Ever heard that 'your tone comes from your hands and that a great player can make any guitar sound good'?
Skill is a must, but that doesn't entirely account for the player's tone.
Consider the quality of his or her rig while performing. You wouldn't use rubbish tools if your trade were building a house so why use rubbish gear when building guitar tone?
Great tone is only half the battle when playing live. So, for a minute, let's forget the ability to play a million miles an hour and steam role over all musician subtleties.
The right tone for the right song gets your listeners enticed.
How do you achieve this?
Practice? Yes, most definitely, but you could nail the song note for note, and if it doesn't sound like the real thing then the listener doesn't connect, nor does the rest of the band. For example, you wouldn't play Led Zeppelin's Whole Lot Of Love, with a cool George Benson jazz tone would you?
Partly it's about using the right guitar for the job, it's also about having an amp that can deliver a clean flat bed for your effects. This is why the likes of Fender and Vox amplifiers have been so successful over the decades.
Good amps allow you to run a myriad of effects pedals inline or through the effects loop and not have your tone "muddied" up.
Ok so maybe this is overkill -
- Good clean amp (valve of course)
- The right guitar for the right job
- And yes, you will have to practice
Ever had a great guitar, a killer amp and a few great pedals that you thought were good, but your tone sounds like it's coming from another guitar? Chances are your pedals destroying your natural tone and the cheap $30 power supply and $12 daisy chain that you are using ain't doing you any favours.
We've all been there, but when you take steps to using the correct gear for the job you start to hear and play things that you've never done. It's awesome and totally justifies your spending. Now we're talking.
When you have the right power feeding your pedals you actually get a quieter, fuller and more powerful signal. Combine this with quality patch cables (not the cheap $4 coloured one) through your pedal board, and you'll start to notice how clean your signal is. From here depth is tone, and it begins to rear its beautiful head.
But what can kill all of your tone in one fell stomp?
A non-true bypass pedal.
These are tone eaters and can suck the life out of your rig. We all still harbour the old pedal that gives us that classic 80's crutch or drive, but for the most part, there are pedals out there that can achieve this without eating all of your tones.
Firstly, there are no rules as tone and creativity differs for each of us. I can't say that you have to put this pedal here or there, but I can offer some guidelines as to what has worked in the past.
One option is to break up your pedal board into two sections:
Drive is all of the pedals that fall into the category of distortion, overdrive, boost, compression and so on.
Modulation is all of the pedals that fall into the category of reverbs, echo, flange, phase, delay, pitch shift and so on.
The idea behind this is to send the Drive section of your board to the front end (guitar input) of your amp. Take the Modulation section of your board and send and return it to the effects loop of your amp.
What does this do?
Well, it firstly separates modulation from your drive signals enabling the effects like reverb, to get thoroughly clean and unaffected signal. It's kind of like layering your signal into your amp; one layer is a clean sound, the other driven or distorted through your front end and hopefully with some tube saturation. It gives some shimmer to your modulation and helps cut through the mix on stage.
There are other options and again there are no rules, but you will need to have the right tools to make this happen. In summary, good pedals, good amp, quality cables, quality power supply (isolated/regulated) = the beginning of excellent tone.
Check back in soon for more tone tips.
Photo Credit: dalioPhoto