The Second Guitar

Telecasters are for professionals. Julian Lage plays one. Everyone in Nashville plays one and has another as a backup. Show up with a Tele and people will assume you can play anything from chicken' picken' to Jimmy Page licks.

This is not me. Also, the neck is half a baseball bat, and I can't get on with it.

Jazzmasters are for indie guitarists, and I'm just a little too old to fall into that demographic. By a few decades. Also, a real Jazzmaster has the rhythm circuit control on the upper section of the body, and quite a few of the Fender models don't now. The Squires do, and the Fender Vintera's. I played a Vintera a few months ago, and it needed to be better finished for the £1,000 price tag. Sounded nice. Then there's all that stuff about how the bridge is not the best design, and the neck needs re-setting to make it better. Maybe not.

But still, and all, never say never. And also, I need a single-coil guitar with Fender wiring. The McCarty is double-humbuckers with Gibson wiring.

I was browsing the Regent Sounds website, which goes under "day-dreaming", and came across something only a guitar nerd could love. A mash-up of a Jazzmaster (body, neck, headstock and neck pickup) with a Telecaster (bridge pickup and ashtray, selector switch and controls).

You know when you see the girl across the room and know you have to talk to her?

That feeling. Well, nearly.

Except about a guitar.

(Musicians are not normal people. Amy Winehouse even wrote a song about a new guitar.)

So the next time I was in town, I wandered down Denmark Street, like I had any right to, and into Regent Sounds. They set me up with a Fender Blues Junior, and I noodled around for a while. Yes, it balanced on my knee. No, it did not weigh 9lbs or so. It sounded good. I knew I was going to buy it.

So I did.

And eventually, UPS delivered it.

It sounds and plays real good.

Here it is...

How To Get A Katana To Sound Almost Like A Valve Amp

(Ingredients: a BOSS Katana, a 10-band EQ pedal or 10-band EQ effect in a digital effects board (DEB), guitar of your choice. Has been tested with humbuckers, not yet with single-coils.)

Valve amps have that sound. It pops and snaps, it's clean and clear and as crisp as fresh winter frost.

Which is no-one's description of the sound of a BOSS Katana.

Well, I'm here to tell you how to make a Katana sound like a valve amp. Nearly.

On the 10-band EQ control, add at least 10dB to the 2kHz, 4KHz and 8kHz bands. (Unless you are a bat or a teenager, you will not hear the 16kHz stuff, but change that if you want). I find the 2kHz and 4kHz bands are better at +12.5dB, but your ears may vary. 

The EQ control should be the last one in the chain (except for a compressor). 

Connect the output from the EQ pedal or DEB into the POWER AMP IN socket on the back of the Katana. This by-passes all the pre-amp and effects and sends the signal straight to the power-amp. The only controls that affect the sound are the power selector and the MASTER volume control. Put the power selector to 25W and the MASTER volume at 12:00. Alter to taste later - according to how much oomph your pickups provide.

Turn the guitar volume and tone pots to 7 or so. (I turn the volume up on the  McCarty SE, because the lower the volume pots are set, the less audible the effect of coil-splitting, tone-adjustment, and distortion effects from the HX Effects.)

Strike a note.

It should be whoa, that was sudden, or something similar. It should also sound a whole lot more like a valve amp. 

Tweak the volume on the amp to make it more neighbour-friendly (but not so much the sound hides away in the speakers. I find that happens before 10:00 on the dial.)

What's going on? 

The frequency response curve of a 12-inch Celestion Gold (available on the Celestion website), the kind of speaker used in valve amps, is

 (All their speakers have a broadly similar curve. Actually, so do all guitar speakers.) 

It comes on song around G on the low E-string, is reasonably consistent all the up to the 18th fret of the high E-string, and then has strong(er) area between 2kHz and 5kHz, after which the response drops off a cliff. 

Guitars produce a trail of harmonics, many less than 10 dB down from the base frequency. Reproducing the sound of a guitar properly means making sure those harmonics are amplified equally. Up to 5kHz, the Celestion Gold is giving good treatment to the first, second and third harmonics of all the notes on the guitar, and to at least the fourth harmonics of notes below middle-C (concert pitch - 2nd string 1st fret) - except for the harmonics between and 1kHz - 1.8kHz, where it's a bit soft.

The Katana speaker is not a Celestion. BOSS say it was designed to match the amplifier. My guess is that the Katana speaker remains flat up to 2kHz and then drops about 10dB - 15dB to 5kHz, when it too drops off a cliff, as all guitar speakers will. (Google can't find anything under various variations on "Katana speaker response curve", so BOSS will have to live with my speculations.)

To correct for that slump between 2kHz and 5kHz, we need to boost the frequencies in that range, which is what my suggestion does.

Give it a whirl.

(Edited 6/11/2024)

Gain and Volume

Yep, it’s tech time again. There are numerous explanations of these two features of an amplifier, and all those I have seen don’t explain it very well. Mostly because they don’t use a model of an amplifier, which I’m going to do.

Picture your guitar amp. At one end is the guitar jack, which carries a tiny, tiny current from the pickups. If that was transferred across to the speaker, we wouldn’t hear a thing. Nothing like enough power. So we need some more power from somewhere - which is why the amp is plugged into the mains, to feed a transformer that feeds the amp’s circuitry. That feed is run through some kind of “amplifying widget”, which might be a valve, a transistor, some combination of both, or some other device.

This widget takes the guitar signal in one connection, the transformer feed in another connection, and combines them in such a way that the signal from the guitar affects the current from the transformer flowing through the widget. (See electronics textbooks for details.) If the widget works properly, the output will be a signal that looks like the input from the guitar, but on a large-enough scale to drive the speaker.

