The Science of Tone
Horning Schmidt says. “You can measure
frequency response and you can measure
decibels but in my research I’ve found that
back in the thirties and forties, you had
engineers saying ‘you can’t just go by the
meters. You have to use your ears.’”
the latest gear, and in spite of thousands
of axeslingers, aspiring and acclaimed
alike, who readily gobble up that gear, it all
seems to boil down to two implements—
and we’re born with those.
This happens when discussing variables
within a number of different art forms—you
simply can’t rely on scientific equipment
to make some assessments. You can’t trust
the gadgets; instead, you have to rely on
your ears. Even relying on your ears can be
difficult because it is, once again, a subjective discussion. “We don’t hear what’s
out there,” Millard says. “We hear what
we think we hear. It’s the psychological or
neurological way we hear. To think we hear
what sound is out there is so naïve and so
wrong.” Trustworthiness aside, this brings
us to another concept that pops up frequently when discussing the nature of tone:
the role of good old fashioned, organic,
human beings.
“The tone thing is amazing because you
can have one rig, have three different
guitar players, and each guy can play the
same exact thing and it’s going to sound
different,” says L.A. Guns guitarist Stacey
Blades. “It’s all in the
hands.” Waara from Line
6 agrees. “Any guitar
player will tell you, at the
end of the day, it’s in your
hands and you will sound
like you will sound,” he
says. The percentage of
influence the hands wield
is shockingly high.
attack. These elements aren’t necessarily
in the front part of the very beginning of a
guitar tone, nor are they delegated to the
trail of lingering sustain. “The reason why
people sound a certain way is because of
little nuances, those little pull offs, those
hammer ons, those plucking [dynamics]—
the sequence of those things. Think of it
as a sonic palette. That sequence is what
makes the artist sound like himself.”
By deleting the front
part of a note, Hogarth
has an intriguing and
innovative teaching mechanism to convey the concept that the human element is all powerful in
the quest for good tone.
The Human Element
As part of his Alien Music Secrets course,
virtuoso Steve Vai often talks about a day
when Eddie Van Halen paid him a visit.
EVH stood in Vai’s home studio, picked up
Vai’s guitar, played it through Vai’s effects,
through Vai’s amps, and out came the classic Van Halen tone.
Similar stories abound—you can simply substitute Big Name Guitar Player X in any number of variations. In The Million Dollar Les
Paul: In Search of the Most Valuable Guitar
in the World, author Tony Bacon quotes an
expert in guitar restoration who uses Jimi
Hendrix as an example.
Berklee College of Music
professor Thaddeus
Hogarth thinks the hands
and the human element
accounts for almost all of
what we consider guitar tone. “Providing the
instrumentation and the amplifiers are above
a certain quality and in the general ballpark,
I think it’s safe to say that we’re talking 90
perecent,” Hogarth says. In his classes and
on his blog, The Quest for Good Guitar
Tone, Hogarth argues that much of a guitar
player’s tone is based upon the attack more
so than the sustain. “If you take away the
first second of the attack of a note played
on any instrument, it is often very difficult to
determine what that instrument is and certainly impossible to identify who played it,”
he writes on the blog.
Ultimately, his thesis is shared by every
single person interviewed for this article.
It simply does not appear that there’s any
way to objectively measure what is “good”
guitar tone. A major reason for that is the
infinitely varied human element of the musician performing and the audience listening. The impossibility of proving anything
doesn’t, however, change the fact that so
many guitarists revere those early tones.
Some argue that’s because the early days
were just better. Others point out that
we’re simply intransigent.
“He played an SG, a Les Paul, a Flying V,
as well as a Stratocaster, but he always
sounded like Hendrix,” Clive Brown states.
“He didn’t suddenly sound like Jimmy Page
because he played a Les Paul. That’s where
everybody’s perception seems to go wrong.
It’s the playing, and not necessarily the gui-
tar.” In spite of an entire multi-million dollar
industry revolving around selling musicians
“It is the initial attack that the listener uses
to identify a sound, since, if the sustain is
removed, it is perceived only as that but
does not make the sound difficult to iden-
tify,” says Hogarth.
Of course, as guitar players we still want to
remain open to a number of tonal aspects
that happen after the front end of the initial
Adherence to the Past
While acknowledging the impossibility of
scientifically proving tone, many guitar
players will still argue vehemently for a classic Les Paul crunch, or they’ll get ready to
throw down if you claim solid-state amps
sound better than valve amplifiers. They will
concede the point intellectually, but on a
more deeply rooted, emotional level, they
can’t get beyond their own perspectives.
