GMC:er Posts: 25.297
Joined: 23-December 09
From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA
There are a variety of factors that can influence guitar tone. We are forever seeking better tone. It's a journey, not a destination. Sort of like guitar playing itself, it never really ends. it's a perpetual crusade. I've put together a list of several key factors that impact tone and some video to go with each one.
JUMPING CHANNELS: This is a time honored trick on amps including the venerable Marshall Plexi. On amps such as the Plexi with 4 inputs, there are two channels and each channel has a high and low input. The high and low inputs have different impedances. This impacts the tonal response of the guitar. What people often find is that these Marshalls can have a somewhat thin sound when using the bright channel. To help thicken up the sound, especially at high volume, one can “Jump” the channels, or use more than one channel at a time. This is achieved by using a connector cable to jump between channel 1 low sensitivity input, to channel 2 high sensitivity input. This allows some of the depth of the normal channel to come into play on the bright channel. As the amp has a different volume knob for each channel, it allows you a bit more control in mixing your tone between the channels. This approach gives you more tonal control and more gain so it’s a very popular technique among folks who use four input amps.
*EDITOR'S NOTE: I’ve never done this before, ever. I am just now learning about Jumping channels so please feel free to correct me if I am explaining this incorrectly.
BLENDING CHANNELS: On amps like the Paul Reed Smith HX 50, the amp has not only bass and treble knobs, but also a Bass Volume and Treble volume knob. So it’s sort of like a modern version of jumping channels. With an amp like this, instead of actually patching channels together and trying to balance the tone using the channel volume knobs, you actually have a knob for the level of treble overall output and bass overall output. So you can set your EQ and then decide how much of treble response is reflected in overall output and how much of the bass is getting through. Of course, there are many ways to skin a cat. Back in the day, players might run two entire amp rigs. One would do a dry/clean sound, and one would do the sound with distortion and effects. That way, the attack of the dry/clean sound could be blended with the fx sound to keep transient sounds in as much as desired.
GUITAR/PICKUP CHOICE One key bit of tweaking your amp is what you feed it. So the guitar that you pick, and the pickups in it, will have an impact on your amp tone. A solid body with Fishman active pups will sound different than a tele with stock pickups. Even if the same player, plays the same exact thing, in the same exact way, swapping out these two guitars will have a noticeable impact on the tone. So it’ always important to make the right choice in terms of your guitar/pups, before you feed it to an amp.
GUITAR PICK CHOICE Even the choice of guitar pick has an influence on tone. If you are using a very light pick, and you want to do very deep metallic chuggs, you are not going to be able to get the same results that you would get if you used a thick pick with zero flex. The harder you strike, the more a thin pick will flex. So you can only hit the strings so hard, before the pick just yields and bends. A thick pick with no flex won’t yield under pressure so the force of each strike is reflected in the tone, even if you are striking with full force, the pick won’t yield, it will just change the tonal output.
EFFECTS CHOICE: The effects you put on the guitar will have a huge impact on the tone. To start with, if you use pedals, many pedals truncate the signal below a certain frequency. This is part of how they impact tone. A typical tube screamer for example, will truncate the bass frequencies off of a guitar signal which acts like a high pass filter. This is a traditional way of getting a “tighter” sound out of a high gain amp. Robbing the input of low frequency information allows the distortion to be used at a high level without the bass frequencies getting too exaggerated and making the tone sound “flubby”. This is just the tip of the iceberg of course. Every effect added will impact the perceived tonal qualities of the signal. Also, where you put the effects in your chain, and whether you use them on input or an effects loop will have an impact as well.
There are a variety of factors that can influence your tone. Perhaps the most important thing?
YOUR FINGERS: “Tone lives in the fingers”. It’s a very old saying and still holds true even today. Two different players can sound very different on the same rig. Each rig is tailored to it’s owner. As such, when someone else uses another persons rig, it can sound very different to when the owner uses it. So much of how we sound, comes directly from our fingers. How we pick, how we mute, our use of vibrato, etc. In the end, tone comes from the fingers and is exaggerated by the gear we put after the fingers in the chain.
