Bruce Kulick made a name for himself as the lead guitarist for the legendary rock band KISS during the ’80s and ’90s, but his career didn’t start there.

There’s a lot of hubbub out there about light guitars, to the extent that — with many players today at least — the lighter the guitar, the more desirable it is, so much so that weight is almost the main consideration for some. There is often something to this, in that many guitars on the lighter side of average for their model do exhibit excellent resonance and musicality.

Face it, guitars are made up of dead things – a collection of wood, metal and plastic that gets juiced up with electricity and sweat. They hang on the wall, hide in a case or sit patiently on a stand, waiting to get picked up and played. In reality, they’re nothing without you.

An electric guitar’s bridge might seem like just another one of the fairly inconsequential details that make up its whole, but the type of bridge used plays an enormous part in shaping any guitar’s tone. Even if you aren’t likely to radically alter the bridge on a guitar you already own, knowing a little bit about the characteristic sounds of different types of bridges will help you narrow down what you’re looking for the next time you’re out shopping for a new instrument. Also, a better understanding of this simple but crucial component will help you avoid fighting against it — swapping pickups, string gauges and types, or effects and amplifiers even — in an endless quest to tweak an element of your tone that really can’t be changed, because it is set in stone at the bridge. There are too many bridge types to go into all of them here, so let’s concentrate on the range of designs that are commonly used on Gibson guitars (this is Gibson.com after all).

If ever there were an underrated guitar player, AC/DC’s Malcolm Young would have to be among the top. With some of the greatest riffs in rock, Young surely holds a place in history.

Many players give little thought to that thin, slotted strip of organic or synthetic material that lies across the end of the fingerboard and guides your strings on their way to the tuners, but the stuff your nut is made from plays a big part in shaping your tone. In partnership with the bridge saddles, the nut is one of the two “anchor points” that determine the speaking length of your string — the components that denote the break between the section of the strings that vibrates and makes all the sound and the “dead” portions — and it greatly affects both the way in which the strings ring, and the amount of vibrational energy that is transferred into the neck and body of the guitar.

Attitude. That one word sums up Joan Jett and her raw, heart-thumping brand of rock and roll. From her early days leading the “Runaways” to the iconic “I Love Rock 'N Roll” and on to modern times, Jett always brought attitude to her music.

Lately, in particular, I have been contemplating some of the other considerations regarding speaker choices — factors that I didn’t have space to go into in depth in the original Tone Tips: Speaker Swapping — so it’s worth passing these thoughts along in the first of the continued series that we will occasionally roll out to you.

As budding young pickers trying to negotiate the hammer-ons in the introduction of the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post” on the crappy acoustic guitars our parents had gotten us with S&H Green Stamps, my friends and I had a saying: “No pain, no Duane.”

David Evans, better know as The Edge, is one of the most innovative guitarists of modern times. His guitar prowess, especially in the use of delays, helped bring U2 to the forefront of music and make them one of the best rock bands of the ’80s, ’90s and into the new century.