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Is Really Guitar Tone A Solo Quest?

In: Rocking in the free world Thursday Oct 16,2008

electric guitar gibson What I am going to say today is the result of a post over at Pribek.net and the result of my last weeks experiences with home recording.

Jack speaks again about the tone. Tone is in our hands, we are the seekers of tone, as he previously said on this very blog a few months ago. Every guitar player looks for the perfect guitar tone, how to sound fatter, nicer, more personal, to make his playing easier to recognize.

While reading his post I suddenly started to think about the fact that the tone that you make for your guitar WHILE PLAYING ALONE is usually not sufficient WHEN PLAYING IN A BAND, where your guitar, despite the high volume, can not break through the rest of the instruments.

How many times have you heard that? Hey,man, turn it down a bit! I guess all of us know how hard it is for a guitar player to turn the volume a bit down, no matter how “band oriented” he is. All the time we have the impression the guitar is not loud enough and we still need that extra boost to make us stand out of the crowd, isn’t it?

But is really the volume what puts you into this situation? Or is it the tone?

While recording at home various pieces with drums, bass and guitar (to not say anything about the vocal tracks cause we start other discussions) I found myself in the position of a newbie sound engineer trying to make various instruments cut through the mix.

And suddenly the volume was not enough, the panning was not enough either…

It was about the tone.

If you want, as an exercise of imaginations, the guys from Line 6 emulated the tones of some famous guitar players, like some tones of Eddie Van Halen, of Angus Young, etc, and put them all on my little home recording toy. I can tell you out of context they don’t sound like the killer tones they are in context of a band. But I guess everybody can agree with me that in the context of a band, Angus Young, Eddie Van Halen and others like them sound fantastic.

That’s why I ask myself if looking for the tone by yourself is actually enough. I think that the quest should be for the band tone as a whole. Of course, each and every instrument should sound well by itself, but sometimes, you need to give some high frequencies to your guitar to make it sound good along the other instruments, even if the sound of the guitar by itself may sound a bit dry.

What’s your opinion on this? I would really like to hear your thoughts so shoot!

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9 Responses to “Is Really Guitar Tone A Solo Quest?”

Mr Trick
October 16th, 2008 at 12:22 pm

I agree. If you’re playing with a band, its the whole sound that matters. Developing an awesome tone on your own is all well and good, but if its not accounting for the other sounds from your group its fairly pointless.

That said, I will cop to spending ages on killer tones for various styles (e.g. woman tone for blues, fuzz tone for metal etc) but that’s knowing full well they’ll only be used solo. If I took those sounds to a group scenario, I’ve no doubt they’d sound pretty bad.
Ovidiu
October 16th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

Yeah, my point exactly, and unfortunately not an easy thing to do, to make a tone that helps the band as a whole, because you need to work together for this.
Mr Trick
October 16th, 2008 at 12:30 pm

Its something I found quite interesting about the various modelling softwares out there (Guitar Rig etc.). Their sound is quite well suited for recording, in that they’re already quite compressed, tweaked and EQ’d for slotting into a mix of other instruments. Compare them with a real equivalent (without band) though and they sound very odd indeed.

I think that’s where recording as a group can come in useful. If you do it as a live environment recording (i.e. not layering instruments one at a time) then you get the benefit of analysing the sound and realising what needs to be done to make the instruments sit together properly. Usually that means boosting mids on a guitar, dropping bottom end to make room for the bass and possibly keys too, etc etc…
Ovidiu
October 16th, 2008 at 1:27 pm

Indeed, the sounds I was speaking about come very well over other recorded tracks not that good alone.
It is very interesting when listening live recordings, you are never happy with the sound, but that is also because of the…well…live environment.
Robert Fisher
October 16th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

Yes. Yes. Yes. Guess this isn’t going to be controversial at all.

When writing alone, use some sort of multitrack recording so that you can get some idea of how your tone and parts will fit with other instruments. Just some scratch drums, bass, vocals, &c. can really help. For me, the big thing is realizing that I can relax and fill in spaces rather than trying to make guitar parts that are trying to carry every beat of the song. (If that makes any sense.)

When writing/rehearsing with the group, it’s a good idea to record too so that you can all stop playing and give your full attention to listening to the whole band.

When setting up for a live gig, have a separate sound guy if at all possible. Trust him. Especially if he’s the venue’s guy. If he tells you to turn your volume down or EQ something a little, don’t argue. Do it! (Or, at least, figure out how you can get the result he’s asking for.) The only thing you need to tell him is whether the monitoring is working for you or not.
Ovidiu
October 16th, 2008 at 4:56 pm

You are damn right, I mean I recorded a song these days, a song that I play for a couple of years with my band and I really knew my parts, if you know what I mean, but when I recorded it something wasn’t quite right, the guitar was not what it should be. I was quite surprised to see that the track sounded way better when I removed every little wizardry there and just played plain G C on power chords, the guitar just found the right placement in the song. Made me wonder how I could play it the other way for so long…
Pribek
October 17th, 2008 at 4:31 am

Thanks for the link Ovidiu and a nice post here too, by the way. Recording is an eye opener isn’t it? The old thing about less is more, you hear that all the time but, when you start recording, you also start looking at things from the listener’s perspective instead of just the performer’s and time and time again-less is more.
Ovidiu
October 17th, 2008 at 10:27 am

Yeah, Jack. The fact is that when you go into the studio with your song and want to record it, you usually don’t have that much time to look for every possible angle for that song and in most of the cases, what you rehearse with your band must be at least slightly adapted for the record.
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Is Really Guitar Tone A Solo Quest?

9 Responses to “Is Really Guitar Tone A Solo Quest?”

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