Tone is Not (Only) In The Fingers

Everyone says tone is in the fingers.

Here's an experiment.

Take your guitar with your favourite schredmeister tone.

Play My Favourite Things, you know, the song Coltrane made a hit.

Uh-huh.

You sound like a guy playing My Favourite Things with a metric tonne of distortion.

Not a wicked schredmeister.

A mixture of sound effects only becomes a tone when it fits the style of music.

Only the Blues can survive anything from an acoustic to heavy fuzz. Everything else only works within a fairly narrow range of tonal variation.

Choose the genre you are playing, and within that, what the song demands.

There is a cottage industry of people creating effects, from downloadable settings for modelling amps, to complicated plug-ins for DAWs.

I'm going to leave DAWs for now, so this is about getting tones from an amp and/or pedals.

The starting point is easier for most guitarists than it sounds: to judge by what the majority of YT guitar guys say, we take up the guitar because we want to play like (enter name of hero(s) here).

I was horribly mislead in my early years by wanting to sound like John McLaughlin, who has himself at one time said he’s what people who don’t play guitar think is a good guitarist. I have no urge to be a virtuoso. Allan Holdsworth leaves me cold (I know, I will be saying several Hail Marys later), as do all the heavy metal shredders and a lot of the jazz virtuosi. Playing hundreds of notes a minute and permuting arpeggios is what people with no musical ideas do. Not that I want to be controversial or anything. Shredding is the rock / metal version of those be-bop solos that relay on playing arpeggios. Done well it sounds and can be impressive, but it’s one of the first styles that will turn up as an AI plug-in.

I liked what Indian raga players did, those long slowly-developing single-string improvisations based around some traditional changes and themes. It has moments of high skill, but always at the service of the groove music.

I prefer Bert Jansch to John Renbourn, even though it is obvious Renbourn has the superior technique. The players I admire most are Neil Young, Larry Carlton, Eric Clapton, Dave Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Cropper, and Frank Zappa before he started shredding. None of those guys play fast, all of them play intense, sometimes funky, and even melodic. All of them can do the important thing, which is make one note count.

All of them were fussy as heck about their instruments and sound. If you want to make one note count, you kinda gotta be fussy about tone.

The search for tone is also the search for soloing style. By now I was realising that what I did / do on the acoustic was NOT going to translate to a Les Paul.

But let's start by getting a) a decent clean tone, b) a decent distortion-y Blues tone, c) some nice Ambient-y sounds.