Learning Electric Guitar: Welcome to Tone.

Classical players do not have to deal with tone. Almost all acoustic guitars of the same size with the same strings sound almost the same. Pluck or pick near the bridge, and all of them sound snappier and twangier. Pick near the bottom of the fretboard, and all of them sound rounder and smoother. (This also applies to electric guitars, because it's physics.) It takes about ten minutes to appreciate the range of tones available from an acoustic, and another ten to convince yourself that, yes, resting your hand on the soundboard does take a little off the treble frequencies.

Start by trying each type of string, from flat-wound to pro-steels, to get an idea of what each one sounds like. I would stick to one string maker to keep the variables down. And try 9, 10, and 11 gauge. (Yes, it makes a difference. 9's feel thin against the fingers and a way easier to bend.) Play DR Blues 9's or 10's and you may never buy another brand again. 

 
I understand that kids these days do not buy amplifiers. They buy an interface (say a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2), plug it into their Macbook, make all the modifications in Garageband or some other DAW, and listen over a £69 pair of headphones via the interface loopback. This is one way to do it, and I understand that this is now taught in primary schools, or is just intuitively obvious to anyone under fifteen. The weakness in this method is headphone quality. If you do go this route, get decent headphones, say, Sennheiser HD560S or better. You ears will thank you.

Amps. Valve vs solid state vs modellers, Fenders vs Marshalls vs Vox vs Roland JC's vs Boss Katanas vs the list is endless. 

(Fender Blues Junior)

You Tube demos and reviews are a reasonable starting-point. YT audio is heavily-processed and that's before your laptop or phone soundcard gets at it. If an amp sounds bad on YT, it most likely will sound bad in your room. You should try them out in a store, but only if the resident shredder is being quiet.

The amps in You Tube demos are always cranked. Those lovely crunchy rock tones can only be obtained at 85 dB and more - just look at the dB meters in the background of Andertons videos - and with a valve amp. Half the time, there are pedals as well, but those might not get mentioned. Below that, you will only ever get a clean tone, with maybe a pinch of distortion from an effects pedal. It will sound different, but it won't sound... glorious. If you're playing jazz or blues, it's fine. But if you want that big stadium-rock / metal sound... you will need to record into a DAW, apply the effects there, and listen over headphones. Learning to use a DAW well does not happen in an afternoon. Or sound-proof your room.

Well-meaning people will suggest a Katana. 

It is excellent value for money, it has a pre-amp volume, a Master volume and an attenuator / power control, so it provides lots of bites at the volume control cherry. It has decent effects - many based on BOSS's own pedals, so they should know - built in, and control software that lays everything out really well. The only thing you need to know is how to EQ it so it provides a reasonable approximation to a "real" amp. 

The majority of recorded guitar sounds you have heard have been played through Fender amps, with Marshalls and Vox's a distant second and third. Fender amps are bright, light, clean, and like a sunny day on the beach. Marshalls are darker, heftier, distort more readily, and are like a funfair at night. Fenders are an easier place to start. To get close to that sound with a Katana (I don't know about the other modelling amps) takes implausibly extreme EQ settings. (See this post for details.) However, the base level valve amps (a Fender Blues Junior or a Fender Vibro Champ) are at least twice as much as a Katana or other modelling amp. 

Guitar amps are loud. For the same wattage, nearly twice as loud as a pair of hi-fi speakers. 1 watt through a 12-inch Celestion speaker 

will produce between 95-100dB, which is well into Health and Safety territory. 1 watt. You don't need 2, let alone 100. Watts are used as a proxy for build and component quality: within the same manufacturer and range, mo' watts generally means mo' quality. A Fender Blues Junior provides 15 watts, and the Vibro Champ provides 5 watts. That means the Blues Junior is about 5dB (i.e. not a lot) louder at full power than the Vibro Champ. All the volume is in the first watt. 

Having chosen your amp (on the basis of reviews, what your mates said, budget, volume, weight, and looks, as well as how it sounded in the store) you need to get a sound you like from it. This will not be done in an hour. You need to hear how the the sound varies with how high or low you have the guitar turned up, what effect the tone knobs have, and what effect the amp EQ controls have. Hearing the all-important difference between gain and volume, and finding out when to use gain (as little as possible).

Later on you can buy a digital multi-effects pedal, such as the Helix HX Effects, 

to start experimenting with effects. Compression, distortion, drive and fuzz; chorus, flanger, tremolo, phaser, and weird stuff like ring modulators. Reverb and delay. Those rabbit-holes go deep. Or if you never want a pension, you can buy separate pedals.

