 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge, and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com. And in this video, we're going to be talking about volume swells and using the volume control on your guitar to create a violin like effect with your playing. All the tones in the video you're hearing today are coming from the Blackstar Studio 10 6L6. I'm also going to be using some additional reverb later on in the video as well. The amp is running on the clean channel and the guitar I'm using is my Jackson Adrian Smith SDX. The guitar is a very important part of this. Volume swells are much easier to do on a strat style guitar because we have very easy access to the volume pot. You can do these on a Gibson style guitar, but you do have to bear in mind that the volume pots are slightly further away from where our hand is when we're playing. So having the volume control pretty close to the strings on a strat style guitar does make this a little bit easier. You can also apply all of these principles with a volume pedal as well. So this technique is great if you're looking to create some ambient soundscapey textures in your playing or you want to create a little sort of hint towards a violin style sound as well when you're playing guitar. The technique is quite easy to get started with, and then it's over to you to find how you're going to creatively use this. The first thing we're going to do is turn the guitars volume control to zero. So there is currently no signal going from the guitar to the amplifier. What we're going to do is we're going to play something and it doesn't matter what we play, we can play single notes or we can play chords. And then we're going to swell the volume in that gradual increase of volume creates the illusion of a violin star sound. This is the reason violins are the way they do because when you use a bow, you're gradually increasing the volume of the string that you're playing. So we're going to simulate that with the guitar. So I'm just going to start by playing a few notes. I'm going to play the fifth, the seventh and the ninth fret on the G. I'm going to play each note and I'm going to raise the volume control on its own. This isn't going to sound that exciting. This technique really comes into its own when you add other things to this, like a lot of delay or reverb to create those big soundscapey textures. So if we hear this in its basic form, it sounds like this. Now, what we do have control over is how fast we swell into the note. So we can do this slowly or we can roll that volume control up quicker for a more immediate effect. So you have control over the speed and the amount that you swell it in. You can swell the note in slightly or you can go all the way. So you can really pronounce the swell effect exactly how you want to. Some guitar players will do this while playing at the same time. And this is the reason why a strat-style guitar is useful, because I can actually use my little finger to anchor on the volume part here. And as I pick a note, I'm pulling my hand up, which in turn is rolling volume up. This technique also looks great with chords. So I'm going to play an E minor chord here at the 7th fret of the A string. A G major bar chord at the 10th fret of the A string. And a D major bar chord at the 5th fret of the A string. I'm going to do this with some volume swells. If you're not comfortable with picking the note and then swelling the volume up, you can actually get all of the attack from the fretting hand. So I'm going to use those same three notes, five, seven and nine on the G, but I'm not going to pick them this time. I'm actually just going to hammer them on with my fretting hand. So we're going to do quite a hard hammer on in order to get the note to sound. And then we're going to swell the volume control with just the picking hand. Now, as I mentioned earlier on in the video, where this effect really comes to life is when we add a lot of spatial effect to this. So I'm now going to add a really big sounding reverb, which is going to sound like this. So you can hear there's a huge tail on that reverb. So when I now combine whichever variation of the volume swell I do with that reverb, it's going to create a really big spatial sound effect. Playing chords, this also works great with a ton of reverb as does using our fretting hand to hammer the notes on and just focus our picking hand on controlling the volume. So volume swells are a very simple technique you can get started with. And you can have a lot of creative fun with this technique. You can use this to create some really cool violin-like or ambient-like textures in your songwriting. If there are any other techniques you'd like to see us talk about or break down in these videos, please let us know down below in the comments. Don't forget to check out Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more free video lessons just like this one. And if you're looking for a music teacher in your local area, please check out musicteacher.com. There's a great network of teachers all around the UK waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.