The Internet makes a moderate deal about the difference between bedroom or solo tone, and what is needed to mix in with a live band or in the studio. “Bedroom tone” is usually fuller, with more bass. “Mix tone” is alleged to be much lighter on the bass frequencies. The unspoken inference is that going for bedroom tone is for the newbies, and pros practice with a mix-friendly tone.
Except there’s a reason mixing desks and DAWs have a gajillion controls. Because it is extremely unlikely that the guitarist (or anyone else) will get the sound the producer wants, using only a guitar, pedals and an amp. Close, sure, but not the final sound. That final tweak is why producers and recording engineers have jobs. It’s cheaper and faster for the mixing engineer to do it from the recordings, than to do take after take to tweak tone. In one approach, the band plays with a sound they liked in rehearsal, and the engineers change it as needed for records and venues. In another, everyone plays with no effects straight into the board and all the effects are added in the mix.
So recording at home, we may as well play with a sound that pleases and even inspires us, and then use the DAW to jiggle it around to make a hi-fi / head-fi / radio / phone friendly mix.
The McCarty 594’s humbuckers can sound dull. Listening a bit more and trying out some other descriptions, I got to “lacked bite and clarity”. And I was always tempted to add more treble, because treble helps with clarity. Then I wondered what would happen if I turned everything on the Princeton up to 10. Which is forbidden. Or terminally newbie. Or eye-rollingly crass.
But it was a lot closer to what I was looking for. So I went in search of explanations of how the Princeton’s tone and volume controls work. A question that is usually answered by blog posts that mostly consist of circuit diagrams. I can read a circuit diagram as slowly as I can read music.
Tone control on the Fender Princeton is subtractive: 10 is no change, and 1 is turned-right-down. Same as a volume knob on an amplifier: it doesn’t increase the volume, it decreases the attenuation. The tone dials on the amp at 10 are in the neutral position, and turning them down reduces the treble or the bass part of the signal from the guitar.
The same logic applies to the guitar, where the tone control (pot) is also subtractive: 10 “leaves the signal alone” and 3 “takes a lot of treble out”. There’s a point on all guitar tone pots below the signal gets wrapped in cotton wool, and the notes have no attack and are blurred all the way through. It’s horrible.
The “natural sound” of the guitar is everything everywhere at 10 - just like Clapton said all those years ago. However, while acoustic guitars are “tuned”, electrics chuck out a signal and leave it to us to do what we will with it. I can set the dials one way for a tone I like, and you can set them another for a tone you like.
Letting the treble rip is close to ice-pick territory or produces overtones some people might find distracting. 10 on the amplifier bass may be felt to be too boomy (especially on the low E string), or smudge the notes too much.
Bass has to be handled on the amp, since the guitar tone control only does treble. Treble can be handled either on the amp or on the guitar. Everyone’s answer will differ. I’ve left the amp treble at 10 (or 5-ish for the single coils) and control the treble on the guitar.
Turning the amp volume up to 10 and the guitar volume up to 10 will be WAY TOO LOUD at home. Anything below 2 on the amp volume and the sound won’t come out to play. I find that amp=2, guitar = 10 gives a nice crispy tone, and guitar=7, amp=3 (or so) is also acceptable and leaves some headroom on the guitar to handle coil-splitting (which drops the volume some). This gives me the definition in the notes that I want. Others may prefer less clarity.
Having the amp tone controls at 10 means the amp sound is closer to what comes out of the Helix and into an interface. Not identical, because amps have a sound of their own. Which is why we record into a DAW with amp models available.
In the Helix I have an EQ that drops 8kHz and 16kHz by 15dB to deal with ice-picky single coils. And a metric tonne of compression: the Deluxe Compressor with a threshold of -25dB and compression of 10:1. That is far more than I would have otherwise thought, but it puts some spine into the McCarty 594's "vintage-sounding" humbuckers. On the Paranormal, everything sounds fine because single coils are far less fussy than humbuckers, and their lower output doesn’t engage the compressor to the same extent.
This, through the Princeton, is close enough to the sound I want to hear from an amp. What sounds good from a DAW into a WAV file and in a mix, is another thing altogether, and that’s what DAWs and mixes are for.
I cannot emphasise enough that the sounds you are trying to get may involve having one or more of the controls or pedal settings at an extreme. The "put everything in the middle and tweak it" approach can have you tweaking a bit of this and a bit of that, whereas you may need to swing something WAY OVER to a limit to get what you want.
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