Now watch a video that explains how the guitar sound you hear on your favourite track is not actually what you think it is. What goes on in the mixing desk, and the mastering process, can make more difference than anything you're doing with your pedals. What it takes to sound good in your bedroom rehearsal space on your own, is not what it takes to sound good when playing live, and when in the studio.

It's all good nerdy fun. But it's a much bigger workload than guitarists had back in the 1960's. No-one tried to sound like anyone else, and there were almost no pedals. Now it's not enough to learn someone else's notes, you also have to get a good approximation of their tone. Effects were made in the studio by huge bits of equipment that cost as much as a house did back then. Now every guitar player needs to be their own sound engineer - until they get into the studio, if they ever do.

Learning Electric Guitar: The Guitar

If you must play electric guitar, make your first one a single-coil. Fender, Squier. A Telecaster 

for preference, though you should try a Stratocaster, because a Tele neck is like a half-a-baseball-bat. If you have a bit more money, try a PRS Silver Sky SE,

which is PRS's only single-coil guitar. The overwhelming majority of guitar sounds you have heard are single coils through Fender amps. Single coils keep their tone through a much wider range of volume change than humbuckers do. Leave the Gibsons, Epiphones, any other PRS, and the others, because getting a good tone from humbuckers is a long journey with many false ends.

Learning scales and modes, and all the fancy picking techniques, takes time and practice, but it isn't hard. Learning the chords, if you do it by rote, is harder because you need to learn to move all four fingers at the same time, like some ballet dancer on all fours.

Making sense of chords is a task. It does not help that guitar chord books show you "chords called A-something". Which is not what anyone needs. Which is a book that shows us "chords in the key of A" (A major, B minor, C♯ minor, D major, E major, F♯ minor, G♯ diminished - for a start) which are scattered all over those books. (An A minor chord is not in the key of A. It is in the keys of C, F, and G major, and also A, D and E minor.)

Everybody talks about the major and pentatonic scale "shapes", but nobody talks about the chord shape-sequences that make up the chords in a scale. You may get a mention of Nashville numbers and cowboy chords (all the chords you can play in the first position with minimum use of barre chords). Oh yes, and barre chords. That will take way more time that anyone lets on, unless you're a natural.

This may all come easily to you. Maybe you got the same brain wiring Davy Graham did - some of the Tik-Tok players undoubtedly have. Maybe you have perfect pitch, or darn good relative pitch, and you have picked up without knowing it what sounds are where on the fretboard, so you can play back a phrase after hearing it once. A lot of people can do that, but even more cannot. Maybe you can just play stuff out of thin air - that's what it takes to improvise. A lot of people can, and far more cannot. Maybe you take to reading tab, or to reading proper notation. Like reading words aloud, some people are better at it than others, almost from the start. Maybe you can form muscle memories quickly, but maybe you're like most of us, and you need to play-it-or-lose-it.

And the guitar is only half the instrument, unless you are going to play jazz, when you only need half the guitar (because jazz only uses the neck pick-up).

Minimum Age for Social Media

I read in our fine print media, that according to many people, the minimum age for social media use should be 16.

I beg to differ.

The minimum age for using social media should be 45.

Up to then, people should be...

doing homework, passing A-levels, going to university to make friends, read books (and online lecture notes) and get a degree, finding a job afterwards (good luck with that), finding somewhere to live that isn't at your parents (good luck with that as well), finding someone with whom to share your life (because that's the way I've always heard it should be, and really good luck with that), getting new jobs because promotions don't come with pay rises anymore (more good luck), having and raising children, and all that stuff. Which defeats most people even if they aren't wasting their time scrolling through the carefully-edited posts of their Facebook friends.

Social media is for professionals to advertise their services. It always only ever was about advertising.

Better living through less exposure to advertising.

And after 45 you won't give a toss who is selling what.

The Great Tone Journey (Cont)

It's been a long time since I've written about my Hunt For Tone. I know, you've been missing it.

I'm after tones that make me want to play more notes because the sound is pleasing. I'm not after the Beano tone (really). I have no desire to sound like Dave Gilmour (honestly Guv). I have accepted that in my bedroom, I must temper my ambitions. Also the one benefit of being an amateur is that one can sound like oneself. It's the pros who need to be able to sound like other people.

None of this applies to using a DAW and its effects and plug-ins. I'm still using old-school things like amplifiers and digital pedals. And guitars. With strings.

None of the Guitar Tubers who talk about tone come right out and say that at bedroom volumes (less than around 75dB at one metre from the speaker) it is simply not possible to get full-bodied crunchy, drive-y, distortion-y tones. Those come from valve amps, the valves need to be driven, and that requires serious amounts of dB's.

Pedals will not do the trick. I have tried every effect in my trusty Helix HX Effects, and while they get close if the humidity and air temperature is just right, none quite get the full-bodied sound we are looking for.

