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Getting good electric guitar tone is just really difficult. And super personal. And people are always saying all kinds of crazy things about it. They'll say stuff like, ‘I want my tone to sound less woody and more like honey, you know?’ Er, no. I don’t know. What on earth does that even mean? And it’s weird, because I always feel like many of the people who spend so much time practicing just never really get around to working seriously on their sound. So you’ve put in the 10,000 hours, you’ve mastered all that technique, scaled the very heights of virtuosity and musicality, but then you’re not quite sure what do when you plug into an amp. That’s not cool. It’s like spending a decade training to become a world champion cyclist, but on the day of the big race you just turn up with your kid brother’s ride, with its flat tyres and its rusty chain. Don’t be that person.
As far as instruments go, the guitar is one that is full to the brim with sonic complexity and possibilities. It is not like a piano where you are mostly limited by how hard or soft you press stuff. I find when I am playing guitar I go for all kinds of things. Sometime I will hit the notes with a pick. Sometimes I like to whimsically tuck my guitar pick under my fourth finger and play more with my thumb to get a softer attack. Sometimes I like to hammer on notes, or go between between single notes and double stops and chords. Sometimes its arpeggios using some kind of right hand technique. Or maybe its playing near the bridge or near the neck or bending notes. Or muting strings when I pluck them, or staying on the bottom pitched strings to get more of a bass guitar vibe. And then there are harmonics. You get the picture.
And so all of these crazy sound hijinks need to get somehow translated from the guitar into a pickup, through whatever effects I am running, then into a preamp, an amp, maybe a speaker cabinet, and maybe out into the mixer through a microphone or line out. Sheesh! What a minefield.
Navigating such complexity is also really not helped by the guitar community itself. I mean, that crowd just provides the most unbelievably unhelpful information when it comes to guitar tone. And the information is so often delivered in such evangelical ways. And everything, I mean everything, has some kind of crazy name in the guitar world. Like it actually makes sense for me to say that I am going to run my guitar through some hot rails into my Blue Boy and into my Rat and into my Warden into my Rainbow Machine and through an Aural Dream before heading into a Mesa Boogie. Like what now? Are we even talking about music anymore?
So my point here is that you definitely should have some kind of framework to create and evolve your guitar tone. And with that in mind, here is article 1 of 2 to discuss it. Now even if you stop reading right now, I am going to implore you to take one piece of advice really seriously:
You absolutely, positively, must make guitar tone as much of a priority as all the other aspects of your practice.
So I have this friend of mine right, and he is always banging on about the signal chain. Signal chain this, signal chain that. And what he is really getting at is that we need be aware of all the things that can possibly effect you sound, from your choice of guitar pick right through to the room you are playing in. And this guy is totally on the money. You need to deal with all of this stuff.
And so what are these things in the signal chain? I count eight of them. And if you are serious about electric guitar tone you will need to have opinions on them all. They are as follows:
Guitar pick/plectrum
Guitar pickups
Choice of effects and pedals
Choice of preamp
Choice of amp
Microphone position picking up the signal from the amp
Choice of speaker cabinet
Limitations of the room
Now you will immediately notice there are a couple of things I haven’t mentioned here. And people may get super weird about my omissions. The first is, surprisingly it would seem, the guitar itself is not mentioned. I am going to put myself out there and say the choice of electric guitar doesn’t really make much difference. I know. Ouch. That might hurt. Sorry. Try not to go all Ford and Ferrari on me. I know that there is the Fender crowd, and the Ibanez lovers, and the Paul Reed Smith enthusiasts, and on it goes. People love different brands and that is all fine. But the sonic reality is that, for an electric guitar, we are talking about a pickup sitting on a lacquered wood finish that picks up electrical signal when you hit a note. The guitar is not going to make a noticeable difference.
