Here's an amusing anecdote. I started jamming with some friends a while ago. The guitarist initially had a small Fender practice amp and a Squire guitar.
After a few months he showed up with a brand new Baum guitar (~$3000 CAD). Meanwhile I had picked up a used 150w guitar combo amp for next to nothing and let him borrow it to play with all of the onboard effects.
He started using it at practice but had trouble getting it to produce enough volume. While it had been plenty loud for me the handful of times I had tried it at home, I thought that maybe it was an intermittent problem and that's why the guy sold it to me so cheap.
After about six more jam sessions, one day I was irked by what had become a typical slagging of the amp for being unreliably quiet. During a break I took a look at it and saw the gain was around 8 o'clock. I turned it up to 11 o'clock and nearly blew myself through the wall.
When the guitarist popped back in, I asked him if the problem was that the gain knob was flaky. He asked me "What does gain do?"
It turns out that all this time he had only touched the Master and FX volume knobs, because he didn't know what gain was. He learned something valuable that day!
I found it hilarious that someone (who is otherwise very smart and successful!) would be willing to spend so much money on an instrument, while being unaware of something that I had thought was absolutely fundamental to playing any electrically amplified instrument.
And now I'm kind of regretting teaching him how to increase the volume
After a few months he showed up with a brand new Baum guitar (~$3000 CAD). Meanwhile I had picked up a used 150w guitar combo amp for next to nothing and let him borrow it to play with all of the onboard effects.
He started using it at practice but had trouble getting it to produce enough volume. While it had been plenty loud for me the handful of times I had tried it at home, I thought that maybe it was an intermittent problem and that's why the guy sold it to me so cheap.
After about six more jam sessions, one day I was irked by what had become a typical slagging of the amp for being unreliably quiet. During a break I took a look at it and saw the gain was around 8 o'clock. I turned it up to 11 o'clock and nearly blew myself through the wall.
When the guitarist popped back in, I asked him if the problem was that the gain knob was flaky. He asked me "What does gain do?"
It turns out that all this time he had only touched the Master and FX volume knobs, because he didn't know what gain was. He learned something valuable that day!
I found it hilarious that someone (who is otherwise very smart and successful!) would be willing to spend so much money on an instrument, while being unaware of something that I had thought was absolutely fundamental to playing any electrically amplified instrument.
And now I'm kind of regretting teaching him how to increase the volume
I mean, they don't need to be audio engineers. And i know a lot of musicians are musicians because they're artistic, not technical people. But, still, these are the tools of your art and you have no idea how they work or what they do? And you're not curious? Okay.... i mean, do your thing the way you want. I'm just confused by it. 
