You’ve mastered every solo, lick, and riff of your favorite artist’s music, and it shows. Your skills as a guitar player have vastly improved, and now people respect your formidable chops.
Yet, despite the amazing difference in virtuosity your hard work has made, your guitar’s tone still sounds — in a word — amateurish. This is probably because even though you have an extensive range of practical guitar skills, you lack technical ones. You know all about playing a guitar, but not about working your guitar distortion. You don’t know the difference between guitar distortion and overdrive.
So why not try the strategy that worked out so well before? Why not try emulating what your heroes do and gaining skill in the process? To help you do this, here’s how a few of the most legendary musicians set up their sound equipment and guitar multi effects pedals.
Prince.
Prince has eight specific guitar effects pedals, besides using a mult effects pedal, a wah-wah, and a whammy pedal. Prince’s collection of sound equipment includes a blues driver, a flanger, a delay, a vibrato, an octave, and three different distortion pedals.
Bruce Springsteen.
In order to get that Americana sound, the Boss uses a Mesa Boogie Mark IIC+ and six different pedals in his sound equipment array, including three different distortion pedals, flanger, compression pedal, and delay pedals.
Eric Clapton.
Ironically, the most prolific musician on this list also uses the least amount of sound equipment. All Clapton needs when he plays is a wah pedal, a distortion pedal, a chorus pedal, and a compressor.
Learning your favorite songs helps you improve your playing technique the same way learning how your favorite musicians perfect their tone helps you improve your technical chops, allowing you to hone and perfect your own, uniquely original voice.
Once you learn how to properly work your sound equipment, you’ll not only play like your favorite artists, but sound like them too. If you have any questions about these artists’ sound equipment, feel free to ask in the comments. Ger more information on this topic here.