My decision on the type of guitar I use is actually driven by other factors. And you’ll have to excuse the philosophical pivot, but the look and brand of the guitar itself is really just some kind of cultural construct. Like I want it cos its cool, not because it brings some kind of sonic contribution. For me, I want something that has a neck that feels good to me to play personally. I also like guitars that are on the lighter side (I just don’t want to lug around heavy stuff these days). There are other factors too. Like if I feel like if I were to turn up to do a solo jazz guitar gig with one of those Randy Rhodes triangle guitars, or an Allan Holdsworth Steinberger, I don’t know, it just feels a little like I have misread the dress code, you know? Like turning up to do open heart surgery in a tux. It’s just weird man.
The other thing I am leaving out of the signal chain is strings. Now I always used to think strings affected my sound. But I came to a realisation a few years ago that I actually have no evidence for this at all. They just never really seem to factor in. I like to use round wound jazz light gauge mostly because I like that slidey feel of the bottom strings. And I also like to use super light strings because I always want to go for lots of stuff and don’t want such a heavy physical impact on my left hand. These are all important considerations, but they don’t relate to tone.
So what is the very first thing I would suggest you do if you want to get serious about you guitar tone? Learn something about the nature of sound. And this doesn’t have to be a huge amount. You can even stay clear of the math. But you should know something. There are endless resources on the web for this kind of thing. Fire up ChatGPT and just have the conversation. Tell it to explain sound to you. Or find some kind of explain-it-like-I-am-5 version of how sound works. When you do this, you will be taken on a fun ride and learn about how, in the air all around us, there are these tiny molecules that bounce away in these wave like patterns when they get disturbed. And a side effect of this is we experience what we know as sound. The wave like patterns can also interact with each other and form more complicate wave patterns, which makes the sounds we hear become more complex, producing different timbres and noise and stuff.
I will leave it there. This is your journey to go on my friend. Personally, the best way I have found to learn this stuff is to come at it through learning about sound synthesis. Studying sound synthesis will open up all kinds of handy things for your music journey, giving you insights into everything from sound mixing to orchestration. And you’ll be able impress people at parties with you all your fancy pants knowledge about things like oscillators, low-pass filters, and sub-oscillators. You will grasp the very specific methods that can be applied to sound to create effects like reverb and delay or whatever. You will develop a keen sense that sound is something that can indeed be demystified, tamed and tweaked, and bent to your sonic will. And its fun!
There are lots of great resources out there if you are into this kind of thing. A couple of my favs are, firstly, a book on sound synthesis called Creating Sound From Scratch It is super cool, comprehensive with a delightful dash of historical context. The second is Syntorial, which is an online interactive resource that takes you through the complete A-Z of sound synthesis. Syntorial was a complete game changer for me (and no one is paying me to say that).
When you learn about sound you will inevitably learn about pitch and I want to touch on it here. Because if you are into electric guitar tone, it turns out an understanding of pitch will matter. Think about playing the very bottom note on the piano, then the very top note. You are hearing sounds in a different pitch. One is low in pitch, the other is high. Pitch is measured in these units called Hertz (Hz). You can read up on it, but simply put, Hz is the amount of cycles a sound wave can travel through in one second. High pitches have a high Hz value. Low pitches have a low hz value. It’s simple enough. A human ear can typically here between 20hz to 20000hz. The range of a piano is between 27.5 Hz all the way up to 4186 Hz. Most music you will here tends not to exceed the range of the piano.
What about a guitar? What is its pitch range? I like to think of guitar between range of 82hz and 1381.51hz. Here I am taking the lowest pitch being the low open E string on the guitar, and the highest pitch as the E note all the way up on the 24th fret of the high E string. The takeaway from all this is that you should be aware of what hz range you are in depending on which notes you are playing on the fretboard. For example, the notes between the 8th fret and 19th fret on the low E string or the notes between 3rd fret and 14th fret on the A string, all have pitches between around 80hz and 160hz. Knowing this will end up mattering to you as you search for that magic tone. You are going to want do things like make your bass less boomy, or your high notes to get less tinny, and you can do this making changes to notes at certain frequencies.
For now, don’t worry to much about it all. I will provide some working examples of the issues above in the next article. Just be aware of that pitch is a thing you should know about. Know the range of the guitar in notes and hz. You can also use this super handy reference from Wikipedia which shows where different types of hz ranges tend to occur.
