Different Sounds

What I love most about the guitar are the endless possibilities. What I mean, is that a guitar can make a huge range of sounds depending on certain aspects. That is how we can have genres like country, blues, rock, metal, and many more all coming out of the same instrument.

This is especially true for electric guitars. Electric guitars, which are hooked up to amplifiers, have more possibilities and range than acoustic guitars. This is because of the nature of the electric guitar. In order for an amplifier to produce the sounds from the instrument, it captures the vibrations of the strings through the pick-ups. The pick-ups are located at the base of the strings, underneath the strings themselves. The vibrations are sent to the amplifier, which converts the vibration to amplified awesomeness. Most amplifiers come equipped with settings that are adjustable. These include gain, mid, treble, bass, and sometimes reverb. By adjusting these settings, a single guitar can make completely different sounds.

In order to obtain a "clean" sound, for example, you need to remove all of the gain and distortion from your guitar's sound. This kind of sound is akin to what an acoustic guitar would be capable of producing. However, even within the "clean" sound, the player is also able to adjust how much bass or treble the guitar should have. You can go full bass and no treble for certain songs, but you won't be able to clearly hear the higher notes. Or you can go the opposite way and go full treble with no bass. The notes are accentuated and crisp, but they lack the "throng" of the bass. I usually play around with the settings until it sounds right to my ear. The sound that I desire usually lies somewhere in between.

The sound that I most prefer is the fuzzy, aggressive crunch thanks to heavy distortion. This is the type of sound that I require when playing things like Metallica, Iron Maiden, or other heavy metal music. This also has ranges of variability. Some songs might require a lot of distortion because it happens to fit with the song's content or the overall theme of the music. Other times, only a bit of distortion is needed. Classic rock songs usually have some distortion in their sound, but it is minuscule compared  to death metal which usually employs very heavy distortion.