Electric Guitars, Synths, and Keyboards for the Curious

You listen to music, but what do you know about how it is made today?

Erik Engheim
14 min readApr 6, 2024

What spawned me to write this article is the fact that I found myself trying to explain to my wife and my parents about how an electrical guitar and a synthesizer works and the whole ecosystem around these different instruments.

For instance, you don’t merely buy an electrical guitar, and you are done. No, you have to hook it up to a guitar amplifier (amp for short).

Yamaha THR5 electric guitar amplifier. Contains electronics to amplify signal driving a speaker. (Credit: Amazon UK)
Yamaha THR5 electric guitar amplifier. Contains electronics to amplify signal driving a speaker. (Credit: Amazon UK)

There is a large selection of these amplifiers with different characteristics and settings. But the madness doesn’t end there. There is a huge selection of colorful little boxes called guitar pedals (or effect units) which you plug in between your guitar and your amplifier to alter the sound of your guitar or do a myriad of other things such as record the sound so you can play as if you got two guitars.

AI generated image of guitar pedals. So there are some inaccuracies in how they look.
AI generated image of guitar pedals. So there are some inaccuracies in how they look.

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Erik Engheim

Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.