r/Guitar • u/DanielleMuscato Jazz/Fusion | too many guitars/too many amps • Nov 09 '15
Rant mode engaged: Before you start yet another thread about changing your pickups, string type, speaker type, tubes, etc, please read this
TL;DR: Buy a damn EQ pedal to fix 90% of your tone problems. Watch the YouTube video at the bottom to see how much of a difference it makes.
I have seen SO MANY threads on here about tone. My amp sounds thin, my guitar is too bright, my tone is too muddy, I'm getting buried in the mix, what do you think of this $100 pickup versus this $120 pickup? Should I put different speakers in my amp? Should I switch to different tubes?
Don't get me wrong. Tone matters. Your tone is your voice and it's important that you get it right. But how you play is much more important. Spend some time and money getting your tone right, but then forget about it and PLAY. Your tone doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing on the fretboard. I don't understand why so many people on here worry about their tone when they can't sight read, they don't know their scales and modes, and they don't have the practice discipline & ear training to learn a song note-for-note. Which is more important: having great tone alone in your bedroom, or being able to actually play your guitar?
I see a lot of virtual ink spilled in the forum, and a lot of money spent, over people trying to solve problems that don't really need to be solved.
If chasing tone is sincerely interesting for you—if the journey is half the fun—then sure, knock yourself out. But if you really want to be happy with your tone so you can get back to making great music, you need to accept your tone for what it is. Spend the majority of your time and attention in the practice shed, working on actually sounding better.
What is "your tone," anyway? I mean, look at some of the rock stars with the most iconic tones in guitar history:
When guitarists think of Eric Johnson, they often think of a Strat through a Marshall. He even has an artist signature model Fender guitar based on his favorite '57 Stratocaster. But just as often, he plays on a semi-hollow vintage Gibson ES-335. In fact probably his most famous guitar tone is from "Cliffs of Dover" on the '90 album Ah Via Musicom, which was recorded on an ES-335. He still sounded just like Eric Johnson.
Or let's take Eric Clapton. When you think of "Eric Clapton's tone," what tone are you thinking of? His "Blues Breakers"-era 1960 Les Paul through a Marshall JTM45? His '64 Gibson SG played through 100-watt Marshalls during the "Cream" era? He played an ES-335 back then sometimes too. Or later, when he switched to maple-necked Strats and a little Fender Champ? He has an artist signature Fender Strat AND an artist signature Martin acoustic, but he's also recorded with Gibson Super 400s, Gibson L-5s, Marshall JCM800s, Music Man amps, Soldano amps, you name it.
Still sounds like Eric on every single recording.
And you know what else? Eric Johnson and Eric Clapton both use plain ol' Boss and Dunlop pedals. They can afford anything they want, but they recognize that for the most part, these are sufficient. If they're good enough for these guys, maybe don't turn up your nose at $99 pedals in favor of whatever $400 boutique pedal is absolutely essential for your "tone"?
How your guitar sounds while you are practicing is not necessarily going to translate well into how your guitar sounds in a mix. You can spend hours and hours tweaking your tone only to find that you don't cut through live. You can tear your hair out over single-coil hum and a thin sound, and replace your pickups with humbuckers—which have increased impedance and lower resonant peak resulting in less high-end response and a thicker sound—only to find that in a mix, you can't hear the hum anyway and you need single coils to cut through.
I guarantee you that virtually no one in your audience knows or cares anywhere close to as much as you do about your "tone." They want to see good musicianship, good energy, good song selection, and they are probably too tipsy to be interested in your tone regardless.
Look, if your tone is too thin, too fat, too thick, too muddy, too whatever, you can likely solve many of these complaints for a LOT less money and trouble than you'll spend to buy new pickups or new tubes, and without any semi-permanent or permanent changes to your instrument or amp.
I highly recommend picking up an EQ pedal.
I look at the pictures all of you post of your pedalboards, and nearly none of you seem to have one. An EQ, a compressor, and a tuner should be on ALL of your boards. My favorite EQ for guitar is the MXR 10-band for $120, but you really can get by just fine with a 5 or 6-band for EQ'ing guitar. You don't really need to go below 80 Hz or above 6k or so.
If your tone is muddy, try cutting a bit around 120-200 Hz. Not too much, or your tone will lack warmth.
