Margot Thiessen

How to find and extend clean headroom on a Fender-style amp — the volume where chords stay glassy instead of crumbling, plus how pickups, EQ, and modeler settings move the breakup point.

The reverb gesture is predelay plus decay. Treat the whole thing as a note value and subtract the predelay from the tail, and the reverb resolves on the beat — an exhale you feel more than hear.

When the delay is on the grid but the reverb isn't, ambient guitar smears against the beat. How to put predelay and a dotted-eighth delay on one tempo grid, with a BPM chart you can dial by ear.

Three buffers for acoustic piezo and magnetic pickups compared by input impedance, noise floor, and tone. Which buffer fixes which problem, in plain English.

The BigSky MX and the MercuryX both sit at the top of the flagship reverb market, but they're solving different problems. Here's how to choose between them.

An IR is the room your modeler thinks it's playing through. Different IR libraries take radically different approaches to mic placement, room contribution, and post-processing. Here's how to choose the one that fits your rig.

The next-level skill after a Floyd Rose string change. A saddle-by-saddle intonation procedure with the spring-tension equilibrium math, the order that saves you re-tuning passes, and the why behind every step.

A first-time string change on a Floyd Rose feels like defusing a bomb. It is not. It is six steps in the right order, with one tool you already own and three small things that go wrong if you skip them.

Pickups give you a tight, isolated direct signal but lose the body of the instrument. A microphone captures the body but picks up the room and bleeds. Run them together — pickup for the attack, mic for the air — and you get the recording most acoustic guitarists are actually trying for.

The Celestion V30 gets criticized in modern djent, and fairly. But for medium-gain rock — plexis at breakup, Bluesbreaker-into-Fender, AC30 territory — it's still the right speaker.

The power tube is the most-discussed and least-understood part of a tube amp. 6V6, 6L6, and EL34 each have a sonic signature, but the differences are smaller than the internet says — and the parts you can actually hear are predictable. Here is what changes when you swap, and what stays the same.

When you stack two reverbs in series, the second reverb processes the mud that the first one created. Parallel routing keeps the reverbs independent and solves the buildup at its source. Here's how to set it up.

Switch from a single-coil to a humbucker with the same overdrive settings and the pedal behaves like a different piece of gear. Here's the physics behind that shift, and the specific adjustments that fix it.

The Keeley Super AT Mod isn't a cleaned-up Blues Driver. It's a different tonal vocabulary built into the same chassis, specifically designed for sustained, touch-sensitive lead tones. Here's what it changes, what it costs, and who should consider it.

Wampler Tumnus Deluxe vs Klon KTR comparison. The three-band EQ changes things significantly, and the $400 price gap raises a legitimate question. Here's the honest answer for players who've done their research.

Timmy vs Tumnus overdrive comparison: two genuinely transparent overdrives with different circuit philosophies, different EQ approaches, and meaningfully different characters at the gain settings that matter.

Andy Timmons' smooth lead guitar tone without the AT10P or full signature rig — budget pedal substitutes, used-market options, and the signal chain principles that actually matter.

The Animals album tone is darker, more aggressive, and less studied than Comfortably Numb, and it's a different rig. Here's what Gilmour was running in 1977 and how to get there.

The Comfortably Numb solo tone is one of the most studied in rock history, but most guides get the source wrong. Here's what's actually happening between the Big Muff, the Hiwatt, and Gilmour's technique.

A side-by-side tone comparison of the PRS Silver Sky and Fender American Professional II Strat through a clean amp, specifically for John Mayer-style clean tones.

A direct comparison of the Big Muff and Fuzz Face circuits: how they work, how they respond to guitar volume and picking dynamics, and which one belongs in your signal chain.

Why does moving a fuzz pedal ruin its sound? The answer is impedance, and understanding it changes how you build your pedalboard forever.

Andy Timmons' singing lead tone broken down — the Timmy drive stack, clean amp foundation, delay and reverb settings, and how to approximate it on Helix or Quad Cortex.

Spring, plate, hall, room, and shimmer reverb explained: when to use each type and the settings that make them sing on your board or modeler.

A complete breakdown of John Mayer's clean tone: amp settings, signal chain, and exact starting points for that Continuum-era neck pickup sound.

David Gilmour's Pink Floyd tone decoded: amp settings, Big Muff dials, delay chains, and song settings for Comfortably Numb, Time, and Shine On.

Big Muff settings for every variant (Triangle, Ram's Head, Op-Amp, Russian, Nano) with sweet spots for shoegaze, rock, doom, and Gilmour tones.

Soft clipping, hard clipping, and transistor mayhem. How each gain type works, when to use them, and how to dial them in on your modeler.