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Old 03-01-2009, 12:26 AM   #402
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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I fear that I might start to sound like a broken record as we get more into specific instruments and practices, but the reality is that the same principles apply over and over again.

When it comes to recording electric guitar, the most important thing is to make sure that we are actually starting with the player's "sound." One man's trash is another's treasure, and it's not the engineer's job to decide whether the guitar should sound like My Sharona or Cannibal Corpse or Charlie Christian.

For the home recordist, one of the problems with most "how to record guitar" guides is that they presume that the player's sound has already been worked out and well-established. This is usually the case with major-label artists who have already established a following, played hundreds of concerts, and who have had the opportunity to use advance money to shop through dozens of amplifiers.

But what of the Joe Blow who started this whole thread, he of the Squier Strat and the Peavy amp? How is he to know whether he would hear a bigger improvement from Lace Sensor pickups, or from a vintage tube amp, or from a modern modeling half-stack, or from buying a $3,000 Les Paul, or an original Ross compressor pedal, or from a POD vs a V-AMP vs a Johnson J-Station vs actually buying a real tube amp? For that matter, does he even really know for sure what "his sound" would be, even if he could have it for free if he simply named it right now?

He could ask in a web forum, and get a hundred different answers (see the very first post in this thread). And all of them probably have some merit. But one man's treasure is another's trash, and advice from James Hetfield or Stevie Ray Vaughn or might be of limited usefulness to a budding Andy Summers or Chris Isaac. Moreover, when a complete guitar rig could cost anything from $120 to $12,000 or more, it becomes difficult to priotitize. Especially where we're not talking about a Grand Piano or a Renaissance-era violin, but just about the staple of working-class garage-rock.

We start to get into hand-wired, discrete component this-and-that, and all-tube transformerless-output whatever, and hand-wound pickups and fourty-year-old paper capacitors and so on, and it's all basically doing the same thing as a twenty-dollar piece of wood with some thin-gauge wires wrapped around magnets.

I wish I could give a simple answer, and say that all you need is a V-AMP, or even an all-tube Marshall half-stack. The reality is, as I said earlier, that EVERYTHING matters when it comes to guitar sounds. The beautiful and terrible reality is that every single thing changes the sound of electric guitar. And unlike most other instruments, there is nothing close to a consensus. If you ask 100 top concert violinists which violins sound best, 99 of them will say a Stradivarius. If you ask 100 guitar heroes which guitar sounds best, you'll get 85 different answers, and never mind the differences in amps, effects pedals, picks, strings, and so on.

Moreover there is a hugely interactive aspect to good guitar sounds. Someone used to playing a Strat who picks up a Les Paul is apt find it a tone-killing blandness machine that makes every note and chord sound the same, whereas someone used to playing a Les Paul is apt to find a Strat to be an uncontrollable inferno of string noise and fizzy pick attack.

This fact, this reality, that very good guitar players often have wildly divergent opinions on the "right" gear starts to indicate a possibility that is not often considered. Especially when we consider the irrational and otherwise inexplicable reverence for "old" gear. Why would a simple guitar amplifier from 40 years ago sound any better than one made to the same specs today? Hold that thought.

We might reasonably speculate that modern lumber from heavily-irrigated rapid-growth forests might not resonate or sound the same as the dense-grained old-growth wood that was the norm in the mid-1900s, but why should ELECTRICAL circuits sound different? Moreover, why would old guitars sound any different from new guitars made from old wood?

I'm going to suggest a possible theory that, so far as I know, is unique. And that is that a majority of the "sound" achieved by the guitar greats was not from the gear, but from the player. On first pass, from a conventional gear-nerd POV, this might seem like no insight at all. Of Course Jimi Hendrix (or whoever) contributed more than the gear did. So we brush that aside and ask what gear do we need to get the same sound, given that we are playing like Jimi Hendrix?

But consider the possibility that it is not gear that defines the sound, but the player. That Jimi Hendrix would have developed a brilliant sound if all he had was a Johnson J-Station and a Kay guitar. Would we then be obsessing over Kay pickups and J-Stations with original EPROM chips? Would Jim Marshall still be running a drum shop in London selling Fender amp knockoffs?

I'm not saying that gear doesn't matter. I am suggesting the possibility that guitar players develop their sound in conjunction with the gear available to them. