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.

Why I Just Bought a HELIX Effects pedal

Helix have built a suite of products around a microprocesser and two chunks of software: a bunch of algorithms that emulate various well-known pedals and amps; and a configuration management program for those algorithms. (My guess is that they developed a bunch of specialised software objects on the way to writing the configuration manager.)

The Helix Floor (£1,199) is the top-end version: amp sims, cab sims, mic sims, and effects out the wazoo. The Helix LT (£839) is a (slightly) lite version of the Floor. Both have USB outputs for recording into a DAW, and both have expression pedals.

The Helix Effects (£479) is a single-chip unit that provides the “only” the effects. To record via USB into your DAW, something like the iRig HD2 (£89) is needed. If you want an expression pedal, you’ll have to buy one for a minimum of around £69.(1)

All three use the same configuration management software, and the same set-up of knobs, dials, touch-screens and buttons. The Floor and the Effects have “scribble strips” above each button that show what effect is assigned to it. The LT doesn’t.

All three can have “jam track” output from a phone sent through the FX Loop Return and patched straight to the output, by-passing the effects. (This means we don’t have to buy a mixer.)

The Effects has no amp sims and is for playing through a guitar amplifier and speaker. The LT and Floor have amp sims, and are for venue PA’s, studio desks, recording into DAWs, FRFR speakers and studio monitors. Putting amp sims into an amplifier is regarded as downright perverse.

Who are these for? This is GuitarLand, where hobbyists have loadsamoney, and the pros are broke. Given the cost of separate pedals, power supplies, and making a pedalboard, it’s the hobbyists who buy pedals. (Also, there’s a learning curve associated with the Helix and other stuff, whereas pedals are pretty much plug-it-in-and-twiddle-the-knobs.) The pros go for these integrated units. Less cost, less fuss to transport, and easier to set up on arrival.

I’m a broke hobbyist - the worst of both worlds. I think the functionality provided by the Helix Effects + USB recording + expression pedal is the starting point. And I don’t need to buy them all at once. At the start, I will play it through the Katana on the Clean channel with no effects - except maybe for some channel EQ.

How much am I losing without the amp sims? There’s nothing magic about amp / cabinet / mic sims: they are another bunch of effects, in this case a way of getting the Fender / Marshall / Vox / Hi Watt / Orange / (enter manufacturer name here) clean / driven / distortion / (enter name of effect here) sound that comes from the amp itself.(2)

Using amp sims would mean replacing the Katana, and this is where the previous discussion comes in. “Upgrading” to a conventional valve amp is not a feasible route, for reasons of volume, and it’s still an amp in its own right, so all I’m really doing is swapping one “flavoured” amp for another. The current batch of FRFR amp combos are aimed at being loud, rather than at the home market. That leaves powered studio monitors. A pair of Kali IN-8 (in white, black looks awful) is around £650, and they have their supporters. (There are monitors for £2,000+ the pair, and more than that.) And studio monitors are good for listening to output from DAWs, should I get that far.

Of course, I could swap out the Katana for the monitors whether I use amp sims or not. If I’m happy with the clean / driven / distortion tone I’m getting from the effects (aka pedals) of the Helix Effects, do I really need amp sims? I think the only answer is to try it and see.


(1) All prices exclude cable, which the marketeers assume us to have lying around, since we’re all old hands at this.
(2) Allegedly. Don’t forget that since the mid-70’s, at concerts, we heard those amps through mics, mixing boards and PA speakers, and in many cases what’s on a recording bears only a slight resemblence to what was heard in the studio.

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.

Health Report

 I have another cold. I am sure I caught it on an over-crowded train from Waterloo to Twickenham Saturday afternoon. I gather the match was quite spectacular. My head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton wool.

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.

Wim Wender’s Perfect Day

I’m trying to remember when in the last twenty years I must have met Wim Wenders and why he would have been interested enough in my life to listen to me describe it. Up to some details - I have never cleaned up-market Tokyo toilets for a living, and I don’t have any relatives who have chauffeur-driven cars - the life his central character Hirayama leads is very close to the one I lead for a decade or more. The moments when Hirayama (aka, me, played by Koji Yakusho, who is far more distinguished than I) stops reading and turns the light off get the feeling wonderfully. Wenders understands it as the ultimate expression of the autonomy of the single: we decide when our day is done, we end it quietly, and sleep. No-one can suddenly start talking, arrive home late, fidget, throw a mood, or otherwise mess with our final waking moments.

We older single men have our routines, we take small pleasures in some of the moments of our days, we may read, listen to music and watch movies, go to the gym (Hirayama goes to a public bath) and have regular places to eat and drink, and from the outside it looks like a life, and on the inside it can feel like a pleasant routine, but it is paper-thin, and we have no links with the people in it other than our habitual economic relations. I do recall Wenders giving me an ambiguous look when I described it like that, and here we are those years later, and it’s clear he got the point perfectly.

The film is not a portrayal of the joys of the well-organised single life. The repeated morning- and after-work routine sequences create the sense that Hirayama is in some kind of emotional stasis. (See also All That Jazz.)

The film ends with Hirayama being asked, by her former husband, who has cancer, to look after the lady who runs his favourite bar. When asked, he demurs, and the husband, says that he is counting on him. The last we see of Hirayama, he has a tearfully smiling face, intensely staring through the windscreen of his van at the future. He has found, as far as Wenders is concerned, the chance of a connection with another person, and that is a source of both happiness and sorrow.

I do remember Wenders suggesting that maybe I might find a relationship even in those my later years. He seemed to think it would be a Good Thing. Hard to explain the draw of bachelorhood to a man on his fifth marriage, so I didn’t.

