Adam Gerow’s Skyturtle

The sound of an electric guitar even in the simplest rigs,  is an ecosystem of moving and changing parts. After your brain says “power chord”, your body has to perform the task.  Most likely you are holding a pick, which affects your tone.  You’re probably holding down a note on the fretboard, which may be maple, a layer of rosewood on maple, or something else. No electric guitar has a mandatory set of strings, so you have a choice to make there too. You have a world of options in every direction.
If you’re wondering why there aren’t more A:B comparisons of, for example, Strats and Les Pauls, part of the reason is that great rigs are often tailored to the specific guitar. At the very least, the pedals and amp may need to be adjusted when switching, at which point its hard to tell which thing you’re hearing in the A:B comparison.

Best Practices

What can we glean from all this? Change your strings. Okay, that’s a metaphor.  Make an investigation of the tone of your strings–the gauge, the materials, the action, the age, and the tuning–part of the fun. Then, investigate everything else in the same level of detail, especially things like picks and pick-up height, where price isn’t much of an issue. If you can avoid hurrying past this part, it will pay off big later.

My local guitar center has a really good salesman that looks like the devil. Really. He’s Bic™ bald except for two little fire-engine-red tufts of hair that are moussed into horns. So, for whatever reason, he’s chosen a path that requires him to tend to this matter every day. I can’t relate to that at all.

I suppose there’s a percentage of people that, being distracted by the horns, won’t notice that he asks questions, listens to the answer, and attempts to take that answer into account in reply. Since logical conversation and reliable information about gear is much more important to me than mainstream coiffure, I’ve not missed it here.

I wouldn’t mention this at all except that the question-answer-response sequence is awfully hard to come by. Plenty of people know more about gear than I’ll ever forget, but will mistakenly presume to know what you’re looking for just by looking at you, or worse, that regardless of what you’re looking for, you’ll be seeking after their tone soon enough.

Some tone chasers have the means to buy vintage guitars and the legendary stomp boxes intended primarily to drive expensive tube amps into harmonic bliss. Such players invariably know a thing or two about making a great rig sound even better. That doesn’t mean they’ll be good resource for taking your Crate and Samick combo to the next level. Other tone chasers are really gear chasers, and if you’re looking to acquire part numbers and specs, will be just what the doctor ordered.  Be forewarned however, that gear chasers don’t always identify themselves as such.

The good news is that–unlike Love or the Economy–after a while it will make perfect sense.

Human eyesight is dependent on change–if the eye is motionless it ceases to see, the image goes blank. Frankly, ears aren’t all that different.  You hear (or notice) the changes in tone much more than the foundations of it.  This phenomenon is the genesis of a lot of unhelpful advice for tone chasers.

Bobby says that what you really need to do is get a distortion pedal like the one he just got–it’s unbelievable how much difference it makes. Bobby is wrong. He’s not lying, it’s just that he’s gotten used to his $850 Strat and dad’s old 50 watt Fender Bassman. Meanwhile, your Korean Squatacaster is squawking through a Peavy amp that you suspect is for keyboards. While this is an exaggerated example, the principle is nearly ubiquitous.

Best Practices

The first thing to do here is cast a wide net. I know, I know, Bobby just shreds, and he’s been playing for years.  Forget it! Going on one person’s advice–mine included–adds risk while robbing you of perspective.  When it works out, it might not be for the reason you thought; when it doesn’t, you can’t examine the advice you didn’t take. In this case, you don’t even need to know other guitarists–learn from any decent book about guitars. You can’t put icing on every kind of brown sound.

Instead of trying to paint over your tone, here’s a rough sketch of how you might build a good foundation.

1. Get a guitar and an amp.
2. Learn to tune your guitar.
3. Learn to play it, at least a little bit.
4. Get a feel for where you can go with your amp’s volume and gain controls, and how they interact with your guitar’s volume, tone, and pick-up controls.
5. Learn to string and set up (intonate, etc) your guitar.
6. Try different strings and picks.
7. Get a boost, fuzz, overdrive, distortion type pedal that costs between $25 and $90, depending on your budget.
8. Dream big.