Ok so that’s guitar sorted and strings sorted. And your pitch comprehension is on lock. Boom baby! Let’s now let’s turn to the first thing that absolutely does effect sound quality - your guitar pick. And this is something of a good and bad news story. The bad news is that music can be something of an expensive hobby, often with little opportunities for revenue. It is full of buyers remorse moments. But the great news is that guitar picks are the exception! They are dirt cheap. You can easily try and bunch of them to get to the bottom of what works best.
I use a 1.00m thick Dunlop Tortex pick. Super cheap, super available, kind of ubiquitous. I have tried all kinds of other picks too: thinner picks, thicker, bigger, smaller, even one made of wood. You will find that different picks really affect the volume of the attack on the string. I really don’t like too much attack when I play notes, so tend towards picks with more of a blunted edge. I also want to move between sometimes really articulating notes, to other times of just wanting to lightly touch the string to create just enough volume. Quirks of the way I play I guess, I sometimes I want precision, sometimes I want messiness. I have seen some jazz guitarists that don’t use a pick (how can you play with that speed and dexterity without a pick John Abercrombie? How!?). I have never come across any jazz folks using the pick that I use. I have seen speedy metal types play super fast passages using a sharper point on the pick to reduce resistance against the string. It is all quite personal, and it is related to the way you tend to play, but as you find what works, understand that you are making decisions about the sound of your tone. So try out a bunch of different things. See what works for your style of playing. This is the easiest part of the puzzle to solve and at the end of it you should have a strong enough opinion about it to be can be suitably outraged if anyone were to suggest using anything other than your chosen guitar pick.
That is pretty much all I want to say in this time around. We will get into the more technical side of things next time around. And in the meantime, you have some homework to do. Learn about he nature of sound, figure out which type of strings work for you (not a sound thing) and which type of pick works best for you (definitely a sound thing). In the follow up to this we will get into the scarier details: pickups, effects, preamps, amps, mixing up the amps, speaker cabinets, and how to deal with the acoustics of the room.
Taking a methodical approach to your guitar tone (Part 1)
Getting good electric guitar tone is just really difficult. And super personal. And people are always saying all kinds of crazy things about it. They'll say stuff like, ‘I want my tone to sound less woody and more like honey, you know?’ Er, no. I don’t know. What on earth does that even mean? And it’s weird, because I always feel like many of the people who spend so much time practicing just never really get around to working seriously on their sound. So you’ve put in the 10,000 hours, you’ve mastered all that technique, scaled the very heights of virtuosity and musicality, but then you’re not quite sure what do when you plug into an amp. That’s not cool. It’s like spending a decade training to become a world champion cyclist, but on the day of the big race you just turn up with your kid brother’s ride, with its flat tyres and its rusty chain. Don’t be that person.
As far as instruments go, the guitar is one that is full to the brim with sonic complexity and possibilities. It is not like a piano where you are mostly limited by how hard or soft you press stuff. I find when I am playing guitar I go for all kinds of things. Sometime I will hit the notes with a pick. Sometimes I like to whimsically tuck my guitar pick under my fourth finger and play more with my thumb to get a softer attack. Sometimes I like to hammer on notes, or go between between single notes and double stops and chords. Sometimes its arpeggios using some kind of right hand technique. Or maybe its playing near the bridge or near the neck or bending notes. Or muting strings when I pluck them, or staying on the bottom pitched strings to get more of a bass guitar vibe. And then there are harmonics. You get the picture.
And so all of these crazy sound hijinks need to get somehow translated from the guitar into a pickup, through whatever effects I am running, then into a preamp, an amp, maybe a speaker cabinet, and maybe out into the mixer through a microphone or line out. Sheesh! What a minefield.
Navigating such complexity is also really not helped by the guitar community itself. I mean, that crowd just provides the most unbelievably unhelpful information when it comes to guitar tone. And the information is so often delivered in such evangelical ways. And everything, I mean everything, has some kind of crazy name in the guitar world. Like it actually makes sense for me to say that I am going to run my guitar through some hot rails into my Blue Boy and into my Rat and into my Warden into my Rainbow Machine and through an Aural Dream before heading into a Mesa Boogie. Like what now? Are we even talking about music anymore?
