Tone colours: Frank Zappa once said to somebody, "your playing is fine but your guitar tone is like a ham sandwich". How bad would your tone have to be to be compared to a ham sandwich? I quite like a ham sandwich, Frank clearly had some bad sandwich experiences.
Guitar tone means different things to different players, good tone is subjective and at the very least should fit into the context of the music. But how do you know when you arrive at it? What if you just like what you like? I'm probably on the ham sandwich side here, cloth ears and low volume, only messing with the pots when I have to, following trickled down rules that are actually just hearsay from guitar mags and YouTube gurus.
Today I was strumming on a Les Paul, a Tele and a 335. All at a low/household, neighbour friendly volume. There was agreeable tonal colour but not actual Technicolor. The Les Paul offers the most variations with it's coil tap and treble boost circuit, it's a subtle beast with class and poise, it has balance. The Tele seems calm as I'm mostly on the neck pickup, it only gets agitated when you use the bridge and hit the strings hard, it's tricky. The 335 is alive and willing, it thinks it's in the Albert Hall and it's 1968, Crossroads is playing, or is that just in my own head?
I've no idea where I'm going with this, there is no describable sound in my head I'm chasing unless I use meaningless terms like crystaline or soaring. I listened today to somebody discuss and dissect the bass work of Jaco Pastorious on Herija. His bass tone is spine tinglingly good, from some other world of tonal perfection, all layered up and hard to pin down, it defies categorization but it has such a soulful sound. It's also multi tracked to sound like a choir. Almost as good as a nice ham sandwich.
No comments:
Post a Comment