Where Exactly is Tone Located?
I'm confused, is it in the hands or the guitar?
The term tone is tossed about by guitarists all of the time. Online forum discussions of “tone” frequently end up with two camps, people that say “tone is in your fingers” and others that argue in favor of gear sometimes referring to very minute details of gear and setup. Many times I’ve found myself typing the words “tone is in your hands”, wishing that there was a way to convey this with a snarl in my voice but alas, if there is an emoticon for a snarl I’m not aware of it.
I must however make a confession at this point; once I am away from the spirit of the moment and give it some thought I can see that “tone”, can not reside solely in either your gear or your fingers. In my analysis, the entire matter of producing a sound from virtually any instrument is complex to the point of being staggering to contemplte, in the end we have to trust ears, our own ears, ears of people in your band, ears of the sound reinforcement people and ears of our listeners.
One logical tool that is used for analysis is the reductio ad absurdum, reduction to the absurd. My humble application of this would start by exploring two absurd possibilities. The first being that tone is entirely a product of the gear being used while the second would be that tone is entirely independent of gear and entirely dependent upon the technique, feeling and indeed, the actual flesh on the fingers of the person playing. We’ll start with the first premise.
A Thought Experiement
Gear is Where It’s At
If we assume that gear is the only factor we can set out to prove this very simply, buy a set of equipment, a guitar & amplifier along with a good patch cord and have a number of players play a set of notes on the instrument while we record the results and then listen to the recordings. For our thought experiment, imagine your favorite guitar plugged into your favorite amp with all of the knobs taped over to preserve your favorite settings. Just to keep things even keeled let’s make sure that everyone uses you favorite pick as well. Now, if a line of guitarists came along and played the same simple phrases would they all sound the same?Now, I’ll even spot you one, let’s eliminate guitarists at both extremes of the experience/ability levels. OK, Setzer, Richards, Heath, Emmanuel and all you other famous players, get out of line, you’re going to skew the results. All you rank beginners, go home and practice, this is a test for experienced players only. OK, with a group of experienced guitarists and no ringers in the mix would this rig sound identical in everyone’s hands?
Experience tells me that the sound of the instrument would come through but that the individual players would have a noticeable effect on the sound produced because they would still have a different picking attack, different muting techniques and most likely differences in the ways that they released fretted notes.
If the guitar/amp combination was setup on the edge of overdrive differences in picking attack would probably be enough to make some players sound clean while others would sound overdriven. If the piece being played was original and the players had no pre-conceived notions of the guitar sound that they were trying to emulate I could imagine that a fairly wide variety of approaches could happen. Still, I’m certain that a degree of uniformity could be heard coming out of the speakers because the hardware would leave its imprint on the sound. It couldn’t be avoided.
I’ve actually taken part in something similar many times as most experienced players have. Have you ever had someone hand you a guitar that they had just been playing? If you played that guitar without changing any settings did you get the exact same sound. In my experience the sound would usually be similar, but not identical.
It's All in the Fingers
So now, lets put the shoe on the other foot. Let’s see how the tone in the fingers end of our reductio ad absurdum would work. Several tests come to mind for this end of the spectrum. Let’s assume once again that the guitar and amps controls are pre-set and taped in place so that the settings cannot be manipulated to optimize the sound.
The first test that comes to mind would be to have a guitarist play the same song(s) on a number of rigs and see if it all sound identical. So we’ll start with a Jazz guitarist that usually plays an archtop through an old Gibson G-50 amp. Let’s hand him Stevie Ray Vaughan’s rig and see how he does. Hmmmm, not bad. The sound is definitely warm and mellow. It appears that by varying his technique a bit our Jazzer can make a Strat sound pretty jazzy. Let’s try something harder. Let’s give the Jazz player a pointy guitar with ceramic pickups and an ultra high-gain amp cranked into heavy distortion. Amazingly, by playing very carefully the jazzer has managed to keep the sound a lot cleaner than we might expect but as soon as two or more notes are sounded together distortion wins the struggle.
If we reverse the test and have a Heavy Metal guitarist play through a Jazz rig setup for clean but warm sounds he will probably run into the limitations of the hardware and its settings but the music and the technique will still be identifiably Heavy Metal, it will just sound a bit strange without the distortion and incredibly long sustain that comes with it.
No Man’s Land
From the thought experiments I done I have concluded that both the gear contingent and the tone is in your fingers contingent are right, and both of them are wrong too. If gear was everything all you’d have to do is buy identical gear to your favorite guitar hero and you’d have captured that sound completely. Most of us who have ever tried to chase down a sound we’ve heard on a record know that it’s rarely this easy.
If it was all in the fingers we’d all be playing on identical guitars, through identical amps and getting all sorts of different sounds. Effects factories would have to layoff their employees and we’d be buying our gear from convenience stores, right next to the propane exchange racks. Online guitar forums would be deserted except for the technique sections.
Long Rambling Conclusion
Thank God it hasn’t come down to that yet. My personal guitar collection is eclectic to say the least. I must admit, I could probably do a lot with a VG Strat and a modeling amp but it isn’t going to happen.
Differing tasks usually require different tools but one can also improvise. I could imagine literally hundreds of objects in my home that could serve as a straight edge and help me to draw a straight line. I could probably draw straight lines from this day forth and never use a ruler but I still keep a machinist’s square and a number of rulers around. They won’t necessarily make lines that are any straighter than the edge of a CD case but the ruler or the square are optimized to the task and make matters easier.
The same is true with guitars. If you want a roots rock sound Gretsch makes a good instrument for the job, there are other brands as well that’ll perform admirably as well. Texas Blues players and Blues Rockers such as Clapton seem to find that a Strat does the job well; obviously this is far from universal. A lot of people wanting a Country sound choose Telecasters as their tool of choice and the list goes on. No matter what subdivision of music we think of there are plenty of patterns and even more exceptions; the exceptions are just as important as the patterns because they demonstrate the fact that there are no hard and fast rules. I’ve seen pictures of Stevie Ray Vaughan with an ES 335, Hendrix with a Flying V and I’ve seen video of Chet playing something that strongly resembled a Strat although it was actually custom made for him by Gibson.
In my final analysis it’s much more than hardware and much more than fingers. It’s a bit of everything. A developed player with a recognizable style and sound will shine through while playing a variety of gear. OTOH, a player that is still finding a style and a sound may go through a lot of gear only to end up with little more than frustration and mounting debts without being any closer to finding what they seek.
It’s also important to note that players are subject to change over time. When I was 14 -17 years old I played a classical almost exclusively. In my early twenties I wanted the sound of a mellow archtop and that’s what I played, but I always kept a classical around. In my early thirties I all but quit playing and I kept only a classical. In my late thirties I got back into playing and preferred Telecasters although I kept playing archtops and classical guitars too. I went through a Stratocaster phase in my early forties and that became my main axe, although I still had an archtop a Tele and a classical. Nowadays Gretsch guitars are a very efficient way for me to get my desired sound but I still have a classical, a jazz archtop (floating pickup), a Tele, a Strat and a few other oddities. If I live into my eighties and continue to play I can only imagine that I might follow several other directions although I must say that when I found Gretsch guitars I felt that I’d found a sound I’d been seeking for many years.
