Tulsa Guitar Lessons | Live Equipment
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Sometimes as a guitar instructor in Tulsa, some of our students are unfamiliar with different types of chords and equipment, things that are required for performing live. If you’re going to use a system, depending on the venue that you use, you may or may not even need anything. Sometimes the venues will provide everything that you need. And if that’s the case, then you’re in good shape because you won’t need anything. However, sometimes you will have to provide your equipment. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about. What types of equipment do you need? What should you have and how is that going to help you if you decide that you want to perform live? So the very most essential thing for a guitar player, if you’re attempting to amplify your guitar, whether it’s an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar, you need a quarter inch table. If you are currently taking Tulsa guitar lessons, we can show you where to plug the quarter inch cable into your guitar. A quarter inch cable looks very similar to a headphone Jack. The part of your headphones that plugs into your phone unless you have an iPhone, because they don’t have headphone jacks. So if you have a headphone Jack, it looks very similar to a quarter inch cable. It’s just four times the size, so you’ve got a quarter inch cable in that plugs directly into your guitar
And then from there you need to have a variety of different equipment in order to actually plug into the system and we can talk about that later. The other piece of equipment that you will likely need is what’s called an XLR cable and an XLR cable is what plugs into a microphone. So if you’re a singer, you’re going to need him XLR cables. Speaking of what you’re going to need a microphone to plug the XLR cable into, but keep that in mind. You will need a table for that. Now an XLR cable can also help provide the sound from your guitar. Basically what you can buy is what’s called a direct box and a direct box converts the signal from your quarter inch cable into the XLR cable. Xlr cables are very, very good in providing long distance sound. And so if you’re going to be standing far away from where you’re set up will be, you’ll need a direct box to provide the cable to go through it if you’re going to be close. So you probably don’t need a direct box, you could just use the quarter inch cable and go all the way to where you need to go. So a lot of musicians that take Tulsa guitar lessons use pedals and we will be talking in depth about different panels. But for now one of the things that is important to note is that every single pedal that you use requires a quarter inch cable to go from one pedal to the next. And so this is called a pedal chain when you have many different pedals in your pedal board and you’ll need a quarter inch cable,
In between each pedal and you can buy specific quarter inch cables, then are very small and this will make sure that you’re not wasting a lot of signal throughout this pedal chain. So each in every pedal that you use, typically you has a four inch at the most cable in between the pedals. I think for my pedal board I probably have about two inches of cable running in between my pedals unless it’s going from one side to the other, which does require a little bit more. So that’s something that you can do, but the pedals are very important for electric guitar players. If you don’t have pedals, your sound is going to be very thin. It’s not going to have the drive that you’re looking for or the reverb and unless you have an amp that has those effects on them, which many amps do. So, and that is also another option that you can do to prevent the need of pedals is having an amp. So let’s talk about amps. You can actually have an amp that can then go into your mixer, which goes into the speakers. Your mixers are the piece of equipment that’s going to have all the other levels. So you can turn up or down the guitar, you can turn up or down that microphone, you can turn down the drums, you can turn up the cymbals. Anywhere that you have microphones set up, you can turn them up or down through the mixer. Typically mixers also have a number of effects on them, not quite as wide as what you would find in a pedal board, but you can have some reverb, some chorus, there’s going to be echoes, flangers, vocal plate reverb. And so that’s something that is pretty typical for your mixer. Also, if you take Tulsa guitar lessons, your instructor at Curtis Music Academy will help you find these effects on your mixer. And then finally it’s going to have the main volume and that’s going to pump this speakers with more or less volume. But here’s one of the most important things to mention about a mixer. Even if you have a mixer, your speakers need to either be powered, which means they’re actually going to plug into the wall or you need to have an amp that plugs into the wall and then your speakers go into the amp. The amp then allows the amp to power the speakers. And so if your speakers are not powered, you will not get any sound. If you plug your mixer into those speakers, so it’s very important to make sure that you’re set up is correct so that you can get the best sound possible out of it.
Lastly, you definitely 100% need to have some massive extension cords. I actually just went to a wedding this past weekend and one of the people there did not have an extension cord that they needed so they were unprepared and luckily another vendor there was able to bail this person out and prevent any chaos from ensuing. But it’s very important to have extension cords cause you never know how far away that outlet is going to be. Furthermore, if you’re talking about having pedals, amps, mixers, speakers, all of this equipment requires power and so you’re going to need to be able to have quite a few extension cords to get where you need to go from one area to order the next. So if you are thinking about taking Tulsa guitar lessons to play at weddings, make sure you bring extension cords to your gigs.
However, another thing that requires power is an electric drum set. I was just at a concert last night because one of our current students that takes Tulsa guitar lessons had a gig and they had an electric drum set in their set up and it was awesome. It was a really good sound. They had a lot of speakers. You could tell that the speakers had plenty amplification, so they definitely had it all right and it was a great setup for them and they sounded very nice.
They had a lot of different varieties of songs and genres that they chose was very good and so you’re going to want to make sure that you’re set up is also good because you could be the best band in the world, but if you’re set up is terrible, nobody’s going to want to listen to you. Likewise, you could be the worst band in the world and if you have the best set up ever, nobody’s going to want to listen to you so that you need to either take Tulsa guitar lessons to make sure that you are adequately preparing for your craft or you need to have a good setup. You need to have them both. So that’s my tip for today.