So my point here is that you definitely should have some kind of framework to create and evolve your guitar tone. And with that in mind, here is article 1 of 2 to discuss it. Now even if you stop reading right now, I am going to implore you to take one piece of advice really seriously:
You absolutely, positively, must make guitar tone as much of a priority as all the other aspects of your practice.
Things you should have an opinion on
So I have this friend of mine right, and he is always banging on about the signal chain. Signal chain this, signal chain that. And what he is really getting at is that we need be aware of all the things that can possibly effect you sound, from your choice of guitar pick right through to the room you are playing in. And this guy is totally on the money. You need to deal with all of this stuff.
And so what are these things in the signal chain? I count eight of them. And if you are serious about electric guitar tone you will need to have opinions on them all. They are as follows:
Now you will immediately notice there are a couple of things I haven’t mentioned here. And people may get super weird about my omissions. The first is, surprisingly it would seem, the guitar itself is not mentioned. I am going to put myself out there and say the choice of electric guitar doesn’t really make much difference. I know. Ouch. That might hurt. Sorry. Try not to go all Ford and Ferrari on me. I know that there is the Fender crowd, and the Ibanez lovers, and the Paul Reed Smith enthusiasts, and on it goes. People love different brands and that is all fine. But the sonic reality is that, for an electric guitar, we are talking about a pickup sitting on a lacquered wood finish that picks up electrical signal when you hit a note. The guitar is not going to make a noticeable difference.
My decision on the type of guitar I use is actually driven by other factors. And you’ll have to excuse the philosophical pivot, but the look and brand of the guitar itself is really just some kind of cultural construct. Like I want it cos its cool, not because it brings some kind of sonic contribution. For me, I want something that has a neck that feels good to me to play personally. I also like guitars that are on the lighter side (I just don’t want to lug around heavy stuff these days). There are other factors too. Like if I feel like if I were to turn up to do a solo jazz guitar gig with one of those Randy Rhodes triangle guitars, or an Allan Holdsworth Steinberger, I don’t know, it just feels a little like I have misread the dress code, you know? Like turning up to do open heart surgery in a tux. It’s just weird man.
The other thing I am leaving out of the signal chain is strings. Now I always used to think strings affected my sound. But I came to a realisation a few years ago that I actually have no evidence for this at all. They just never really seem to factor in. I like to use round wound jazz light gauge mostly because I like that slidey feel of the bottom strings. And I also like to use super light strings because I always want to go for lots of stuff and don’t want such a heavy physical impact on my left hand. These are all important considerations, but they don’t relate to tone.
On the nature of sound
So what is the very first thing I would suggest you do if you want to get serious about you guitar tone? Learn something about the nature of sound. And this doesn’t have to be a huge amount. You can even stay clear of the math. But you should know something. There are endless resources on the web for this kind of thing. Fire up ChatGPT and just have the conversation. Tell it to explain sound to you. Or find some kind of explain-it-like-I-am-5 version of how sound works. When you do this, you will be taken on a fun ride and learn about how, in the air all around us, there are these tiny molecules that bounce away in these wave like patterns when they get disturbed. And a side effect of this is we experience what we know as sound. The wave like patterns can also interact with each other and form more complicate wave patterns, which makes the sounds we hear become more complex, producing different timbres and noise and stuff.
I will leave it there. This is your journey to go on my friend. Personally, the best way I have found to learn this stuff is to come at it through learning about sound synthesis. Studying sound synthesis will open up all kinds of handy things for your music journey, giving you insights into everything from sound mixing to orchestration. And you’ll be able impress people at parties with you all your fancy pants knowledge about things like oscillators, low-pass filters, and sub-oscillators. You will grasp the very specific methods that can be applied to sound to create effects like reverb and delay or whatever. You will develop a keen sense that sound is something that can indeed be demystified, tamed and tweaked, and bent to your sonic will. And its fun!