My Paranormal Telecaster has been the single most significant learning experience in the whole search. Single coils don't lose tone as the volume goes down, and don't gain it appreciably as the volume goes up. There's a change, but it's not from WOW to OH-UH. That's what happens with the humbuckers on my McCarty 594 SE. At 8 and above, the sound is all there. At 7 or below it goes flubby, rubbery - the strings feel like rubber bands under my fingers, which is totally a psychological effect, but we're talking about psychology here. Unless I use a fuzz pedal, when it's all just fine at 5 - and that's with the fuzz level control turned down a lot.

So I've learned to separate the effects of twiddling the humbucker volumes from twiddling the effect controls. I set the effect up with the Tele (single coils), and then check it on the McCarty (humbuckers). As long as the humbuckers are 8 or more, it usually works.

The EQ is the final part of the chain, and that is there to correct for the Katana, not the guitars. On a 10-band EQ pedal, this is +15dB on 62 and 125Hz, +21dB on 2k and 4k Hz, and -20dB on 8kHz and 16kHz. This requires two EQ blocks in the HX Effects, and the second one makes the difference.

The signal chain is now: guitar -> HX Effects -> Katana Power Amp In, and HX Effects -> Scarlett 2i2 -> DAW.

The basic clean chain is: LA Compressor -> '63 Spring reverb -> EQ1 + EQ2. 

Distortion pedals work better in <i>parallel</i> with the main signal chain. I put a Y-split after the compressor, place the Y-join before the Reverb and EQ pedals, put the distortion in the B-channel, set it up so it sounds good, then take some dB out at the Y-join. The Helix Y-connectors provide that functionality. I've got three drive pedals, each in its own panel. 

The settings work for both guitars, though the ODs sound different when hit by humbuckers or by single-coils. Which is the way it should be.

(edited 20/2/2025)

The Good Life Treadmill

Since people had time to sit around and think about stuff, they have wondered how they should live, and what a "good life" is. Not a fun life, or an exciting life, or a boring life, or a safe life, all of which are very easy to define in any given society at any given time, but the far more elusive "good life". Whatever that is. Kudos in funeral orations or obituaries? Nobel Prizes? A life lived without once appearing before the magistrates on some sordid or serious charge? What feels worthy, or righteous, or proper, or grown-up, or spiritual, or, well, anything that lets us claim virtue-status over the mere hedonists?

The psychologists have come up with just such a description. Not for what you or I would call a good life if we lived it, but what liberal, middle-class, postgraduate-degree-holding, urban-living, people familiar with the pop-culture would think they should say if asked what makes people feel as if they are living a good life.

Invariably it looks something like this (taken with minor edits from an actual source):

1. Healthy living and functioning

2. Having hobbies and recreational pursuits we enjoy 

3. Doing work that allows us to feel, from time to time, as if we are highly competent at the job 

4. Relatedness - intimate, romantic, and familial relationships 

5. Connection to wider social groups 

6. Feeling good in the here and now 

7. Inner peace - freedom from emotional turmoil and stress 

8. Feeling well informed about things that are important to us 

9. A sense of autonomy, power and self-directedness 

10. Finding meaning and purpose in life 

11. Creativity allowing self-expression

Seriously. This is what they came up with. Word for word. My heart sinks every time I look at it. It's so darn... icky-sweet-nice. Like those articles about Ten Things Dying Patients Say - Number Seven Will Surprise You. I seriously doubt anyone ever said they regretted working too hard. Everyone I've ever seen working long hours has been doing so to avoid going back to the Divorce Flat, or a housemates-marriage. But I digress...

There are no qualifications, no conditions. It's mind-snappingly obvious (I will feel better if I'm not exposed to emotional turmoil and stress, and if I feel good in the here and now? Gee, who knew?), and also highly non-specific (what the hey is "healthy living and functioning" in a world where there is research to condemn or praise any darn diet or exercise regime under the sun?). Which is intentional. It is supposed to get us arguing about what it means, rather than whether it should be there at all.

It misses the point entirely. A good life does not consist of doing a whole bunch of things so that you can do a whole bunch of other things so you can do the whole bunch of things again. That's a treadmill, and Marty Augustine, the gangster in Chandler's The Long Goodbye, knew it: I gotta make a lot of money. I gotta make a lot of money, so I can juice the guys I gotta juice, so I can make a lot of money, so I can juice the guys I gotta juice.

When we do something so we can do something else later, that's called "work". And too often 'later' never comes. Everything is work, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, and even sleep is about productivity and health, so that makes it work as well. The psychologist's 11-point good life is work: we are not advised to have friends because hanging with the bros is a neat way to waste the time, but because it gives us a feeling of connection that forestalls loneliness. We even need to "feel good in the here and now" because then we might not take drugs, get drunk, eat too much, or spend time in dark corners of the Internet. Everything we do is always about something else.

