Reader's Choice: Most Popular Guitar Production Articles in 2014

by Dan Gonzalez

14 Tips for Guitars Before Entering the Studio

Entering the studio can be a stressful task if it is your first time. Here at Cakewalk we’ve outlined a few things that every guitarist should know before walking into a tracking session. This article has been brought to you by the our reader’s community as one of the most-read articles, so enjoy! You can check out the article here.

Guitar Month Bonus Pack (Free Downloads)

Cakewalk vetern Craig Andertons brings you some of the top guitar-related content that he has in his vast collection of creations. Check out Continue reading “Reader's Choice: Most Popular Guitar Production Articles in 2014”

Guitar Month Bonus Pack (Free Downloads)

Guitar month is almost over but we’ve saved the best for last: All customers can now download the Guitar Month Bonus Pack, which includes a selection of Craig Anderton’s AdrenaLinn loops that he sampled using Roger Linn’s famous AdrenaLinn effects pedal.

Download AdrenaLinn guitar loops

Craig has also designed a one-of-a-kind Bass Guitar Instrument for Dimension Pro that samples one of the eight basic sounds obtainable with a real Gibson EB 5-String electric bass, and includes five programs based on these samples.

Download Gibson EB-5 Bass for Dimension Pro

And, in case you missed them, here are two free guitar FX Chains that Craig posted on the blog earlier in Guitar Month. Now go make some music!

CA Power Chord FX Chain

CA Vintage Wah FX Chain

Guitar Tips: Open Up Your Guitar Tunings

Tuning your guitar differently can produce some incredible new sounds for the creative process. Open tunings in particular produce shimmering and complex overtones when you play with a lot of open strings. Here is a quick rundown on four different tunings for you to experiment with when you’re looking for a bit of inspiration.

Standard Tuning

First you have the good old Standard tuning that everyone uses. This tuning is mostly in fourths and is called “Standard Tuning” because every guitar comes stocked with it’s strings tuned to E A D G B E.

Playing a major shape in this is tuning is rather easy and introduces the use of the “power chord”. To constructively show off the different tunings I’ve used a progression of G, A, Bb, A as a reference for the rest of the tunings. The major shape in this tuning looks and sounds like the following:

DADGAD

DADGAD is my personal favorite alternate tuning due to it’s suspended sound. The stacked 5ths and suspended 4th produce an incredible harmonic series above just about any passages you play.

The easiest way to get your guitar to DADGAD f Continue reading “Guitar Tips: Open Up Your Guitar Tunings”

Guitar Tips – Advanced Theories Behind Chord Structures

Have you ever wanted to start experimenting with different chords?

The charts outlined in this blog article take a bit of a different approach when constructing guitar chords and their shapes. It simplifies finding chord voicings by outlining the root notes and what intervals each neighboring fret represents.

Before examining the chord chart let’s talk about intervals and their meanings. An interval is the amount of distance between two  notes. Both chords and arpeggios are made up of many different types of intervals. Continue reading “Guitar Tips – Advanced Theories Behind Chord Structures”