The Cult of Tone
current artists leading that format (for example,
Kenny Chesney, Taylor Swift and Rascal Flatts).
My personal conversion experience that led to
my joining the cult of Tele-evangelists came in
9th grade, when I watched Albert Lee open
for Clapton at the local civic center. The scales
fell away from my eyes. I saw the light and
devoted myself to chasing that sound. I eventually followed that sound to Nashville, where
I heard Brent Mason, the guy who probably
influenced more people to pick up a Telecaster
than anybody in the last 15 years. Mason’s tone
pretty much set the standard for what most
Tele players strive for. Web message boards
are full of conjecture about how he achieves
his sound, making it seem more like mysticism
than mechanics. I asked Mason about his own
pilgrimage to tone, and he was kind enough to
give us the keys to the kingdom.
“Oddly, I first got interested in the Tele when I
heard Jerry Reed—the slinky, funky style, with
claw-style double-stops,” he says. “After that,
it was definitely the country/jazzy style of Roy
Nichols from the Strangers [Merle Haggard’s
band] that twisted my ear. Old blackface
Fender amps and a Tele with single-coil
pickups and an MXR Dyna Comp compressor in the chain. Later on,” Mason continues,
“I developed a little more overdrive in the
sound by using a lower-wattage amp—like a
’ 67 Fender Deluxe Reverb—on the Brooks &
Dunn records, Alan Jackson, and so on. That
was inspired by listening to Danny Gatton and
Jeff Beck (even though Beck plays a Strat, he
still goes to that back pickup randomly during
a solo, and it had a beautiful tone). I now play
through a ’ 63 50-watt blackface Bassman head
with an external cab and one channel souped
up a bit. It was the best of both worlds.”
It’s really a shockingly normal story. I hear
Mason play and it sounds like he’s been
touched by the hand of God. But as it turns
out, he’s just one of us—a guy that got turned
on by a sound, chased it down, and developed it into his own. As his story corroborates,
the actual tone of most guitar greats generally
begins as an impersonation of another great.
As the artist develops, their tone takes on its
own unique signature that’s so far away from
the original source that one would be hard-pressed to find the sonic footprint. Reed and
Nichols begat Mason, who begat Brad Paisley,
and so on, but Mason’s quintessential playing does not sound much like either of them
(though once you know the reference, you can
detect some small similarities). There are many
examples of this. Les Paul was influenced by
Django Reinhardt, and you can hear those
crazy glissandos on pre-Mary Ford recordings,
but you’d never guess it listening to his most
popular work. Eddie Van Halen maintains that
he modeled his tone after Eric Clapton, but
they don’t seem remotely similar to me. Their
development as players is akin to people who
are raised with certain worship rituals but then
question what they really believe and strike
out to find their own truth.
The Tympanic Membrane: An Intelligent
Design or Evidence of Evolution?
If we strip away all dogma and the influence of our family and friends, what do we
believe? Music, like spirituality, is so emotionally charged that it’s difficult to define what
and why something moves us. Why do we like
what we like? Just as scientists hypothesize
physical reasons for religious phenomena,
there are some scientific explanations for why
certain tones move us. Jason Dunaway, a
damn fine bassist I’ve worked with in the past,
happens to be a top electrical engineer who
has helped design some of the gear most of
us have used at one time or another. I asked
Jason to weigh in for a scientific explanation
of why we devote ourselves to certain tones.
FEATURE
“Our ears/brains are really amazing,” he
says. “We can divine an incredible amount
of information very quickly by listening. Is it
a real cry or are they just messing around?
Is that my wife? Sarcasm, deceit, serious,
playful, angry.” In short, our hearing has an
amazingly difficult job of picking up the tiniest nuance and processing the information.
Roughly 100 million years of evolution was
involved in developing these abilities—our
ancestors’ hearing had to be good to ensure
survival of the species. So how does this
relate to our choice in guitar tone? It goes
back to survival. “Generally, when we are
stressed or excited and want to verbally
express it, we go up in volume and drive
our vocal apparatus harder than normal,”
Jason continues. “Things get nonlinear and
our normally smooth voices have more high-frequency content and volume than normal.
Over time, we have come to perceive this
changed harmonic content and increased
volume as something that needs to have
our attention. It may be danger, it may be
an opportunity...but whatever it is, it excites
us. It also says ‘Listen to me!...ignore all that
other stuff that’s going on.’
“We find even-order distortion fairly pleasing,”
Jason explains. “That’s essentially the addition
of stacked octaves on top of the fundamental
tone, and it is a result of asymmetrical distortion
[one side of a waveform being clipped more
than the other]. Odd-order distortion gives us
odd multiples of the fundamental, which is not
very musically pleasing. Where does every guitar,
saxophone, vocal solo, or evangelical preacher
go to bring the crowd to their feet? Loud, high,
and way nonlinear. A scream has much more
high frequency content than a normal speaking
voice, regardless of volume.”
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And there you have it, folks. The reason
the hair stands up on your arms when you
hear a PRS ripping through a warm, fat
tube amp is because your body has evolved
over millions of years to respond to those
nonlinear waves. Our bodies tell us that
these sounds are important and we feel
physically excited when we hear them.
Conversely, these tones don’t fit very well
in an everyday context, as Jason learned
from personal experience. “Tones that are
used for everyday signaling, like a doorbell,
are pretty simple. They don’t alarm us too
much. I once had a door chime that was the
actual recording of Zeppelin “Black Dog”—
for one day. Every time someone rang the
doorbell, it scared the shit out of me!”