When everything we do is about something else we're going to do, or not going to do, or something that might happen, or that might not happen, that's not actual living. It's not even training. It's prep-work - but without ever getting to the actual decorating, let alone having a pleasant room to live in.

Which is a problem, because the things we enjoy doing are the things we do for the sake of the process, not the result. So if everything we do is about something else, we're not enjoying anything we do. Because it's something we are doing for some other reason other than doing it. (See Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, the chapter on Emotion, for details.)

I'd suggest that a good life is one in which a sizeable chunk of what we do is about itself. It prepares us for nothing, and prevents us from nothing. It is not something we do so we can do something else. It might be something we do so we can get something done: ironing, taking photographs, writing blog posts, hanging with the bros, watching a movie, putting the world to rights, fixing the roof, washing the car, reading a history book, lifting weights... as long as we are doing it because it is what we want to do, and we don't want to be doing anything else in that time, and it's not being done because then we can do something else, or then we will have a tick against some To-Do List.

(Edited - a lot - 15/3/2025)

Who's The Customer?

Sounds like an obvious question with an obvious answer.

The customer is whoever buys it and uses it.

That works in Tesco.

No, wait. You got that shopping list from your partner. You're the errand boy, and you're paying, but it's your partner who will be using that stuff and expressing disappointment if you forgot the radishes and got the wrong brand of pasta. (You didn't know there was a wrong brand of pasta?) You are Tesco's customer, and your partner is your customer.

How about the NHS? You don't pay for NHS treatment, so you can't be the customer. Patients are just raw material for the process. Who pays? The Government does. Whose complaints get attention? Um. The staff, especially the consultants and surgeons. Maybe the managers listen to the politicians, but mostly not. The NHS does not have a customer. Which is why it is a self-contained, unaccountable, uncontrollable organisation. They are all going to get paid no matter how long the queues.

By contrast, Harley Street has customers. They're called "clients" because Harley Street is posh.

Who are the customers for universities? Foreign students actually pay with their (parents') own money. UK students "borrow" money from the Government to pay, but the debt is not distrainable and does not count against the credit score. UK students also borrow money from the bank, and get some from their parents. Sounds to me like they are just the means by which that money gets to the Bursar. Like NHS patients, undergraduates are raw material for the process. The Government is paying for the universities to provide an illusion of employability and education. The parents are paying in the hope that it's not all an illusion. The one group we have overlooked are the academics: they are expected to bring in research grants. Those are handed out by the Government. So that makes the State the customer, and it dictates what gets researched. (Yes, all that junk soft science is actually commissioned by people who know it is junk. You wouldn't want the money spent on real research would you?)

Who are the customers for airports? Not passengers. Airlines.

Who are the customers for airlines? Some of the customers are the actual passengers. But then Ryanair gets a chunk of money from provinces for flying into their regional airport. So that's Government again.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out who is the customer for Social Services? And who is just raw material for the process.

It's a wonderfully clarifying question.

The Sophons Arrived in 1995

In Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy, sophons are neutron-sized supercomputers with a propulsion system that can whizz around the solar system in no time and mess up any experiments we do that might advance our understanding of fundamental physics.

(Yes, I know, but it makes for an interesting read.)

That has to be the best explanation of why, all of a sudden in the mid-1990's, everything stopped developing: physics, music, politics, fashion, art, literature, mathematics, movies, name it. There have been engineering advances in computing, but no fundamental breakthroughs, and look at what that got us. TikTok, dating apps, Facebook, the Lockdowns, working from home, mass-scale social flaking, and Netflix. Yep, real progress.

I think the Sophons are distracting us with that stuff.

The essence of Sophon intervention is that it should look as if it's a neat idea and will make our lives better, easier or more fun; absorbs a huge amount of effort and smart people in its implementation; but after a while turns out not to be such a good idea after all.

I hereby suggest that the adjective 'Sophonic' be used to describe anything that meets these criteria, and those who devise and push be described as 'Sophons'.

Not all distractions are Sophonic, we do quite enough on our own to distract ourselves. Celebrity and royal gossip is just plain ordinary stuff, as is corporate PR. Political BS has always been with us. Bogus research in psychology, social "sciences", behavioural "sciences", not to mention anything prefaced by "Evolutionary", are just plain old-fashioned academic BS.

The Green agenda and Climate Change were taken over and exploited by the Sophons. I demur from suggesting what research in maths is Sophonic, but String Theory and Supersymmetry are both clearly Sophonic. Facebook, Instgram, Pinterest, TikTok, You Tube, and the rest... all Sophonic media.