In summary…

Guitar input signal -> widget
+
Current from transformer -> widget
=
More powerful copy of the guitar signal from widget to the loudspeaker

Gain controls are on the power input side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Gain up increases the amount of power into the amplifying widget, and increases makes the output signal… Gain at 0 = signal direct from guitar with no increase in power, Gain at 10 = guitar signal amplified to maximum input power

Volume controls are on the power output side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Volume up lets more of that power pass to the speaker, so it gets louder… Volume at 0 = no output power, Volume at 10 = as much out as the Gain creates. 

Now here’s the thing. The amplifying widget will change how it responds as more power is applied to it. That’s why turning up the Gain often produces distortion (unless the widget has a kilometer of “headroom”). But when we adjust the volume, it won’t change the way the widget works, because the volume is on the output side, after the widget has done its thing.

However, adjusting the volume will affect the power going to the speaker, and that will affect the way the speaker reacts. Less power and it won’t be able to transmit the fine details in the signal loud enough for us to hear. Which is why a crunchy distorted tone at high volume turns to a nasty fizz at low volumes.

So that’s that.

Recording With The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and Helix Effects

Regular readers will remember the problems I, and everyone else with a Katana, had with recording and playback through the thing. I gave up in the end.

I’ve been trying recording on the iPhone / iPad, using the Lexis Audio Editor, which is intuitively easier to use than the iOS Garageband. For my simple mind, anyway. Record with the mic, playback via the Apple dongle and the Katana Aux In. It kinda worked, but not inspiringly.

Then I got the Helix HX Effects. I’ve been playing with it exploring its functionality for a while. I had registered that it treated the SEND and RECEIVE ports as blocks that could be put in the signal chain. I had got as far as using a RECEIVE port / block to receive music from the phone and pass it on to the Katana.

That works because the Helix software lets us create two logical paths (A and B) between the device inputs and outputs. It’s actually easier to see-and-do on the control software than it is to explain (which is how it should be). Put all the guitar-related effects on one path, and use the other path to take the play-along music. Join the paths together at the end, so the play-along music is unaffected by the guitar effects. Works nicely.

One afternoon, I started thinking about recording again. I don’t want to use headphones, and I want to hear the sound of the guitar from the amp. That was always a problem in the past, because I was getting the guitar effects from the amp. Ever since I got the HX Effects, the amp has been set to the Clean channel and all the effects turned off. EQ’s at mid-day. It’s almost tonally transparent.

The following question now makes sense. Can I use a SEND port on the HX Effects to send a copy of the signal to an interface? The interface connects to the laptop via USB and a recording program can use the USB as an input. Also, can I take the audio out from the laptop and plug that in to the Aux In of the Katana. The HX Effects is connected to the Katana via the L/Mono output socket as usual.

I have one signal path from the guitar to HX Effects to the amp; a separate path from the HX Effects to the laptop to the recording software; and another from the recording playback to the amp. So there’s no feedback loop.

And even better… there’s no way background noise can get into the signal chain because there are no microphones!

I’m using Audacity. It’s recording software with some extras, rather than a full-featured DAW, so it will do nicely for my simple mind. I made sure it could record one track while playing back another, which is kinda key to the whole thing. I can.

All I need to be able to do is send one copy of the signal to the L/Mono output, and another copy to a SEND socket. Which is kinda the reverse of bringing in a signal from the RECEIVE port.

I tested everything I could without actually getting the interface. Everything worked the way I needed it to.

Pull the trigger. The interface of choice for the amateur is the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, which has two inputs: either instrument jack plug or mic three-pin. (Mics need a lot more signal boost than guitars.) I need one short guitar cable (male-to-male jack plugs) to connect the HX Effects SEND to the Scarlett instrument in.

Arrives within 24 hours thanks to Amazon Prime. Took about fifteen minutes to set up, including an online firmware update. Another five minutes to set the recording volume for the guitar.

Now I have to deal with the well-known phenomenon of “recording klutz”, where hitherto fluent playing suddenly misses the beat, because someone turned the red light on. Also with the fact that my playing is, well, not quite metronomic.

Which is why we record ourselves. It’s one thing to know you’re a bit clunky while playing, but another to hear it in playback. It’s so much more embarrassing in playback.

Guitar Humility

For reasons to do with me mentioning it, my tutor looked up Joni Mitchell’s Coyote on YT. Within a verse, he detected the down-tuned low-E string (to C), and had picked up the chords. I still have fumble-fingers making a C6/9 and would never have picked up the detuned E-string.

It’s one thing to know about (say) perfect pitch and ear training, but it’s another to see it action and understand the ocean-sized gap between an amateur and a proper musician. An untrained ear condemns us to a lifetime of sight-reading or tab.

Learning the major scales, modes, and even harmonic minors, octotonic and other weird stuff, is actually fairly simple as long as you can handle doing repetitive exercises. After that, finding the key a song is in is a matter of quietly trying this or that note (starting with F♯ then B♭ to figure out which side of the circle of fifths the song is in, and going round that way) until it sounds right. Then jamming along with the track using pentatonics or a major scale is a fairly easy and pleasing experience.

An experience that requires almost no knowledge of chords or harmony, no ability to read tab or stave, and no idea what clever chords are being used. It’s like being able to make an omelet and bake a simple cake and thinking you’re a cook. Or being able to speak tourist Spanish.

Problem is, it gives you an entirely false idea of just how much you know.