There are lots of great resources out there if you are into this kind of thing. A couple of my favs are, firstly, a book on sound synthesis called Creating Sound From Scratch It is super cool, comprehensive with a delightful dash of historical context. The second is Syntorial, which is an online interactive resource that takes you through the complete A-Z of sound synthesis. Syntorial was a complete game changer for me (and no one is paying me to say that).
Pitch
When you learn about sound you will inevitably learn about pitch and I want to touch on it here. Because if you are into electric guitar tone, it turns out an understanding of pitch will matter. Think about playing the very bottom note on the piano, then the very top note. You are hearing sounds in a different pitch. One is low in pitch, the other is high. Pitch is measured in these units called Hertz (Hz). You can read up on it, but simply put, Hz is the amount of cycles a sound wave can travel through in one second. High pitches have a high Hz value. Low pitches have a low hz value. It’s simple enough. A human ear can typically here between 20hz to 20000hz. The range of a piano is between 27.5 Hz all the way up to 4186 Hz. Most music you will here tends not to exceed the range of the piano.
What about a guitar? What is its pitch range? I like to think of guitar between range of 82hz and 1381.51hz. Here I am taking the lowest pitch being the low open E string on the guitar, and the highest pitch as the E note all the way up on the 24th fret of the high E string. The takeaway from all this is that you should be aware of what hz range you are in depending on which notes you are playing on the fretboard. For example, the notes between the 8th fret and 19th fret on the low E string or the notes between 3rd fret and 14th fret on the A string, all have pitches between around 80hz and 160hz. Knowing this will end up mattering to you as you search for that magic tone. You are going to want do things like make your bass less boomy, or your high notes to get less tinny, and you can do this making changes to notes at certain frequencies.
For now, don’t worry to much about it all. I will provide some working examples of the issues above in the next article. Just be aware of that pitch is a thing you should know about. Know the range of the guitar in notes and hz. You can also use this super handy reference from Wikipedia which shows where different types of hz ranges tend to occur.
The guitar pick
Ok so that’s guitar sorted and strings sorted. And your pitch comprehension is on lock. Boom baby! Let’s now let’s turn to the first thing that absolutely does effect sound quality - your guitar pick. And this is something of a good and bad news story. The bad news is that music can be something of an expensive hobby, often with little opportunities for revenue. It is full of buyers remorse moments. But the great news is that guitar picks are the exception! They are dirt cheap. You can easily try and bunch of them to get to the bottom of what works best.
I use a 1.00m thick Dunlop Tortex pick. Super cheap, super available, kind of ubiquitous. I have tried all kinds of other picks too: thinner picks, thicker, bigger, smaller, even one made of wood. You will find that different picks really affect the volume of the attack on the string. I really don’t like too much attack when I play notes, so tend towards picks with more of a blunted edge. I also want to move between sometimes really articulating notes, to other times of just wanting to lightly touch the string to create just enough volume. Quirks of the way I play I guess, I sometimes I want precision, sometimes I want messiness. I have seen some jazz guitarists that don’t use a pick (how can you play with that speed and dexterity without a pick John Abercrombie? How!?). I have never come across any jazz folks using the pick that I use. I have seen speedy metal types play super fast passages using a sharper point on the pick to reduce resistance against the string. It is all quite personal, and it is related to the way you tend to play, but as you find what works, understand that you are making decisions about the sound of your tone. So try out a bunch of different things. See what works for your style of playing. This is the easiest part of the puzzle to solve and at the end of it you should have a strong enough opinion about it to be can be suitably outraged if anyone were to suggest using anything other than your chosen guitar pick.
Next time
That is pretty much all I want to say in this time around. We will get into the more technical side of things next time around. And in the meantime, you have some homework to do. Learn about he nature of sound, figure out which type of strings work for you (not a sound thing) and which type of pick works best for you (definitely a sound thing). In the follow up to this we will get into the scarier details: pickups, effects, preamps, amps, mixing up the amps, speaker cabinets, and how to deal with the acoustics of the room.