Create your own style with guitar accessories and sound effects!

Electric guitar accessories come in so many shapes, sizes, and functions these days. Some of the more popular accessories are fuzz boxes, wah wah pedals, phasers, and tuners. There are so many other electronic devices that I still need to research. I do know from experience that they are a lot of fun to experiment with.

One of my favorite guitar accessories is the "fuzz" box, or distortion box, like the BOSS DS-1 distortion box. Fuzz boxes add more sustain, distortion, and volume to the guitar's sound giving you more "rock power". On the fuzz box itself, you can increase or decrease volume level, distortion level, and the presence level. Increasing the distortion level makes the sound "sustain" or last longer than it normally would before the sound gradually fades.

The presence knob seems to control the bass/treble level. Some fuzz boxes have a foot pedal that lets you use your foot to turn on/off the fuzz box to distortion sound or regular sound. The BOSS DS-1 does all of these great functions.

Another great guitar accessory that I love is the wah wah pedal. Wah wah pedals (or cry baby pedals) are the devices that make the guitar "cry". The DUNLOP GCB-95 Cry Baby Wah Wah is a great wah wah pedal to have.

In the song, "Guitar Man", by the band Bread, David Gates infers that the guitar man can influence the audience's emotions. "Who's gonna steal the show, baby, it's the guitar man...he can make you laugh or he can make you cry...he can bring you down or he can get you high..." (This may not be verbatim, but I think it's pretty close.) Meanwhile, the lead guitarist in that song is playing a wah wah and the Dunlop wah wah rocks!

In Cream's "Tales Of Brave Ulysses", Eric Clapton is using a wah wah big time. In the song, "All Along The Watchtower", Jimi Hendrix uses a wah wah right after he yells, "Hey!", midway through the song. "Voodoo Child" has tons of wah wah in it. Quite a cool guitar accessory, huh?

Phasers have a spacy sound that fades in and out in a cycle which you can slown down or speed up.

A tuner is great to have for getting the correct music pitch of each string which tunes the guitar. I believe the wavelength frequency is 440. (More on this later on.) If you have a good "ear" for tuning, you can get by without one. (I mean get by without a tuner, not an ear.) I prefer to use a tuner myself. Here's a great tuner to have -the Korg CA30 tuner.

A gig bag is a cool item to have as well. You can protect your guitar with it and store a lot of your accessories in it!

In closing, guitar accessories really do give you a wide variety of options and sound effects that you can experiment with to find a style (or styles) that you really like. So go on, what are you waiting for? Go get some perfect sound effects!