I came away from the third lesson, during which we went through the chords of Autumn Leaves as an example of moving in fifths, usefully angry with myself. I thought I had been fumbling on the fretboard like some beginner, and it was inexcusable that I heard the phrase “E♭major 7th” and didn’t automatically make the required shape. I know the major 7th shape on those strings, but I couldn’t bring the knowledge to use. Not good enough.

Playing guitar is like speaking English. The basics are easy, and one can communicate well-enough in it and still speak it badly (unlike, say, French or Dutch), but advanced use takes a very long time, and most people never get that far.

Part of the hump is learning the fretboard. There is no equivalent for pianists: F♯ below middle C is in one and only one place, but on the guitar, it can be played on the third string fourth fret, fifth string ninth fret, and sixth string fourteenth fret. And yes, each one sounds slightly different, because physics (overtones). Same with the violin family. Learning the fretboard is nowhere near as easy as you think it is, and nobody knows why.

Chords are even worse, and it doesn’t help that a chord of N notes can have at least N different names depending on which one is treated as the root. (Classical harmony gets over this by defining the root as the note that would the lowest if the notes were re-arranged in ascending thirds (or nearest approximation). It also does not help that - aside from the sus chords (2 and 4) - there are no even-numbered notes in chords. Chord intervals go 1-9-3-11-5-13-7 (unless the 9 is a sus 2 or the 11 is a sus 4). Also 7’s are all minor unless announced as major, and a diminished 7th is a 6th, but not in a 5/6 chord or a 6-chord (which is not to be confused with a VI chord, of course).

So your tutor can say “Esus ♭ 6” and leave you wondering WTF? Whereas they mean A-minor, which is a reflex to shape at the first fret, because it’s a cowboy chord. Not that tutors would do that.

Oddly, realising just how low on the learning pole I am, has introduced a lump of realism to whatever the heck I think my goals are.

McCarty 549 Follow-Up - 1950’s Manufacturing Was Always A Bit Dodgy

The tone pots on my Epiphone Les Paul were monsters, especially on the bridge. Turn the bridge tone pot up to 10 and the sound was 10dB (!) louder than at 0. Neck wasn’t quite as much, but it was still unmistakeable. And to my ears the difference in tone was independent of the volume pot setting.

The effect of the McCarty tone pots depends on the volume level: the higher the volume pot, the greater the difference between 0 and 10. The difference is greater at the bridge than the neck, but that’s because physics.

Which is one reason it took me a while to notice that the bridge tone pot wasn’t actually working. Coil split was, but not the tone control. The neck one was okay.

So back to those nice people at GuitarGuitar Epsom I went, where their wonderful tech swiftly diagnosed a dry solder joint. A quick touch of the iron, and everything worked as it should. All covered by warranty.

A lot of a modern guitar is made by CNC tools. The body is cut by CNC millers, which is why the body shape is so consistent. The pick-ups are wound by a CNC winder, so every pickup gets 5,324 turns of 60AWG (or whatever) - as opposed to 1950’s Gibson pick-ups which were wound by hand and could vary considerably. The necks must be cut and fretted by machine as well, given the cost of a luthier re-fret these days.

The wiring has to be done by hand. I doubt even Apple could automate that. The connections are soldered by hand. Just like when Leo Fender made his first guitar for Noah on the Ark. Hand-soldering has not improved since it was invented. The mid-teenage me used to solder slot-car chassis back in the day, and even I could get a dry joint now and again. However, I wasn’t making lots of chassis in a day, so I had time to spot it and re-solder. The guys in the factory probably don’t have the time.

Once upon a time, cars used to be assembled more or less by hand, and we could tell. Rattles, squeaks, screws coming loose… There’s a reason Ford, Fiat and the rest spend gajillions developing automated manufacturing. It’s the reason that modern cars are so reliable and last so long. That and improved paint formulations.

Guitar-makers don’t work at the volumes of car manufacturers and can’t afford the investment in specialised robots. So we will just have to accept that, at least for the budget-price market (if PRS SE prices are your idea of “budget”), a fair proportion of the guitars will need some post-sale tweaking to get 100% right.

Now everything is copacetic. The default volume pot setting is around 7-8, which lets the tone pots do their thing. I had to tweak some settings on my HX Effects, but I’m getting real slick at playing the stomp switches.

My McCarty 549 SE sounds great, has humbuckers, the Les Paul control layout, and weighs 7 lbs. It’s not going anywhere for a long time.

Farewell Les Paul, Hello McCarty

My first electric guitar was an Epiphone Les Paul. It weighed 9.1 lbs and sounded - once I finally sorted out the effects+amp chain - pretty darn awesome. Double humbuckers will do that. I liked the feel of the neck. I bought it in late 2022 before my neck vertebrae decided to play up. 9.1 lbs was just too heavy to sling on my shoulder for more than half-an-hour, and if it wasn’t positioned just right, like all LP’s, it would slide off my right thigh like a (insert analogy here).

Facing the prospect of my second lesson, and needing to play for practice sessions for longer than I would find comfortable, I finally faced up to the fact that the weight and balance of the LP was a distraction.

My Marshall-owning friend advised me to get the guitar I needed / wanted, rather than could live with, as trading guitars can be an expensive way of renting them. Which is a good point.

What I wanted was a Les Paul that weighed 7lbs at the most and didn’t fall off my lap like (analogy supplied above). One candidate is an SG. It weighs around 6 lbs, has a shorter body from neck pick-up to the end and hence superior upper fret access, but it has neck-dive. Acoustics have neck-dive (falling forward in the direction of the headstock) but nothing like an SG. Straps are compulsory, and it does not balance on one’s knee. Sounds wicked though.

Fender don’t really do double-humbuckers, and don’t have the LP control and wiring. Also, Strats and Teles are heavy - not hefty like some LPs can be, but still heavy.

