MusichopperThe Official Blog of Pro Guitarist Allen ROBOT Van Wert

Some people have no idea what guitar tone they want. Some know exactly what it is they hear in their head. Most don’t know how to get it either way. I am known for using a very unique guitar tone that many people thought was a keyboard, midi file or somehow just fake. I developed the tone by playing around with some ideas that would lead me to my goal, to sound like a Nintendo basically. The tone sounds odd to some people and some really enjoy it. The main point is that it is very unique and immediately distinguishable.

When you hear Eric Johnson, you know it is Eric Johnson. It isn’t just the playing alone. The gain stage and every little element in the chain changes the outcome.

A good way to start your exploration for YOUR tone is to first think of something in your head. Even if it is abstract and not exactly connected to sound, it is a start. Once you have that element defined with certain terms that you may be able to develop with equipment and even technique, Start playing around with sounds that remind you or best fit the terms you list for the thoughts in your head about the ultimate guitar tone that screams “THIS IS ME!”

You could use other guitarist’s tones as a starting point and I think it is very useful to pay attention to how different players get their own sound. This will help provide somewhat of a road-map when developing your own.

Here are some tips and thoughts:

Reverb or the lack of reverb really puts a guitar in physical space of near or far. It also can be used to provide a form of environment or ambient sound-scape. My ROBOT tone uses NO reverb at all which helps give it a distinct raw quality that closer resembles something digital and unnatural.(which was my goal)

Compression is something very useful and dangerous. You can get drastic results with compression depending on how and where you use it. Essentially, compression is where you take a signal and squash it so the louder notes become softer and the quieter notes become louder. This makes things less dynamic and if you really push it overboard, you can have it so squashed that every note regardless of how loud or soft you play, comes out at the same volume. I use this trick with the ROBOT tone to give it a digital and unnatural feel. Eric Johnson uses compression in a different way. He uses it to cause notes to swell which alters the pick attack. Sometimes I do something similar where I make the pick attack compressed and clean but have the fullness of the guitar swell in slightly over a few milliseconds to make sure the picking is defined while still getting that smeared sort of neck pickup tone. There are so many applications for compression that I highly suggest researching compression and various uses so that you can make educated decisions when applying it.

Volume is something to consider when using an amp. Many people agree that there is a sweet spot for tone that happens when the speakers are physically displacing due to high volume. This gives an added natural distortion where you can lower the gain some and add midrange for more clarity while still getting a heavy sound. This deals more with heavy rhythm and chord playing than lead in most cases.

Know your amp! You really need to know you amp inside and out. Different tubes will change the tone. Understand how each tone knob alters the way other tone knobs act and if you should usually take into account how everything will sound or does sound going into a microphone. Mose people use a dynamic mic up close. There are many variations to work with and try. The best way to do this is to have the cabinet and mic in another room. Have the amp head in an isolated room with you so you can hear only the sound that comes from the mic picking up the signal from the cabinet. Have an assistant move the mic around while you tweak amp head settings back and forth to test how things work. Playing live and recording usually means everyone hears your tone AFTER it goes through a mic. This will drastically alter your tone. The goal is to get the mic signal to match what a person hears from the amp alone. You would think that the logical thing to do is to walk around the room with the amp and find the spot you like the sound the best with your ears. Then place a mic right where your ear is. However, microphones have lower bass response at a distance and it won’t work out quite as you imagine it should. Take into account the size and type of speakers the cabinet has. Every speaker on the cabinet sounds different (even if they are all the same brand). Then you need to realize something that most musicians in general simply ignore…

A guitar tone on its own will sound different that a guitar tone with other instruments/sounds playing.