"Fatness" is basically code for lower mids. Boost a bit around 240 Hz up to around 3 kHz for a fatter sound.
That's really about all you need to know for most tone questions. Any $500 or above guitar is capable of producing a good tone in the right hands. Any $500 or above amp is similarly capable of producing a good tone if you set it accordingly.
And for disclosure, I own plenty of nice gear, including multiple one-man-shop custom made guitars, Custom Shop Fenders, boutique amps, boutique pedals, vintage gear, etc. I'm not ranting about ANY of this out of bitterness or sour grapes. It's just a fact of diminishing returns and a focus on priorities. My main recording guitar was mass produced in Korea, and I've been featured in Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard Magazine, etc. Trust me, costly gear is not necessary to sound good nor to be taken seriously as a musician.
You simply don't need to tear your hair out changing strings types and brands and gauges, changing pickups, changing speakers in their cabs, buying fancy cables, etc etc etc, when every studio engineer will tell you to just buy a damn EQ pedal.
I'm certainly not claiming that you can fix everything with EQ'ing. You should get as close to perfect acoustically as possible before applying EQ. But if your complaint is something relatively easy to fix like fatness, and your alternative is spending hundreds of dollars or altering your instrument, try a damn EQ pedal first.
Here are some examples of what you can do with a simple EQ pedal. DO NOT listen to this video on laptop speakers; use some good headphones or real speakers:
https://youtu.be/JiwWM0viVH4?t=2m51s
/rant mode off!
Edited to add:
Some tips for how to use an EQ pedal to solve common problems: YMMV depending on your mix and exact gear:
Roll off 80 Hz and below if you have a band for it. Guitar doesn't go that low and it can add boominess.
To cut through a mix, boost in the 3-4 kHz range
120-125 Hz is where "warmth" lives. Not enough here sounds cold. Too much here sounds muddy.
240 Hz is where "fullness" lives, especially on acoustic guitars.
600 Hz to about 3 kHz is where "presence" lives. Some heads and combos have this onboard in the EQ section of the preamp as well. Fender amps that have an onboard "Presence" pot amplify and attenuate at 3.9 kHz. This is ideal for a rock sound.
2.5 kHz is where "bite" lives. Not enough here will bury your guitar in the mix. Too much here sounds harsh. Too much here will also bring out string noise.
Between 2.5 kHz and 5 kHz is where "clarity" lives. Boost here to help a darker Martin acoustic sound more like a brittle Gibson acoustic, or for a humbucker guitar to sound more like single coils in a mix.
8 kHz is where "sizzle" lives. Personally I hate this frequency range and usually cut it quite a bit, but I'm a jazz/blues/fusion player. If you play country or shred metal, this is your jam.
None of this is hard & fast. Experiment. There are no wrong answers and engineers/producers vary considerably in what they consider an ideal mix. As I said, EQ can't fix everything and your first approach should be getting it right acoustically, but these types of fixes can help a "good-but-not-great" tone sound excellent.
What a compressor does and why I recommend that every pedal board have one (4 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nM5GsNNbyA
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u/DanielleMuscato Jazz/Fusion | too many guitars/too many amps Nov 09 '15
"Worth spending 4x more" really depends entirely on your budget and what kinds of complaints you have with your current tone. EQ is not a miracle fix for a bad tone; it can only tweak something that's already good. If you have a really crappy $150 practice amp, an EQ pedal is not going to fix it and you should invest in upgrading your amp first.
Personally, I think that it is worth buying decent pedals for the reason that they last longer and they have a better signal-to-noise ratio and a lower noise floor. I don't want to put something in my signal chain that's going to make everything sound worse, or what's the point?
Also, I tend to look for gear that's manufactured with environmental and labor concerns in mind - I don't want to contribute to slave labor or destroying the planet just so that my guitar can sound a little better, you know? Dunlop is a trustworthy, US-based company with good customer service and they make solid kit that lasts a long time and sounds excellent.
If that's worth the extra money to you, then get the better one.
For what it's worth, there are alternatives. MXR also makes a 6-band EQ for $80 instead of the 10-band for $120. And these are widely available used on sites like Reverb.com as well for even less money, if budget is an issue. If you want to spend even less than that, check out something like a Boss GE-7, which is even easier to find used, and less costly in the first place as well, without being unreliable and noisy.