Within my budget, this leaves the PRS SE range. You don’t have to be a lawyer to buy one of those. It’s in the Mexican Fender price range, and the unoccupied land between Epiphone and Gibson prices. After much trying of this and that , I asked one of the GuitarGuitar staff if they could weigh the two candidates. I felt one was slightly but crucially lighter than the other. It was. 7lbs dead on.

7 lbs 

Double humbuckers with separate tone + volume controls in parallel, joined at the switch (e.g. Les Paul wiring). 

Sounds fine - in fact, I preferred the slightly cleaner sound of the PRS pickups 

Looks good 

Balances nicely on my right thigh 

Doesn’t feel like a weight on my shoulder 

7 lbs

This is what I wanted. 

So I went back to the car, fetched the Epiphone, and traded it in.

First Guitar Lesson

It’s been a long time since I got in the car and drove anywhere except the local supermarket or Richmond. I choose one of the hotter days of the year to do it, and there were works on a road which is notorious for not moving very quickly at the best of times. I made it to the tutor’s place about fifteen minutes late. Fortunately his schedule was not rammed.

We had an introductory chat, and he made approving noises about my Epiphone Les Paul - it does look good. I plugged into a solid-state Marshall (which had a far better clean tone at conversational volumes than my Katana) and we set off on Samba Pa Ti. We had settled on it during our back-and-forth of messages.

This is the first time in many, many years another person has been in the room while I played.

There are many reasons for having a tutor, and many more lessons to be learned than which notes go in what order. Some background: classical music has definitive scores because composers wrote what they wanted playing. The score is the music, all the rest is interpretation. Jazz, rock, folk and most everything else by contrast does not even have a definitive recording. There’s the album version, the version on the later release of out-takes, four versions on You Tube, and the legendary version they played at the (insert name of concert hall here). Very often in these genres there is no sheet music, and if there is, it can be unreliable. So even today, if you want to learn a song, sure look for the sheet music, but you may well find a good recording and learn from that. It’s what the younger jazz players did in the 1950’s.

If you have perfect pitch or a well-trained ear, and an amount of patience. My tutor has a well-trained ear. I made a note to get back to doing ear training.

There are other things as well. Until then I had only suspected that the chords in pop-music sheet music were… ummm… directional. My tutor was quite clear that the scores and tab charts available on the big-name sites such as Ultimate Guitar had enough errors to be an actual waste of time. (I rather like the look of the regular notation on MuseScore, and they are having a June Sale. I may do that.)

Teachers today are very different from they were when I was a pupil. They go in for making encouraging remarks, instead of saving the grudging praise for Christmas. Mine was no different. At the end he told me I was (by the standard of the pupils he has, granted) a “good guitarist”. I’m going to interpret that as meaning that my technique and knowledge of theory is enough for rock ‘n roll. (Which actually has quite high standards these days.) Which I will take as meaning I should concentrate on the music, rather than learning yet more scales or chords.

I came away with four bits of homework: unison bends; ear training; using my third finger to make a barre in the middle of the fretboard; polishing Samba Pa Ti.

The next lesson is booked in.

Finding A Guitar Tutor

I had my first guitar lesson a few days ago.

I have been looking at guitar tutors in my area. There are a couple of websites they all seem to use - tutorful.co.uk and musicteachers.co.uk - and Google found me those.

The tutors are mostly younger (which is ‘under 35’ to me), offer roughly the same range of subjects, and have varying degrees of experience playing professionally and of teaching. All very solid, I felt, but something was missing.

I didn’t want to do ABRSM - I sat my last exam in my twenties and have no intention of doing any more - and I don’t want to learn jazz either. Music-school jazz is journey-man’s music: an all-purpose technique to make familiar sounds over the chords of any song. Which is not to detract from the considerable skills required, and the musical creativity of the very best of the musicians. But that’s the point: all the rest of them cats sound the same. If I want to learn some obscure chord changes and the weird scales that go with it, I can get the music and

Then I ran across one tutor who mentioned “becoming a competent songwriter”, and all doubts left my body. Yep, even if I never actually write a single darn song, that’s what my aim is. I’m a writer of words, not a speaker of them; I’m likely a writer of music (my heavens that sounds pretentious) rather than a performer.

Having found a tutor, you send them a message describing briefly what you are looking for, they reply and you back and forth for a bit, until one of you pulls the trigger and suggests arranging a lesson. So that’s what we did.

More of this to follow.

PRS NF3 SE and Other Thoughts

The PRS NF3 SE was officially released this very day (19/6/24). It’s up for order on Anderton’s and GuitarGuitar. Every YT guitar channel has a review. I’m going to enter it for new product launch of the year 2024. Man, PRS’s marketing people are slick.

Everyone reviewing it said almost the same thing about it - which would okay if they were just talking specs, but they also said the same things about it. Almost as if the PR company sent them a press kit, or they were all watching each other, and nobody wanted to disagree. From what I gather, the PRS online media relations people really seem to know what they’re doing - way better than the Big Two. (And none of the other guitar makers seem to give a darn if anyone reviews their gear.)

However, when they played it? Everyone made it sound different. One reviewer was playing it through a setup almost as clean as a Roland Jazz Chorus, others had some edge-of-breakup, others did a here’s-clean-and-here’s distortion. And it sounded different every time. It didn’t seem to have a sound of its own on which to build other sounds. (And yes, I have liked the sounds of other PRS’s.)

