OWN YOUR TONE: THE GUITAR TERMS YOU NEED TO KNOW

TO HELP YOU PERFECT THE FEEL AND SOUND OF YOUR GUITAR RIG, HERE’S A REFRESHER ON SOME KEY CONCEPTS.

Your tone is about more than just sound; it’s the things that affect playing feel and touch-sensitivity as well. Some players like a clear, glassy note that can punch through any mix. Others need a swampy, down-and-dirty drive tone to feel really at home. Others still need both, at the touch of a footswitch, to get their point across.

Our goal is to get to those sounds deliberately and methodically, whenever we want them – not rely solely on random experimentation, as fun and useful as that can be. But you don’t need a degree in audio engineering to get to the point where you can make effective decisions about tone-tweaking. As with cooking, there are some simple building blocks that can be combined in different ways to create thousands of distinct flavours.

We’re going to look at some of those building blocks below, so we completely understand our key ingredients before going on to show how they can be put to use in crafting your perfect tone.

HEADROOM

This is arguably the most important root concept we need to understand before we can make any effective decisions about tone-tweaking. Headroom is the capacity of an amp or pedal to reproduce a signal faithfully without distorting. With an amp that has lots of headroom, such as a Fender Twin, you can turn it up loud at the master volume and the sound will still remain glassy and clean, with the whole of the waveform of your signal amplified clearly and faithfully.

This is really important for players who rely on delivering huge clean tone at gig volume – think of Duane Eddy, for example, or the late surf-guitar master Dick Dale. Headroom isn’t just relevant to amps, either – some drive pedals, such as Fulltone’s OCD, can be run at 18 volts to give them more headroom than if they were operated on a standard nine-volt supply.

So why is headroom also important in an overdrive, where you’re not aiming for pristine clean tones? To understand that, we need to move on to our next key term…

DYNAMIC RANGE

The most important thing that an amp (or pedal) with lots of headroom offers you is dynamic range. This means that if you dig in and play hard, then you hear that jump in loudness reproduced clearly and crisply. If you play softly again, the amp backs off to a whisper immediately.

Good dynamic range means all the detail of your playing, in terms of loud and soft dynamics, is captured faithfully in your audible tone. This is great for players who rely on nuanced loud/quiet dynamics to convey emotion, such as blues players. So if dynamic range is so brilliant for capturing the subtleties of your playing, why wouldn’t you want as much of it as possible?

The answer is that it can be pretty revealing – volume will rise and fall very abruptly according to how hard you’re picking, so your tone can sound a bit spiky and plunky if you’re not careful.

Also, you don’t have a comfortable cushion of sustain to help you milk those bends and get notes soaring. Obviously you’re going to want a bit of that, too – which leads us nicely to…

COMPRESSION

This process makes quiet sounds louder but also quashes spikes in volume. In practical terms that means it smooths out changes in volume and adds some flattering sustain.

By definition, compression means you that lose some dynamic range – but, in exchange, you gain a more rounded, mellow attack to each note and a pleasant bloom as the note fades.

Dedicated compressor pedals can give you full control over how much and how little of this effect you want. These are favoured by country players for chicken picking, where you’re aiming for a silky-smooth flow of rapid but clean notes with no uneven spikes in volume. Likewise, Roger McGuinn of The Byrds fame uses one with a 12-string electric to smooth out what might otherwise be quite a brash sound and help notes ring and shimmer for longer.

Already you can start to see that a given player’s sweet spot will lie somewhere on the spectrum between maximum possible dynamic range and maximum possible compression. You need some dynamic range to get light and shade, in terms of picking dynamics, into your sound. But you also need compression to smooth and flatter and extend notes in a pleasant way.

How much or how little of each you want is absolutely central to achieving your perfect tone. However, it’s not quite as simple as picking a spot on that spectrum and setting up camp there.

Why? Because your amp and drive pedals will also introduce a degree of natural compression themselves when you play. How much? Well, here’s where things get tricky, because that amount varies depending on a variety of other factors – which brings us to our next key term…

CLIPPING

Earlier on we looked at the concept of headroom. But there’s a crucial question to answer: what happens when you run out of it?

Circuits that amplify signal – from the mighty power valves in your amp to the transistors in your overdrive pedal – all have a limit to how much signal they can handle while still reproducing all of the waveform fully and faithfully. When they can’t amplify the full waveform any more, clipping occurs.

As the name suggests, this means the peaks of the waveform are lopped off when they hit the ceiling of how much the circuit can handle. This has profound effects on your sound and produces those great crunchy drive sounds we all love. And because the loudest parts of the waveform get clipped off, it’s also a form of compression.

So, what causes clipping? One way clipping occurs is to turn up the gain – the degree to which the signal is being amplified by a given circuit. When the circuit runs out of power to amplify the full waveform, clipping occurs at the peaks of the signal. But if the incoming signal is already pretty hot – for example, if it has already been boosted by a drive pedal earlier in the chain – then the threshold at which the circuit starts clipping is reached much quicker.