Own Your Tone
Great tone is about sound, isn’t it? Or is it about how your gear responds to your touch? Actually, it’s both. In this month’s cover feature, we explain how to unlock the full potential of your gear by tailoring it like a Savile Row suit to your style of playing
Guitar players often talk about achieving the ‘sound in your head’. We all know what they mean. Inside every guitarist’s mind is an archive of beautiful, soul-satisfying sounds that are based on some of the world’s great recordings. But here’s the thing – tone, as experienced by the guitarist doing the playing, isn’t just a sound. Every time you play a note, there’s a feedback loop going on between your gear, your fingers and your mind.
We’ve probably all had a moment during a gig when you just aren’t feeling good about your sound. The result? You don’t play as well because you just aren’t getting into it. But if your ears are hearing something they like, you start expressing yourself with more conviction. So far, so good.
But there’s more to it than that. It’s not just the sound but the feel of how the notes come out that gets our creative juices flowing: some players’ styles require a fast attack and for each note to be crisp and clearly defined for them to give their best. Others, like the old-time blues guys, prefer lots of sag and crunch. It’s like the difference between drawing with a crisp ‘H’ pencil and a soft, smudgy ‘B’. You can draw wonderful pictures with both types, but they suit different types of artist.
This, in a nutshell, is what this feature is all about – the reality that great tone is not just a sound but a dynamic feel that you connect with.
And if you can bring those two things together in the right way, then magic happens.
To get to that point, however, it’s necessary to understand how various parts of your gear interact with one another. That’s because nothing works in isolation – and although guitarists often talk about ‘great pickups’ or a ‘great overdrive pedal’ they less frequently mention what else those pickups and pedals are being used with. Context is everything, because what sounds stunning through one amp may sound mediocre through another. Likewise, what one player gels with may turn off the next guitarist completely. But if we can understand a little better how all those links in the chain influence each another, we can start to develop a solid plan for getting to the tone – that is the perfect union of sound and feel – of our dreams. If that sounds – or maybe feels – good to you, then read on…
Great tone is not just a sound but a dynamic feel that you connect with