For those who don’t know, a Les Paul sounds like a Les Paul, whether it’s made by Gibson, Epiphone, PRS or anyone else, and whether you’re playing it clean, dirty, at the neck, at the bridge, or whatever. The double-humbuckers have a unique depth and oomph of sound. At the other extreme, a Strat sounds like a Strat no matter who makes it and how it’s played, and it has an neat, clean edge to its sound. Every other solid-body guitar is in-between those two. (And sure, in a blind test no-one can tell the difference between a Russian acoustic ukulele and an American-made Les Paul through a Marshall stack, but that’s just science…)

On paper, I liked the idea of the NF3 SE. SE means it’s the sub-£1,000 version, NF3 refers to having three narrow humbucking pickups. It’s an S-style body with a five-way selector switch. During most of the reviews, I could tell the difference between bridge and neck positions, but I wasn’t sure I could notice the change from one position to the next.

As I’m learning my way round the effects in the HX Effects - what works, what doesn’t - I’m coming to see the guitar as a note-generator, rather than the origin of all tone. In that sense, what matters is the strength of the signal and the overtones it generates.

The day before the NF3 SE reviews, I had three guitars on my list: Fender / Squier Jazzmaster; PRS John Meyer SE; PRS NF3 SE. That has gone down to two now. Amps, if you’re wondering, are between a Fender Blues Junior or a Roland JC-22. At low volumes, the amp can’t be used to get “tones”. So the idea is to have a clean amp (or studio monitors or FRFR speakers) into which to push already messed-up signals from the effects units.

I do think about gear upgrades, but every time I get even close to buying anything, I have a serious session with the HX Effects and get better tones out of the current gear.

Right now I have some monster tones - but that’s another story.

Sight-Reading

I’m also spending some time learning to sight-read. Using the Allemande from the first Bach Cello suite. Since it’s for the cello, it’s in the bass clef, mostly in the octave below middle C, with occasional excursion above and below. It’s best played in concert pitch on the guitar, as opposed to an octave lower, though it could be played an octave higher.

Repeat after me: Every Good Band Deserves Fans And Cash. Those are the notes on the lines of the bass clef, starting with the ledger line below the main stave and ending with middle C(ash) one ledger line above the main stave.

I tried this a long time ago, but I struggled with the bass clef. Attempting to sight-read on the piano, which takes the “Grand Clef” (treble on top, bass below, middle C, well, in the middle) seemed to have eased reading the bass clef, partly because I spent a long time reciting the notes on the staves.

Remember running your finger under the words to help you read? Remember pronouncing a word one syllable at a time? Remember looking at a combination of letters and thinking “huh”?

All that and more. I follow the notes for a while, and then the tune drops to the bottom of the stave and I’m like “ummm, A? B? G?” Or I follow four notes but don’t finish on the E but the D. Huh? Oh! That’s an A I should be starting on, not a G.

As for playing the notes so that an actual tune emerges?

Oh. The tune? Where’s that?

The tune emerges when I play the notes without hesitation, fluently.

Ah yes, fluency. Playing the right notes in the right order isn’t enough. There’s more.

I know what it takes to read fluently: one has to read ahead and think about that, while one’s fingers are playing what one read a moment ago, because it was passed it to the complier, translated into muscle actions which were stored in short-term memory and are now being played . Which is what fluent word-readers do.

It takes a while for the brain to create that compiler, the memory, and the mechanism to take the muscle actions from memory and execute them. Building all that is what it means to “read music”.

It isn’t memorising the piece. That’s different.

This is one of those tasks that one starts and carries on despite seeming to make no progress, because I suspect that when the brain does construct the read-ahead compiler, it kicks in fast and makes all the slog worthwhile.

Talk to me in a year.

Tanya Shpachuk

Somewhere in the quieter parts of the Ukraine is a workshop full of luthiers (guitar makers and repairs), and Ms Shpachuk has a channel. Marvel at how much work goes into getting the neck of a guitar right. The neck and frets are precision engineering in disguise.

The Subtle Genius of the Middle-Position Selector of the Les Paul

I’ve recently come to appreciate the subtle genius of the middle-position selector of the Les Paul.

Need to turn the guitar down but don’t want to walk back to the amp / digital controller? Just turn either of the volume pots to 0 - shuts down the guitar output. (It’s a feature of the circuit design, not a bug.)

Need to turn it up for a solo? Turn the dominant (or both) pots to 9 or 10 - doubles the volume. (That’s a feature of the volume pots, not a bug.)

Need to turn it back to play rhythm again? Turn the pots back to where they were, usually 8 or below.

But most of all…

The middle position lets us mix the outputs of the pickups to taste using the volume pots. (The Rhythm / Lead positions are limiting cases of the mixes available with the middle position.)

Is the bridge too thin and nasal? To get a bridge-y tone with a bit more body, put the bridge pot somewhere between 7 and 10, and the neck somewhere between 2 and 4. (*)

Is the neck too full and jazzy? To snap it up a bit, put the neck pot somewhere between 7 and 10, and the bridge pot somewhere between 2 and 4.

Something balanced? Put both on 6 or 7, or 9 / 10 if you want to be loud.

A Strat offers five discrete mixes of its pickups, the Les Paul offers a (theoretically) continuous variation.

When I’m creating a Preset on the HX Effects, I set the volume pots at 6 (which is the actual mid-point when using a Katana) and the tone pots at 7. Then I can use the volume pots to get a more bridge-y or more neck-y version of the tone, and I’m not having to create something that will deal with the nasal bridge signal, and consequently be useless on the neck, or vice-versa.

The Creation of Marshall Amplifiers

On the third day, the Lord did create Marshall amplifiers, and he played his Les Paul through them, and heard the distortion, and even with the Telecaster and the Stratocaster, even the ES335 and SG, it was good.

