General Tone Tips

[ancient_owl]

Re: General Tone Tips

Don't forget about your guitar volume and tone controls - they may significantly affect your tone, especially with valve amps. Try to get true-bypass effects.

[El Dunco]

Re: General Tone Tips

Here's some vital points to consider when recording distorted guitars.

You should be so practiced that you can play your parts backwards in your sleep so you can bash them out with confidence, precision and flare when needed. You should make sure you aren't making creaks and string noise.

Try and have as direct a signal as possible. Spend the money on good cables, especially on the cable from the head to the cabinet. The speakers have possible the strongest role in the coloration of your sound so in preproduction you should experiment with different speakers until you find "your" speaker.

If you use pedals, don't use noisy AC adapters, put in fresh batteries. That guitar had better be intonated and the strings should be fairly new and freshly worn in (not too jangly). Get "your sound" happening in the room, right there. Don't think you'll get it "later down the line". It's gotta happen where it's at.

Find the excursion point of the speakers. The sweet spot you want is just as the speakers start to move and a little before they start to break up undesirably make the cabinet rumble. You may need to take off your grill cloth to see the speakers and observe the movement. If possible, try and determine which speaker has the best tone.

You also want to make sure you aren't causing too much movement in your microphone's diaphragm and that there's plenty of headroom on the mic preamp.

Keep a note of your excursion point and put the volume down, strap on your headphones, put your mic of choice on a stand. Stick it on the cone, pull it back a few inches and then turn it about 30 degrees facing the edge of the cone. Then rotate the boom until you get the sweet spot where it isn't ice-picky and thin, but it's muffled and dark. Then lock it all down and DON'T TOUCH IT. Turn back up to your excursion point and now we can start using the control room.

If you really know what you're doing, stick a condenser or two in the corner of the room to supplement the sound later on.

Spend the money on a good unit for gating and compression. VSTs aren't really going to cut it and they will chew up RAM. Spend lots of time shaping the sound with the attack and release. My compressor has a tube saturation section and I use the coveted echoplex tube section as well.

Your amp should be in a different room so you can hear it unimpeded through your monitors. It may also be a good idea to keep your cab mic'd in your iso room and adjust the head in the control room.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is just the beggining of getting a really great distorted guitar sound the old fashioned way with real amps and microphones.

[icantbuyafender]

Re: General Tone Tips

Never eat yellow snow.

[Scott Olson]

Re: General Tone Tips

There are no rules - a guitar can be played in any way you can get sound out of it. Explore alternative tunings, tapping, harmonics - you might find things you like and incorporate those little sounds into your tonal pallette. Learn how to play songs by ear rather than using tabs all the time. I'm a huge fan of low tunings on Acoustic that I could never pull off on electric and playing it distorted and as hard as you can. I love what I can do on acoustic guitar, that I could quite frankly not pull off on electric with such aggressive playing and low tunings.

[fleabag]

Re: General Tone Tips

I agree 100%. As I also agree that tone is in your fingers, I also think it is your gear as well. When we finally hear whats in our heads coming out of our amps.... well how inspiring is that!?

[Baltar]

Re: General Tone Tips

@philtis: i think everyone swears on different speakers in a twin.
some other fantastic choices:
- evm12 for superclean
- eminence gb12 imo a perfect mix for multiple needs (i'd say from country to bluesrock)
- jensen neo12 (green)

many other fit cool as well.. swamp thang (less sterile than evm12), texas heat (less dB)

cheers, b

[philthis]

Re: General Tone Tips

hey there is some great advice on here allready so I will just put a couple of easy things I have been researching latley

1) if you are buying a Fender Twin amp or a clean amp in general with that similar clean type tone check out the Weber 12a150 speakers-they are a warm alnico speaker that just seems to go very well with this amp for some reason, for you ceramic speaker guys the weber 12f150 is good as well.


2) for tweed amps with a thicker tone if you want to fatten it up even more try a celestian vintage 30. I know-I know its a distortion speaker but it also sounds nice and fat, clean-in a tweed type circut and when the tweed amp starts to break up it sounds great as well.

just a couple of ideas for you guys

[El Dunco]

Re: General Tone Tips

Here's some even the most accomplished players can probably learn from!

Boxing: Don't limit yourself to patterns and 'box yourself in'. Learn modes for the entirity of the fretboard so you can move higher or lower. Learn the actual notes rather than the patterns. Can apply to great riffs and phrases as well as just leads.

Key changing: Learn to be able to switch keys during solos. This will allow you to create much catchier leads if you can move within a chord progression. Another limiting factor that even the best players may be caught in without realizing is only ever playing within the mode for one key.

Music Theory: If you can learn to read sheet music even just a little bit without necessarily being able to sight-read on the fly, it will do alot for your songwriting. Guitar tab is only written for guitar and is only numbers. Whereas notation is universal.

If you suffer from any of these, it doesn't mean you're a bad player. But if you can fix these it will make the difference from 'great' to 'amazing'.

[RobSoundtrack]

Re: General Tone Tips

1: Square wave FACT
These edges of sound waves are tedious on our ears, whether we know it or not.
The 'warmth' of tubes refers to the roundness of their output wave.

That is to say, you get a solidstate amp setup to sound JUST like an adjacent tube amp;
on a psychological level, your brain/ears will sooner get tired of listening to the SS amp..
...and you wouldn't otherwise know why..

2: STYLE. We all have our own, embellish it well.
If we play the same easy riff on the same gear, are we going to sound the same?
Is one of us going to sound 'better?'

Take your vibratos. Do you just shake the s*** out of every note??
Or do you make those notes BLOOM!!

[davidwillson]

Re: General Tone Tips

ALWAYS TUNE YOUR TIMPANI!!!

If you pick hard on a tube amp it will "dirty up", if you do it on a transistor amp it might get louder. If you roll back your volume on a dirty tube amp it will "clean up", or in other words tube amps have the correct "feel".

In the immortal words of Cub Koda....." Never give a roadie anything of value, I have a box of toothpicks at home that use to be a Les Paul."

[Ninja Monkey]

Re: General Tone Tips

Sorry, but being out of tune is something you should strive to avoid with most all recording situations.

The best way to make a recording sound bigger/wider is to double track incredibly tightly and just pan in either direction.

hee hee
I meant to delete my n00bish advice. Anyway, you're right, when it comes to standard recording practice. However, now that I have this advice, I will not use it. I don't want to sound all normal, ya know?

[Diego]

Re: General Tone Tips

Lowering those pickups a bit and raising the string action a few milimeters will give you a fatter tone, a clearer sound and more sustain.

I think string action is more important that string gauge, in fact.

[tonefreak1527]

Re: General Tone Tips

-tune

-turn the pick sideways, so the thin side is on the string for fast picking

-drill scales for an hour a day

[Johnny Nowhere]

Re: General Tone Tips

Whatever works.

[super rad stuff]

Re: General Tone Tips

If you must use reverb, use as little as possible. Too much reverb can cover you up in the mix.

yea, no one could ever hear van halen!