushing tone? I've had to play my guitar through headphones recently, and the tone I get through them is monstrous compared to the tone I get when I'm playing normally; Can I replicate this tone without headphones, or aquire a crushing tone in general? I've never been too good at producing tone - I can recognise what I want, but seldom make it.

This is very strange. Usually listening to your amp through headphones makes it sound thin and horrible, lacking any of the presence which comes with the amp's speaker cone. Anyway, on the 'crushing tone' thing, I'm not entirely sure what that means. I think the first thing to keep in mind would be that your guitar tone will usually sound different in the context of a full band as opposed to playing it alone at home. A lot of bedroom players scoop the mids because it makes a solo guitar sound bigger and heavier, however in a live band context, the lack of any mid-range to your tone usually means that your guitar won't cut through the mix as well as it should, and the overall effect is pretty weak. Similarly, tones that sound slightly twangy and thin in a bedroom context will sound much better with bass and drums behind them. Generally the best advice is just to experiment until you find something that works with your amp/guitar combo. You've only really got three EQ controls plus distortion so it's not like trying to pilot a spaceship or anything.

The only other thing I would mention is that my personal preference is for slightly less distortion that might be initially common sense. I think at a certain point, turning up the distortion stops making your tone sound heavier, and starts making it sound like a fizzy blurry mess without much clarity. You may feel like you prefer your guitar sounding like a bee in a jam jar though

Does anyone else here play guitar through a bass amp? I've been doing this for years and prefer my bass rig to any guitar rig I've plugged into, as does the other guitarist in our black metal band (also using a bass rig). I use an ampeg b2r, an accoustic 2x15 cab, a homemade 2x12 with some kind of eminence bass speakers, and a behringer tube distortion pedal (i know, behringers are cheap pieces of crap. but it was way cheaper than other tube distortion pedals and i love the sound - but i am finally having problems with it after 2 years). I accumulated my set up years ago on account of playing bass and somtimes guitar, and now play more guitar - but have not yet considered buying a guitar amp. I just feel like regular guitar setups sound really thin now. I can get plenty of piercing trebles and a balanced tone from my set up, but guitar amps just can't shake the room in the way I occasionally feel like doing (especially with 2 piece projects or in the case of your bass player not showing up to practice...)

anyone else with me on this? I guess I kind of mean to put this kind of thing out there as advice for new players lookin to buy a rig, but also I'm curious if anyone calls me straight up crazy or just plain wrong. Because so far, a lot of people have borrowed my rig or jammed through it and commented on how good it sounds, but outside of our other guitar player I don't know anybody playing guitar through a bass amp in any serious way...

I know a lot of people do use their guitars on bass amps, it's a relatively common thing. It's only the opposite that's not something to do (bass on guitar amps)
But what struck me is that you play black metal and prefer to put a lot of bass on your guitar sound?
and also, you think that the usual guitar setups sound too thin?
That's one of the aspects of the black metal sound; the thin, lots of hi - guitar sound with almost no bass to it.
I personally don't follow this trend but almost everybody else do.

Hey im wondering what a chromatic or chromatic sclae is i know the pentanonic and blues shapes but i have no clue about what a chromatic is and how it could be used.

Short Version: The chromatic scale is all the notes and you do not need to memorize any specific pattern to use it. Since it includes all of the notes you can do whatever the hell you want.

Long Version:The chromatic scale is a scale with all of the notes in normal Western music. So on your guitar: E, F, F#, G, etc. until you get back to E. An easy enough scale to remember because all the notes you play on most western instruments are in the scale. The scale divides the octave into 12 equal steps of one semi-tone each. This symmetry can make it sound like the chromatic scale has no key center (a key center being a note that gives you sort of sense of melodic resolution, i.e. a riff is over). In this way the scale itself is similar to the whole tone scale, which is composed entirely of whole-tone steps rather than the chromatic scale's division by semi-tone steps. To a lesser extent this is also true of the diminished scale which has an ambiguous key center.

Too complicated? No worries. A lot of metal bands just do whatever the hell they want on guitar with melody. When you happen to play a series of notes or riffs that use all of the notes then you are using the chromatic scale. A lot of metal does this, while one riff may be in some pentatonic scale, another could be in a different scale so that when viewed together they act more chromatically. One could view the way band's play series of riffs as creating a key center and then moving it. Imaging going from B pentatonic to C pentatonic and having that be a riff. I think this is part of what makes metal more interesting than pop-music which tends to stay in one key. You can use any damn notes you want. On the other hand a lot of melodic death metal bands will stay in key so it is certainly not essential. So while you may have learned a specific riff or pentatonic/blues shape, using the chromatic scale has no such pattern that you need to memorize (unless you deliberately wanted to make music without a key center, then you should look into serialism 12-tone system stuff).