Sayth the LORD, this sound shall be only for Marshalls. Not even unto the Hi-Watt and Mesa/Boogie. And the Fender shall be clean, and scooped in the mid-range. Even the amp that is Orange shall not have this sound.

He who wishes for this sound shall not find it in the pedals that are between the guitar and the amplifier. This sound shall be unto the gold-and-black that shall be the sign of the Marshall for evermore.

And those who despair that their guitar may be un-blessed, and have a nasal bridge tone, shall play into a Marshall, and what they hear shall be as from a blessed guitar. For the Marshall is the amplifier of the LORD, and all who play through one shall have good tone.

(Yep, my guitar friend recently acquired an f-off JCM800 head to go with a 2x12 Marshall cabinet. I had a play with it recently. Everything you have heard about the ineffable nature of that Marshall sound is true.)

Chasing Tone

When I play an acoustic, the sound is what it is. I can modify it slightly by the choice of pick, where I pick the strings, and where or if I rest my right hand on the body. These are slight changes on the fixed underlying sound of the guitar, which is itself a variation within narrow limits of the fundamental sound of an acoustic.

Then there’s the electric guitar. There are a bunch of genre-based sounds for the electric. There’s the “jazz tone”; the “Nashville country twang”, if anyone still uses it; the “blues tone”, which is not to be confused with the edge-of-breakup “blues-rock” tone; there’s the heavily distorted “metal tone”, with variations for each type of metal; and then there’s the “ambient sound”, characterised by endless variations of echo, delay and reverb. There’s the Andy Summers chorus sound, the Eddie Van Halen “brown sound”, the Hank B Marvin 60’s instrumental sound, the “legendary Beano album sound”, and of course, there’s The Edge. The list goes on quite a way.

There’s a relationship between tone and music. Put a Blues Drive in the chain, and you’re going to wind up playing minor pentatonics. Flip to the neck pickup and keep a clean sound, and you’re going to play some kind of jazz. Perhaps if I knew what the music I was looking for was, I could find the sound for it. Or do we find the sound and then the music comes?

I want some sustain (reverb YES, compression NO) to open up the sound, a little texture (distortion or overdrive) and some variation (modulation). It needs to be full (some gain and easy on the treble) as well as well-defined (not too much gain or bass). No one effect should dominate, but all of them should be audible. Each individual note should be a sound interesting enough to listen to on its own. It has to work all over the neck, not just in one position, and it has to work at bedroom volumes.

Also, can I get some vanilla ice-cream and an espresso with that?

There are three reasons for spending a lot of time futzing around with pedals and effects boards. Such as I have been doing for far too long.

A) You play in a tribute band and want to get the exact sound the originals got.

B) You play in a repertoire band and the song sheet for next Saturday has a U2 song followed by an early Police song. You have to get close to the spirit of The Edge and Andy Summers.

C) You are trying to find your sound.

Of these A) and B) are business reasons, but C) is in danger of being a search for one’s identity. Those of us with diffuse identities may be spending a lot of time on a fool’s errand.

The Real Reason Why The Pros Like Amp Sims (and you should too)

At some point in any review of any guitar amp, no matter if it’s a 1 watt Marshall or a 100 watt Fender, the reviewer will say something along the lines of “this thing can get real loud”. Every amplifier, every review. Maybe there’s a reason?

There is. Guitar amps have Celestion speakers, or something very similar. These have sensitivities around 100 dB / watt at one metre for a 1kHz tone.(1) That’s eight times louder than you play your stereo just before someone else in the house asks you to turn it down.

At one watt. Never mind five, ten, or twenty-eight watts.

It’s not the guitar that’s loud, it’s the speakers.

What everyone wants is a) a decent amount of sound with a “clean” tone, followed by b) that magical edge-of-breakup as the valves start to run out of headroom and clip the output waveform.

However, in a conventional valve amp, achieving the first means that the second is only available at ear-damaging sound levels. Conversely, getting edge of break-up at practice volumes almost ensures that the clean sound isn’t that consistent.

So the world is full of guitar enthusiasts, and indeed professionals, with wonderful valve amps that are forever on 2 and never reach break-up, which is daft, because the point is the edge-of-breakup tone.(2)

Except…. I mean, I can play Band of Gypsies on my hi-fi and hear that tasty Hendrix tone at sensible volumes - granted that the excitement from higher volumes is missing. What’s going on?

The edge-of-breakout tone needs the valves in the power amp to be driven hard, which produces a powerful output. Is there a way of sending the waveform to the speaker without sending all the power? It’s usually called attenuation and can be done in a number of ways, and usually, the cheaper the way, the more that lovely hard crunch turns into an irritating fizz.

At least for analogue methods. Using a decent ADC -> DSP -> DAC sequence may be better, but this starts to turn the amplifier into a hi-fi amplifier, with consequent costs and development programs that only the larger companies can even consider. Guitar makers are old-school electrical engineers unused to the delicate touches required to keep ADC / DAC chips running well, and DSP algorithms are still “secret sauce” even in hi-fi.

The result is that we have amp-simulation software, developed by computer-centric companies. Kemper, Helix, and others.

The idea is to record an amp doing its thing as its designers intended, and then throw some kind of wavelet analysis at the input and the output.(3) This provides a description of the change from before-to-after which can be summarised by a mathematical model, which can be turned into fast algorithms run on multi-core chips in specialised computers disguised as multi-button pedals. The required tone is now available independently of volume levels.

It’s not perfect (though neither is the manufacture of valve amps) but it’s a process that can be iterated for improvement.

