Do you need a quest?

Someone emailed with a question that I get now and then. They were setting up their pickup balance and asked if it was ok to send the guitar signal to their DAW so they could see the waveforms and be really precise with their balancing. Sometimes I get this variants of this question with oscilloscope substituted.

And, sure, you absolutely can. There's no wrong answer here. If that's what works for you, go for it.

Do you need to, though…?

What level of detail is needed to set up a guitar or bass?

Many of us — and, I think, guitarists in particular — are prone to fetishising things. That is, we dig a little excessively. We make a ‘quest’ of it. We buy some new piece of equipment because we feel it’ll improve something by a fraction of a percent. We spend three weeks organising some system or workflow just to save three seconds once a month.

We have the best intentions with this but we can sometimes add hurdles that don’t need to be there. I can’t do this job until my new doohickey arrives – that sort of thing.

I’m certainly not judging here. I’m incredibly guilty of this sort of thinking. And, before I did this stuff for a living, I was very happy to scrabble down dark and nerdy rabbit holes. I still am sometimes, but the more I’ve learned doing this, the more I’ve realise that things don’t always need to be complicated.

Or, maybe a better way of putting it is to say that it’s not necessary to make things more complicated than they are. We can do a fine job without making it a quest.

I’ll add the obligatory references to lauded musicians of yore, all of whom (by today’s standards) would likely have had basic equipment and setups. Django Reinhardt’s tech wasn’t looking at waveforms; Hendrix’s guitar wasn’t PLEKed; Beethoven’s piano tuner used his ears; you know the sort of thing.

Now, like I say, I’m not judging. And I know that, for many of us the ‘quest’ is part of it. My advice here is to just be conscious of what’s absolutely necessary and what’s part of the quest. There’s not a single thing wrong with using waveforms in a DAW to balance pickup output. Not a thing. It’s not absolutely necessary for a good setup, though. Your ears are pretty good judges of this sort of thing on their own (and if you don’t trust your ears, do remember that the more you use them, the more you’ll trust them).

So, use a DAW or an oscilloscope. Get a strobe tuner. Buy that bluetooth-enabled screwdriver that can adjust your intonation using an app on your phone (IntonoBot)*. Do what makes you happy and what gets you a good result. Just be a little wary of fetishising the quest too much. If you want it to be more complicated, or involved, or expensive, go nuts. Just remember it doesn’t always need to be.

And that seems a good point for me to do a plug for Sketchy Setups. 😉 Well, my setup guides aren’t too complicated, involved, or expensive. Pick the one for your guitar or bass and just learn how to set that up. Easy! Quests optional. Check out Sketchy Setups.