You need to check how the guitar tone works when there is a bass guitar and vocal or piano/keyboard. A classic example of this is all of the guitar players who scoop the mids completely out of their amp. It sounds cool because you suddenly have a thumping low end and harsh distortion sound. That crunch happening. As soon as you place a bass guitar along with it, suddenly the low end is mud. Then you add a vocal and drums and you cant hear your guitar anymore because the midrange is sucked out of it and other instruments are now masking what you heard when it was playing alone. Of course, you then turn the amp up because the other guys are just “to loud” right. Now you are adding this noisy shrill top end to compete with the drums and the low end is just walking all over the bass guitar and it sounds bad in basically every way you can imagine. I agree that rhythm guitar should have the mids scooped. But only slightly and in a specific range(s). You also need to account for the room you are recording in for a recording situation. If you have the cabinet in a room less than 20 feet long, you will usually run into issues with room nodes. This basically means that the room itself latches on to certain frequencies coming from your cabinet and amplifies them itself. This of course gets into the mic and the recording or into the P.A. system at a show. You can lower your bass knob on the amp to help it some but then you are sacrificing some tone. The best way to fix it is to isolate the cabinet and mic from the room sound any way you can. For recording, I use bass traps set around the mic and cabinet. For live, you are usually on your own and get screwed lol. You can however build or purchase an isolation cabinet with a mic inside, just make sure the sound man has you up enough in the monitors so you can hear yourself. On, and don’t even think about using eq to “remove” the room sound lol. You can usually take out some at 400hz but you are losing the guitar tone with it. Best bet is to isolate, unless the room sound is really working for the tone and magic happens. I won’t go into technical sound manifestation, reflection and absorption. I will say this. Buy yourself some Owens-Corning and isolate the room from the mic and cab. Make sure to get thick versions or double or even quadruple thinner ones together if you need. Also, you should wrap them in burlap unless you want fiberglass in the air or on you lol. Burlap works great because it holds the fiberglass in but it is porous enough to allow higher frequency sound to pass into the fiberglass, thereby isolating the upper frequencies from the room and mic as well as the low frequencies. Before you get too excited. There are certain diminished returns when it comes to bass frequency isolation. You should read up on the length of sound waves and know that sound waves that are longer than the thickness of your isolation material will pass right through it like magic. This is why thickness of materials matters. There is a trick though. You can add virtual thickness to your material by allowing an air gap between it and a wall. The closer it is to a wall, the less it will work. You should keep then out as far from the walls as you can for the best results in isolation. Oh, and don’t forget the floor lol. A carpeted floor will stop some high frequency but no lows. A wood or hard floor will cause reflections of high frequency. You should elevate the cabinet from the floor and elevate the mic stand from the floor if you can. This isn’t always a huge deal because usually guitarists or engineers will cut frequencies below 90hz out of a guitar anyway. It still alters the tone though. Just because you cut out 80 hz AFTER the recording was made doesn’t mean the 80hz didn’t affect the rest of the sonic spectrum through resonance and overtones.

I may have gone a little too much into recording guitar since this was meant to be about guitar tone. However, you hear guitar tone after it hits a mic and gets all fucked up. So, it is good stuff to be aware of and understand when dealing with tone.

Other things to look into will be the pickups on a guitar and how well volume is consistent from one string to the rest, How the pick you use changes the attack sound of the guitar and of course how you play it. I wouldn’t worry too much about spending tons of money on some special guitar cable or speaker cables lol. I ran tests on the cheapest through the most expensive and they all sound identical. I did the tests using a keyboard so I could activate every sonic range to be thorough. Many people have also mentioned the bullshit story these companies spin about a special way their cables work. It’s all pretty much the same except for isolation of radio waves and long term wear and tear resistance.

You should also think outside the box. I am told that Mutt Lange had people using a little rockman headphone amp for Def Leppard and/or ZZ Top recordings and massively EQ corrected it to get their guitar tone to work well in the mix and have the needed attributes he wanted. This brings up non amp tone and solid state processing. Some plugins and rack based guitar amp simulations are quite good sounding and very useful. I sometimes get ideas by playing around with various effects in a rack to make cool sounds. Some people use software to emulate guitar tones and to actually see how something might sound in their own rig before purchasing it.

Gain Stage is one last thing I will mention. It has to do with how the sound is progressively amplified from the guitar to the amp and speakers. I have heard many times what lower output pickups give a “better” tone. I agree. I also like to roll off the volume on my guitar until it it right at the breaking point of cutting off and then boost the amp gain some. This seems to give a really breathing human tone. Reminds me of Eddie Van Halen sometimes. Speaking of which, the way you blend effects with a direct signal can really help things out as well. He had his phaser sending along with the direct signal. If you don’t, it gets a little unruly at times. Back to the gain stage stuff. Basically, the gain will take sound and “suck” in more sound depending on how high it is turned up. This works just like compression and essentially, distortion is compression. So just be aware of WHERE things get amplified and how much. Amps all work differently so learn your amp.

After all is said and done. It is rare to ever be 100% complete and happy about a tone for a very long time. It is good to save settings and write down knob positions and go back to them at a later time to see what the sound you liked sounds like. One last tip is comparison. Humans, have a tendency to automatically hear something louder as being better than something quieter. This means you need to make sure wen you change settings of any sort, you are not just liking the change because it made everything louder.

Have fun playing with sounds and reaching your imagination in the more apparently physical world.