So we have a gadget with an ADC at one end, a bunch of algorithms running on fancy chips in the middle, and then a DAC to provide an analogue signal to an analogue amp, or a USB connection to a laptop running a DAW.

And not a speaker to be seen, let alone heard at intolerable volumes. This is why the professionals jumped at using the computerised stuff, despite already having a studio with selection of valve amps and speakers. It was much quieter and much less temperamental (just listen to engineers talk, for instance, about how mic placement changes from speaker cab to speaker cab, even when both cabs are the same make and model).

This also changes the role of the amp / speaker for live listening. We’re not looking for it to provide the tone - clean or beak-up - but to be as neutral or flat as a hi-fi system.(4) Right now the guitar business doesn’t have too many of this so-called FRFR (full-range, flat-response) kit, and what it does have is often described by the familiar phrase “this thing can get real loud”.

Which really does bring us back full-circle.

(As you can tell, getting a Helix LT is now my current first step on the gear-upgrade path.)


(1) Hi-fi speakers are often in the 83 - 90dB / watt range. Which is somewhere between half and a third as loud. 

(2) Unless you’re Tim Pierce and have your speakers in a soundproofed basement, played as loud as you need with only microphones to hear it. 

(3) It probably is wavelet analysis, but it might be something else with the same result. 

(4) Yes, I know. But in comparison to guitar amps, decent hi-fi’s are pretty neutral.

Up Close and Personal With Valve Amps

Recently I visited a friend from back in working days. He has a number of Real Guitars and three Real Amps: a Fender Deluxe Reverb, a Fender Vibro-King, and an Orange Rockerverb. We had a good time trying each one and I did a lot of hard listening. (Because mostly when we hear amps, it’s at 85+ dB and with a lot of distortion, and to repeat, six rubber bands across a dustbin would sound good at 90dB with distortion.)

I learned a number of lessons:

If you’ve never heard a valve amp up close and personal, you’re going to get a shock. Even at low settings, it has a clarity and punch that makes it sound much louder than the dB meter would say it was.

An electric guitar played through a decent valve amp has a heft of sound that is lost in the recording-mixing-mastering process, and it’s pretty much smoothed out by the live mixing desk as well. Raw electric guitars do not sound like processed ones. (As I’ve said before, a lot of what a contemporary guitarist does is produce electronic sounds to enhance the song soundscape.)

There’s a Rock Music Zone of guitar and amp dial settings and volumes at which Rock / Metal tones exist. Below that, the magic vanishes.

Especially a Les Paul (or any double-humbucker) can sound fierce if wound up to 9 or 10, but below that it cleans up to a “jazz sound”, no matter what you actually play and which pickup you’re using.

Strats sound like quieter versions of themselves.

Dedicated pedals sound way richer than the on-board effects in the Katana.

Of course I spent the next couple of days trying to reproduce, however approximately, the clean tones of the Fenders on the Katana.

Eventually I found that the trick is to use the Crunch channel and to keep the volume down, set power selector to 0.5W, with the Pre-Amp and Master volumes set to 100. Add Spring Reverb to taste. I’ve set the Booster Effect Level so that bringing it in or out doesn’t change the volume, and use the Blues Drive and Centa OD to provide a bit of flavour, and the Clean Boost to leave the tone unchanged. I’ve also set the EQ to dampen the 4kHz, 8kHz and 12kHz bands, which can create a shrill tone, especially on the bridge pickup.

Flip the channel from Crunch to Clean and put the power selector at 25W. The result is just as loud, but not as vivid, as the Crunch channel.   

The result has a similar sound, but not the physicality, of the valve amps. The result is far more in-your-face than I would have ever devised if I had never heard the originals.

Am I sold on “upgrading” to a valve amp? Not quite. But that’s another discussion.

One Journey Ends, Another Begins

I've spent a couple of months thinking that I'd gone as far as I could with the Katana and the Les Paul, and needed some new gear to improve things. Who isn't tempted by a nice shiny white Jazzmaster with a red flecked pickguard? And of course, Valve Amps. And pedals. Lots of pedals.

A £3,500 Matchless combo with £1,500 of pedals on a board (more easily spent than you might think) would do the trick nicely. An £800 Tall Trees amp into a Celestion-equipped speaker cab, with the same £1,500 of pedals, would sound different-but-as-good, again, with the proviso about playing volumes. I heard a fabulous little vintage Fender amp in my last visit to Regent Sounds on Denmark Street, a snip at £4,999. They also have a nice 5W Cornell Traveller Combo for £695 (at time of writing). Lots of options, but do they sound convincing at 60-75 dB?. (Many of these amps have attenuators between the power amp and the speaker, but if it was easy, Ox Boxes would not sell for four figures.)

That's the key. if I want to hear what I'm playing through a loudspeaker, playing at bedroom volumes may compromise the amp's ability to produce the sounds I'm looking for, so that there's no significant improvement over the Katana (or any other modeller). Which means I might wind up testing the patience of guitar shops around London, while I don't find anything in their stock that sounds worth-the-money better than the Katana 50 II at 60 - 75dB.

(You Tube reviews are absolutely useless in this regard: the majority of them wind up playing distortion in the high 80's and low 90's, if not more, often displaying SPL meters proving how loud they are playing. I could stretch six rubber bands across a dustbin, mic it up, run it through a distortion pedal, and it would sound amazing at 95dB.)

If I'm content to listen over headphones (wired, too much latency with bluetooth) then I have options based on Multi-FX / Amp Sim kit, DAWs and plug-ins. This is what the professionals do when they are playing in venues with built-in PA systems or recording studios: these take output direct from the electronics, while the band will be listening through in-ears (live) or headphones (studio). Professionals only need an actual amplifier for venues without a PA.