A chromatic is a note that does not belong to the scale you are using. So for example, the notes in C major are C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. So if you are playing in C major and add a c# (by that I mean c sharp) then that is a chromatic note. You can also build chords with chromatic notes for chromatic chords.

I know that is a lot, and I may not have explained it perfectly so feel free to ask more questions or wait for someone more eloquent/succinct to explain it.

Thats prefect man thank you

Im looking at upgrading my set up atm i have a Yamaha erg 121c and a Yamaha GA-15 amp, there pretty bad especially the amp which is a peice of shit. I have about $850 to spend and am wondering about a good amp to get. I want to know if it is better to get a cheaper tube amp with some pedals( boss metal zone and blues driver) or a solid state amp with presets (line6 spider IV 75) or get the cheaper amp with a better guitar and no pedals. im not sure about a good guitar or setup in general, i specialize in playing metal and blues any, help would be much welcome.

So I've been playing guitar for about a year though still not very good. If anyone is bored could they write out an ideal schedule for a beginner guitarist that can play a couple Darkthrone and Burzum tunes. I know I'm not practicing right, I want to practice for about an hour a day but find I get bored really quickly. One day I would like to play guitar similar to Mastodon, Leviathan era.

try to learn new songs, maybe something challenging, that should keep you interested

also get a good teacher if you dont have already

I'm currently searching for some good exercises for alternate picking, and just tricky/difficult playing in general. If anyone has some I'd love to give them some good runs.

If your budget is $850, don't spend money on pedals, don't buy anything Line 6. I'm not sure about pricing and availability in NZ, so recommendations might vary a bit.

I would suggest avoiding digital presets or any gimmicky garbage on practice amps. Look for an older Peavey combo amp, or a Roland Cube, perhaps even a Marshall combo could do it, but there's a lot of variation in Marshalls that I don't know a lot about. There are a few variations, but the Peavey Special 212 is by far my favorite practice amp - they're cheap, powerful, and you can get a variety of good sounds out of them. GIS for pictures of what they look like.

In that price range, I would look for a fixed bridge guitar - tremolos are a pain in the ass on cheaper guitars. There are so many different guitars that you need to narrow down what you're looking for a bit, or know what you like and hunt for used gear. I like ESP's LTD line and Schecter's guitars in that price range, and some of the BC Rich NJ line is nice.

Practice everything to a metronome. Find some things you want to work on, break it up into five minute sections doing things like scale runs, rhythmic practice, and building up endurance by tremolo picking across multiple strings - Transylvanian Hunger is a good start, but practice to a metronome, not the album (it's off-time a bit).

Find a few riffs of somthing you want to play. Play a riff and repeat it until you get it perfectly 4, 8, or 16 times. A few to start
Burzum - Lost Wisdom (main riff, any riff, or the whole song)
Mastodon - Blood And Thunder (main riff)
Darkthrone - Transylvanian Hunger (main riff or whole song)

Tabs of these are easy to find.

Simple scale runs, 3 notes per string, are a good place to start. They can be a bit boring, but you can also pick bits out of songs that use them. Racer X's "Technical Difficulties" is basically a song built around alternate picking wankery, you can pull pieces straight from that. That song does tend to make you feel like you should rush it, but if you keep up with a metronome (start at 40-50% speed), it's fine.


Testament's "Sins Of Omission" is great for alternate picking with string skipping. This section
http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/t/testa ... on_tab.htm




Death's "Spirit Crusher" has my favorite riff of all time. String skipping - down-pick every note on the 5th string, up-pick every note above those.
http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/d/death ... r2_tab.htm

Does anyone else write odd-time signature riffs/melodies?
And if you do, do you use a different method from me, which is choosing a number of notes to play, and then messing about with it until you like it?

I only rarely will make a conscious decision to use some odd time signature these days but I used to try messing around with them intentionally years ago. I don't think of it as number of notes but rather I look at beats, meaning if I am in 7/8 time I know I need to play stuff that adds up to 7 8th notes in each bar. These days if I do an unusual time signature it is just because I came up with an idea that happens to be in that time but I rarely end up doing things other than 5/4, 7/8, or 9/8 and doubt I would just happen to write something in say 27/32 time.

Odd time signatures are not terribly alien when it comes to metal even though most of it is in 4/4 or 6/8 so I am sure others will provide feedback as well.

thanks!

also this is pretty hilarious, because those songs you listed were all among the first songs I've learned. Rigt now I'm working on the Blood And Thunder solo