thetruthaboutguitar

Practice. I’m a dick. Haha. Alright, let’s assume that part is covered.

 

To effectively imitate the tone of a guitar part in a song, you have to have a working knowledge of the tools guitarists use to get that tone. Which means a knowledge of what those tones are made of, and what tones are common.

 

Cutting to the chase, guitar tone comes down to tubes and pedals.

 

TUBES

 

Vacuum tubes are remnants of the old days which we can’t seem to replace, because they sound so damn good. The Guitar Amplifier Player’s Guide by Dave Zimmerman provides a good overview of tube amp istory and detailed chapters on the innerworkings of tubes and what they do for your tone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An experiment for getting tone from a tube amp:

 

Step 1. Turn the master volume up half way to three quarters. In order to get the speaker to overdrive and contribute a smoothness to your tone, it needs power, at least 3 to 5 watts. This means LOUD. The speaker will actually move quite a bit. Unlike stereo speakers, guitar speakers behave differently at different volumes, and the sounds you want for guitar are generally not in the lower volumes. So wear earplugs. There is no substitute for power stage overdrive which the speaker cabinet can provide.

 

Step 2. Turn the guitar’s volume all the way up. This is so we can back it off in Step 4.

 

Step 3. Turn the Gain or Preamp up and play some stuff until the amp just goes from clean to gritty. Generally this will be somewhere between 4 and 6. This will be loud.

 

Step 4. Turn the volume on the guitar down until the sound cleans up.

 

Essentially what happens in this little experiment is we’re taking the electric guitars signal, and we’re messing with it. We’re extending the highs, taking off some of the attack, and making the amp more responsive to the guitar. The sound gets thick and soothing.

 

Because it can be so loud, you’ll generally never need more than 20 to 30 watts, unless you’re playing in big venues onstage, at which point you just might need a big nasty 100W with 4×12″ speakers in a half stack.

 

The market for 5W tube amps is getting more attention in recent years. Even those can be loud if you’re playing in a bedroom or apartment setting. Vox attempts to address this with the AC4 which goes all the way down to 1/4W, but it does it with attenuators. Essentially a big resistor between the amp and the speaker. This however, screws with the natural response of the tube amp, which just won’t sound the same. Also, even if the signal coming from the amp is good, the speaker still needs 3-5W before it even wakes up.

 

For reasonable volume levels, we turn to the next category of tone tweaking: pedals.

 

PEDALS

The thing about pedals is that we combine them largely to emulate tube tone.. haha. But at reasonable volumes. Or hey, maybe the sound you’re going for just isn’t tubey, but more modern and edgy.

 

In any case, here’s a quick breakdown of the categories of effects and their usage:

 

Compression: these pedals are meant to thicken up the sound by pushing them into soft-clipping. This si where the top of the wave is cut off smoothly and it actually looks rounded if you look at it on an oscilliscope.  We want to do this to add even harmonics into the sound. *pushes up glasses* In a tube amp, this comes from power stage distortion, the speaker, and power supply sag.

 

Compression pedals are generally best operated on the lower settings where they make the sound thicker, but responsive. If you turn them up really high, it kind of makes everything the same volume (read: boring).

 

Boost: This original idea was just to make the signal bigger for solos, and not change the sound, but that’s not totally true. They do make the signal bigger, but generally they also boost the high frequencies, and push tube amps into overdrive. They can be thought of as the smoothest form of overdrive.

 

Overdrive: The next step up from boost. Once again, it comes in many flavors and aims to imitate the soft clipping of a tube amp. Boosts the signal and causes a little bit of grit on the higher settings.

 

Distortion: This is just unabashedly messing with the sound of the guitar. It’s gritty, it’s hard clipping. Playing chords with more than about two notes becomes unreasonable.

 

Fuzz: Intense distortion. Also a very simple circuit. The original intent of these was to make the guitar imitate the evenly weighted harmonic series of something like a blaring trumpet. That’s not quite what it does, but it has similarities. More than anything, when you think fuzz, think Hendrix. It’s all over his tracks. The gritty ones anyway.

 

Phaser: Messes with the phase of the sound. Sound hits our ears in pressure waves. There is a point where the pressure is highest, and a point where the pressure is lowest. It’s like at the beach, peak and trough of a wave. A phaser takes multiple copies of the signal and sends them past each other at different speeds. Imagine if two ocean waves of the same size went at each other, and if they collided at the peak and trough, they would cancel out. Phasers essentially do that with a guitar signal, the waves add and substract from each other depending on how the signals are combining in relation to each other. It creates a very cool sound and is related to a chorus. Flangers are a more extreme version of this effect.

 

Echo: Well.. Does what the name implies. The most popular of the effects.

 

Reverb: Make the guitar sound like it’s in a big church. Also the most popular of the effects. It’s best at the end of a signal chain. And preferably, after the preamp.

 

 

It helps to know the history of these devices as well, to get into the various brands and getting familiar with what sounds you’ve heard before and just don’t know by name. Guitar Effects the Practical Handbook by Dave Hunter is my formal education source on pedals, aside from years of playing with the gear. After reading it, I had a more than a few epiphanies about the experiences I’ve already had with my gear.

 

As a matter of fact, that’s a huge point to make. The reason for learning the history of guitar gear is because when we become guitarists, we’re sort of exploring a world of sound that’s already in our head. You’ve heard the songs you like, and you know the guitar sounds you like, and now you have to figure out how they’re made. Often we aren’t trying to create something new, sometimes we are, but more often, we’re trying to learn so that we can make practical use of the memories of sounds that are already in our heads.