Look at where a lot of those You Tube Guitar Gurus work: sitting on a computer chair, in front of an iMac running a DAW, surrounded by amps, cabs and other gear, with an extensive knowledge of how various computer programs - on the Mac or embedded in a piece of kit - work. Yep, in the digital world, everything becomes a computer, and everyone becomes a computer user.

No thank you. I already did that for a great many years. (What about the BOSS Tone Studio? To me it does not feel like 'using a computer'. It feels like 'twiddling a lot of dials', which is an analogue thing to do.)

So faced with the fact that spending money on gear might leave me right back where I started but a few quid shorter, I went home and had more serious attempts to get the two main tones - Marshall-ish and Fender-y - that I wanted at the volume levels I needed. (Yes, that amp is as good as everyone says it is. Somewhere in it is the tone you are looking for, though it may be the result of an odd combination of settings.) The details are in a previous post. Since then, that restless urge to upgrade or buy different gear has waned.

The final touch was setting the Neck pickup height by ear. This will cause Techs to roll their eyes, but if it's what it takes, it's what you have to do.

The Les Paul / Katana Journey is declared ended.

Now I’m starting to think about what I play, and that's really baking my noodle.

The Les Paul / Katana Tone Journey - Continued

(Updated at publication date)

The Guitar

Flat-wound 10's and liking it. 

The base setting for the dials is "all the 7's", and the pickup selector default position is in the middle.

I experimented with pickup height, and in the end did what would make a well-bred tech shudder, set the heights by tone. The neck is practically flush with the surround, and the bridge is about where a good tech would put it. Switching from neck to bridge does not lose or gain volume - the SPL meter on my iDevice confirms it. All the problems I have had with the characteristic Epiphone Pro-Bucker tone have vanished. 

The Amp

I was determined to get that Marshall-ish sound. These are the Panel settings

and this is the all-important EQ setting

The power setting is 0.5W. This is not optional. Neither is the 12dB attenuation. I have no attenuation on the 4kHz and 2kHz bands, because that's where a lot of the distortion comes from.

Use the Neck pickup, turn the tone dial to 0 and the volume to 8/9, play above the eighth fret and you will get that creamy 1960's distortion sound. There's a reason no-one needed pedals back in the 60's. Turn the tone dial back to 7 or 8, and all that crunchy Marshall-ish goodness comes back. 

This tone does not play well with anything except the Limiter. But then, if you're using it, you won't want any other effects.

Having done that, I went for the Fender-y sound. These are the Panel settings

And these are the all-important EQ settings.

There's a trick. Just a little touch, the lightest sprinkle, of the distortion effect, to put a bit of bite into the sound and stop it sounding like a sodding jazz guitar. 

The power setting is 25W. This is not optional either. 

This sound is a base for putting the modulation and time effects over: it isn't really a tone in its own right.

Neither of these sounds are the "dials at 12:00" type, and in fact are quite extreme. If they weren't, they wouldn't be iconic. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I have simplified the options, the idea being to approximate a pedals - amp - speaker set-up. The Chain has all the effects (except Reverb) are before the Pre-Amp.

Recording via USB

I've tried. Lost cause. Too much faffing around. If I want to record, I'll get the specialist gear.

Chasing The Tone

Everyone goes on and on about tone (1). It's in the fingers. It's in the wood, the pickups, the pots, the fretboard, and even the nut and tuning heads.(2) It's in the pedals and the settings. It's in the amp and the speakers.

John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter both played tenor sax. Tenor saxes are made to sound the same, because it's a band instrument. The player can make a slight difference with their choice of reeds, and their breath control. So you know how you know it's Wayne Shorter or John Coltrane playing?

They play different notes. They play different phrases. They structure phrases differently. They sound different not because one uses a Selmer and the other some other make: they sound different because they play different.

Tone is in the music.

Play My Favourite Things, with fuzz, blues drive, lots of reverb, chorus, slow drive, whatever... it's still My Favourite Things and it's still a showtune. At no point does it become a metal anthem. It has a mood all its own, and turns all the tone-gear into a sound effect.

There's a video of Jimi Hendrix playing an acoustic guitar. He sounds like himself, playing an acoustic. Because he's playing Hendrix phrases and chords.

Bad news for people chasing that SRV / Hendrix / Beano Album / Dave Gilmour / whoever tone: if they want to sound like Dave Gilmour, they will have to play like Dave Gilmour.

All those pedals and amps are sound effects. The sound effects are an extension of the electric guitar - and in John Martyn's Glistening Glynbourne, the acoustic guitar as well.

Ambient is all about the sound effects, not the tone. So are a lot of post-rock instrumentals. The guitarists in rock bands don't have a tone, they provide the sonic backdrop required for the song, which changes from song to song. They might have a personal style of soloing, or creating fills, or a distinctive rhythm attack, and that's how you know who it is. Not because they of the distortion setting on their RAT pedal.

Learning what sound effects are available is part of learning to play the electric guitar. Every guitarist should know how to get a Blues tone, a fat jazz tone, a biting bridge rock 'n roll tone, and so on. Even if they never use them. That's knowing your instrument. (The Katana is outstanding in making that possible at a stupid low cost compared to buying a valve amp, interface, mic, pedals, and supporting gear.)

The search for tone is partly learning your sound effects, but it's really the search for your voice.


(1) Defined as the distinctive sound of a given guitar or guitarist, that only vanishes after excessive amounts of metal distortion or ambient effects.

(2) According to John Lill, the sound of a guitar is in the scale length, the position of the pickup(s) from the bridge, the height of the pickups, the pickup wiring, and the settings on the tone and volume pots.