A Working Guide for Producer/Artist Hybrids Who This Is For — and the Actual Argument This guide is for writers who live in both worlds: you play a real instrument, and you finish records in a DAW. You already know how to make a song in Ableton or Logic. The problem this guide addresses isn’t…
Fingerstyle players have a complicated relationship with effects pedals. The whole point of the style is nuance — independent bass lines, ringing open strings, percussive slaps, the tiny dynamic swells that make a solo guitar arrangement feel like a full band. Most pedals were designed for electric players chasing saturation and sustain, and running a…
This guide is for the songwriter. The person whose primary use case is sitting in a bedroom or home studio at 11pm, plugging in, and trying to find the sound that suggests the next chorus. The criteria for that person are different. Tone purity matters less. Inspiration matters more. Latency from idea to capture matters…
Compressor pedals are usually marketed to electric guitar players. Country chicken-pickers, funk rhythm specialists, ambient pad-builders. The pedalboard convention has been to put a Dyna Comp or a Boss CS-3 between the guitar and the amp and call it done. For songwriters who work primarily with acoustic guitar and vocals, that convention is wrong, or…