“Perfect Day” is the most-misunderstood song. The day isn’t perfect because of what the singer does, or who he does it with, but because he is able to forget what a lousy person he is, or perhaps, what a rotten opinion he has of himself. (I think it’s a drug song, but then I would. Others think it’s a song about being with another person.)

This is where it gets interesting. Perhaps all Hirayama’s “perfect days” are a way of forgetting something that he did, or how he was, at some time in the past. In which case, we have a movie about a man hiding from his past in work, culture and routine.

Which would mean Wenders really did understand my life back then.

Leaving only the question of when and where we met.

Hypergamy aka The Servant Takes The Money…

The concept of hypergamy originates in India: the word was introduced in a nineteenth-century English translation of Indian law. It referred to marriages where the partners did not come from the same caste, and hence (since the caste system is linear) one had a higher caste than the other, and the other had a lower caste than the one. The concept made sense because the caste system was codified and widely understood in Indian society.

That the translators had to invent a word suggests that there wasn’t already one in English, and so the behaviour had not been identified as a thing-in-itself. Possibly because there wasn’t a defined social hierarchy in English society at the time. This doesn’t mean that some groups of people didn’t think they were better than other groups of people, it means the law or some other institution didn’t codify and enforce those judgements.

Applying the idea of hypergamy without referring to an established social hierarchy is a tricky bit of concept-stretching. There’s a temptation to define it in terms of the economist’s generalised “value”, which might include anything, and which, crucially, depends on each person’s evaluation of whatever it is that carries the “value” - money, status, kindness, influence, social skills and so on. Two people may agree on the facts, on the things to be valued, but assign different values to each of the things. For example, social skills that are valuable to one person, are useless to another.

This makes arguments using the concept of hypergamy tricky. One partner in a relationship may think of it as having an equal flow of value, and hence assortive, while the other sees a consistent net transfer of value from them, and hence sees their partner as hypergamous. At this point, the concept ceases to be useful, because it has dissolves into unresolvable disputes over evaluations, rather than facts. Transfers of “generalised value” are not matters of public fact: the what of the transfer is, but the value each person places on it is not.

So to define hypergamy, we need a bunch of resources that can be publicly observed and measured (in some equally public) way. Typically this would include wealth, income, social standing, political influence, and similar. Secretaries marrying bosses and nurses marrying doctors used to be the romantic staple. This can’t include everything, for a reason we will see shortly.

A question is whether the consistent net transfer of hypergamic resources from A to B, creates an obligation on B to balance it by doing things outside the hypergamy-criteria, that A finds valuable on a personal level. For instance, a man with money, reputation and social standing may have a partner who provides a sunny attitude, support, loyalty and a splendid cooked breakfast. That’s what’s been missing from his life, and that’s the balancing personal value she provides.

Answers can be argued in all directions. We might say that the institution of marriage puts men under an obligation to provide a net flow of resources without thought of “reward”: ask not what your wife can do for you, but what you can do for your wife. We might say she was being a free-loading ingrate if she didn’t provide a balancing personal return. We might say that relationships are not supposed to be zero-sum transfers of resources and favours, but opportunities for each partner to show their love by selfless sacrifice to the needs of the other. And other such sophistries to support our chosen side of the argument. This is a dead end.

The attitude of the partners is important. If she chooses to be a sourpuss to demonstrate that she damn well feels no hypergamy-induced obligations, that’s her decision. She might have chosen to be graceful instead. If A is domineering because “it’s his money”, that’s also his choice: he might have chosen to be gracefully generous instead.

As I understand Dr Orion Taraband’s discussion of hypergamy, his claim is that a) hypergamy is a feature of female nature (and indeed “female nature” may shape the list of hypergamic resources), b) the net transfer of hypergamic resources from him to her effectively makes her a servant (because in all societies, the servant takes the money), and c) women don’t like being in that position, so they turn into sourpusses. Unless they decide to be graceful, and since Dr Taraban practices in the San Francisco Bay Area, he doesn’t see much of that.

There is no causal link between being a (hypergamic) “servant” and being a sourpuss. It’s an understandable consequence, but it’s not inevitable. It shows us that the key question to ask about a possible partner is: will this person turn into a sourpuss if she thinks she’s being paid? To see that question is to see that the real questions is simply: will this person turn into a sourpuss given the way I think I’m going to be behaving in this relationship?, because my behaviour is a factor as well. Some of you can do relationships, and some of us can’t.

The moral of this tale is that men and women need to know what a good partner looks like, and whether they are one themselves. Men need to understand that she’s a good partner because she had (by today’s standards) an exceptional father and mother, and if he doesn’t match up to Dad, she’s going to get upset and leave, or stay and turn into a sourpuss. Women need to understand that he’s a good partner because he had (by today’s standards) an exceptional father and mother, and if she doesn’t match up to Mom, she’s going to feel very out-of-place around him, and will get upset and leave, or stay and turn into a sourpuss.

I can’t stress this last point enough. Men who want “good women” must be “good men” themselves, and women who want “good men” must be “good women” themselves. How likely is this in a society in which forty per cent of sixteen year-olds are not living with both their biological parents?

A large proportion of the population simply has no idea what a “good partner” looks like, or how a “good partnership” works. They never see it.

A lot of people make lousy choices of partner: always have, always will. If they didn’t have hypergamic criteria to help them make those lousy choices, they would invent others. If they didn’t make lousy choices, around half the population would wind up single and childless. That’s what is starting to happen now, but not because people are making better choices or preferring to go without. It’s because they can’t find a hypergamically-acceptable partner who makes them think a bad choice might be a good idea.