Whether you’ve locked your tube amp in your car over the course of a cold winter night, found an old amp in a relative’s garage, or you’re planning on storing a tube amp in an unheated space for a period of time, you’ve likely wondered, “Can a tube amp be stored in the cold?” Tube…
Across most musical genres we are used to hearing distorted guitar sounds, but do all guitar amps have distortion included? When shopping for a guitar amp, there are a number of things that we have to know. Since I’ve been a guitar player for a long time and have been in your shoes before, here’s…
We are often told not to leave electronic equipment switched on, mainly to keep those electricity bills down. But what if turning it on and off all the time causes damage?. One of these pieces of equipment where this question is often raised is tube amps. There are pros and cons to leaving your tube…
On your audio interface or mixer, you may have noticed a button labeled ‘phantom power’ (or perhaps ‘48v’). This might seem quite mysterious if you don’t know what it is. After realizing phantom power is needed in order for some microphones to work, many people ask the question, do dynamic mics need phantom power? Well,…
If someone’s told you that you can’t play guitar because your hands are too small, let me clear something up – that’s a myth. Can you play guitar with small hands? The answer is a resounding yes! Hand size does not affect guitar playing in any sense. Would you say that you can’t learn how…
Studio monitors are expensive pieces of kit and so it’s not surprising that people want to use them as much as possible. I had some friends around recently to watch a movie and I wondered if it would be possible to connect my Yamaha HS7 monitor speakers to my TV. Usually, I have them running…
So your bass guitar has a battery slot on the back, but you didn’t think that’s how basses work… What’s going on? Well first of all, don’t panic! It’s fairly common to find bass guitars that use batteries, and it doesn’t mean the instrument is in any way deficient. It just means that you…
When a piece of musical equipment stops working it starts a puzzling quest to find out what is causing the issue. Sometimes it can be something very simple, sometimes it might require some technical knowledge, and sometimes you might just have to accept it can’t be fixed. This is true for an electric bass…
After about a year of playing my bass guitar when I was younger, it started to sound weird. The sound was crackly, fading in and out. I went to the store where I bought my amp to complain about the sound. But the store manager said it wasn’t the amp that was causing…
When I bought my first bass guitar I had no idea it was an ‘active’ bass until one day it started to sound a bit weird. I thought the amp might be broken so I started looking online for a solution. After a few hours of searching, I found the cause of the problem….