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.
- Get a guitar and an amp.
- Learn to tune your guitar.
- Learn to play it, at least a little bit.
- 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.
- Learn to string and set up (intonate, etc) your guitar.
- Try different strings and picks.
- Get a boost, fuzz, overdrive, distortion type pedal that costs between $25 and $90, depending on your budget.
- Dream big.