WARM JAZZ CLEANS

A rig for mellow, harmony-rich improvisations

“So it depends what you mean by warm,” Daniel Steinhardt begins. “For example, take a Roland Jazz Chorus. If you’re a jazz guitar player and you’ve got something like a Roland JC-40 set up and you just notch the tone back a little bit on the guitar, it’s warm but it is so appropriate for that sound because it’s so detailed and it’s so quick. That’s important when you’re playing complex harmony – you want to be able to hear all those intervals.

“A really good transistor amp with loads of headroom can reveal more of just the sound from the guitar itself, which is sometimes just right for this scenario. Jazz guys can get some really funky intervals and the way that mixes harmonically can be really complex – and you’ve got to get that all out of a speaker, right? Now, if your amp is overdriving and adding harmonics of its own, that’s really tricky to do. So what you want is an amp that is open and quick.

“Also, it’s vital to consider the musical context when you’re selecting gear. Jazz players are never going to be really loud. So you could also consider something like a Deluxe Reverb. When you turn those things up, they can get nasty and really start to compress. But if you’ve got a jazz gig at Ronnie Scott’s and you’ve got a microphone in front of it, it’s going to be all you need. It’s fascinating that just turning the volume up on that amp changes everything.

“It has to come down to context. Therefore, if I’m selecting an amp to be the core of my rig for a jazz gig, firstly I want to be able to get the sounds out of the guitar faithfully, so I need to be able to reproduce a broad spectrum of natural harmonics. But I also know that the amp doesn’t necessarily have to be loud to do that.”