This is a big topic and one that I am going to revisit occasionally in this blog. Today we are starting with the brain.
I already hear many of you thinking “what does the brain have to do with guitar tone?” and the reality is that it has EVERYTHING to do with it. The brain is your actual musical instrument. The physical instrument that we choose to play just gets the sounds in your head out into the world.
One of my favorite video lessons for musicians is from a clinic that jazz pianist/educator Hal Galper gave some time ago that occasionally makes the rounds of the internet. If you have a minute you should check it out:
Hal is discussing musical performance issues but I strongly feel that the idea of “aural imagination” is central to everything you do as a musician, including tone production. A good friend of mine (bassist Martin Torres) is primarily an upright bassist who plays jazz and classical music although the majority of the time that we play together he plays electric bass. The first thing that I noticed about his electric sound is that it is darker and warmer than most other bassists I work with. It took me a while to realize that Martin probably has his acoustic bass sound as a baseline for his tone and I know for a fact that two of his favorite bassists are Paul McCartney and James Jamerson (which makes him wonderful to be in a band with, btw). Both McCartney and Jamerson have darker, rounder tones in most of the recordings that I’ve heard. I think that Martin’s “inner bass voice” is dark and “chocolatey” and has been shaped by the music he listens to over a lifetime of being a professional musician and as a fan of music. A good example that I happen to have handy at the moment is his playing on this tune from my last solo album:
Now how does someone translate their “inner tone” into something we hear in the outside world? Honestly, some of it is just in the preferences you have when you plug into an amplifier and adjust the controls for EQ and gain and whatnot. You are already shaping the sound to your taste. To me, that is the easy part.
The next part is a bit harder. I’ve noticed that as I’ve improved my playing technique or the way that I physically address the instrument that the sound produce improves accordingly. Some of that is just a consistency of attack when I am strumming or picking. Some of it has to do with choices I make in where along the length of the string I pick or strum or how I chose to voice a chord or where on the fretboard I play a melody. And these are not things that I consciously decide while I am also trying to play music, but over the years my brain knows how and where to get the sounds out of the instrument that I am hearing in my head. I know that if I am playing the notes E, F# and G in a country or bluegrass setting I will most likely want to play them on the first string with the E being open and the F# and G being the second and third frets on that string. That gives me a more appropriate to the context sound that is brighter and punchier. If I am playing those same notes in the same octave in a jazzier context I’ll want them to be darker and rounder sounding so I might choose to play them on the second or third strings higher up the neck. And I know that if I play those notes on the 4th and/or 5th strings they might be a little too fat and bloated sounding to be musical. This is just a simple example but I think it gives you an idea of a small part of the process that goes into shaping a sound and it is mostly the result of years of critical listening and fumbling around with the instrument. At the end of the day, this is all just me trying to get how I hear my guitar in my head out into the world for you to hear it.
There is a joke that a musician is someone who puts $5000 worth of gear in a $500 car to play a $50 gig. And honestly, there is some truth to that. I am guilty of bringing a ridiculously expensive rig to play $150 bar gig, but at the end of the day, I could play the same gig with a $400 import guitar, $600 amp and about $300 worth of pedal effects. The audience would be none the wiser and I could probably make it sound pretty good. The rest of the money in my rig goes into things that make me happy onstage and work together to help me get closer to the sound that I hear in my “mind’s ear”. This weekend I was entertained by someone in the crowd of my club gig who was mesmerized by my pedalboard that has been dubbed my one of my friends as “Pedalstar Galactica” and was taking pictures from over the stage to send to his friends:
There are lots of ways to play the cover gig I use this for without a digital loop switcher and the rest of the junk pictured here but this ended up being a solution that helped me get the sounds I wanted for this particular gig and also helps me manage what can be a hectic show of about 60 tunes a night (from a repertoire of about 130 total for the band) from styles of music that include country, rock, blues, jazz, funk, and metal. I know that there are choices that are allegedly “better” for pretty much everything I use and I could probably go shopping every year to replace everything with the “newest better” but this seems to work for me. I’ve been through the cycle of buying and selling pedals, amps, and guitars for years and came to the realization that I can make what I already own work. Sometimes something new that comes out might have some added utility that would make my life easier on stage (like the recent popularity of dual overdrive pedals or an affordable loop pedal like the Boss ES-8) but I’m not searching for ways to buy a better sound anymore. I DO spend a lot of time improving my “brain” instrument, however. There is always room for improvement there.
When I have smaller gigs such as a wedding gig I played last week, I use this smaller board that I can easily swap pedals in and out as needed. It can be really nice to simplify and/or experiment with pedals but being restricted to the smaller format forces me to focus a bit and generate more sound from my hands.
One of the reasons why this is a blog topic this week is that I’ve seen a ton of posts on social media the last couple of weeks (and have had questions from students) about why some pieces of gear are better than others or why a $6000 Les Paul is better than a $2000 one and so on, ad infinitum. I play gigs with $300 guitars and I play gigs with $4000 guitars depending on what I need for that show. I’m pretty sure that no one is pricing out my rig to let me know that I don’t sound very good. I see hobbyists buying reams of Custom Shop or boutique instruments and I see touring pros and session guys using stuff that you can easily shop for at the local Guitar Center. There really is no right answer to this question other than “play what works for you”.
In the online guitarist world, the debates about whether “tone is in the hands” or generated from the instrument are endless and unwinnable. Everyone has their opinion but I think before we consider that question you have to answer the question “do you know what you sound like?” first. Then you can worry about what it takes to get that sound out into the world.