The Science of Tone
“Music is ineffable,” says Scott Waara, product manager at Line 6. His company has
built a business around providing the widest
range of tones possible to guitar players.
But even for a firm dedicated to dissecting tone, it’s not easy to reduce things to a
simple recipe. “Everybody hears differently,”
Waara says, “and the frequency response
of everyone’s brain is different, so some
things that are cool to some guys are not
going to be cool to other guys. You can put
it on a scope and see what’s happening on
a frequency graph and you’ll see some tendencies and trends and so on.” The trends
seen by the Line 6 staff seem to indicate
that warmer, fuller tones are more generally
accepted and considered “good.”
“Tone that emulates the human voice is
always more accessible,” Waara contin-
ues. “Otherwise, purely electronic music
would have taken over, and we wouldn’t be
making guitars anymore. There are some
absolutes in human DNA about wanting
to feel connection and that’s probably a
fuller frequency tone, that’s tone that is
more reminiscent of the human voice. Or,
for instance, a violin or organic instruments
that have been around for hundreds of
years. When we talk about guitars having
an organic quality, it’s because that’s rooted
in what human beings know. Which is air
moving, wood vibrating, people speaking.”
Beyond those generalities, replicating a
standard formula for the be-all-end-all
tone isn’t possible. Why? Because some
people will genuinely pass on a ’ 59 Les
Paul and Marshall stack combination—they
might prefer what sounds like a vibra-
phone under water. Sometimes, a certain
“it” factor just grabs musicians and won’t
let them go. Waara explains that even in
a business as technologically advanced
and specialized as Line 6’s tone research,
“There’s no escaping that we emotion-
ally say ’Man, that just sounds cool.’ ”
Frequently, part of that “cool” factor is
imprinted on our brains as a result of a
component that we often overlook.
The Forgotten Factor
When guitarists sit around and debate
tone, they pontificate on the properties of
this instrument or that amp. But frequently
there’s a factor in the equation that is forgotten. Our templates of what we consider
to be great tone are not simply a formula of
instrument + amps + musician. Recording
studios also play a vital role in the creation
of those sounds.
“Most guitarists learn from records,” says Dr.
Andre Millard, a professor at the University
of Alabama-Birmingham, editor of The
Electric Guitar: A History of an American
Icon. “That’s how you learn to play. We learn
from the classic records. And those classic
records have that classic tone, which is ’ 58
to ’ 63.” And quite frequently, Millard points
out, the studio had as much an impact on
those recordings as anything else. He uses
the Rolling Stone’s debut, England’s Newest
Hit Makers which was released on London
Records in 1964, as an example.
“It had ‘Walking the Dog,’ ‘Route 66,’
and others on it,” Millard says. “That has
tone. The reason it has tone is that it was
made in the worst damn studio possible.
Everyone who worked there said this was
a shithole. There was no sound separation,
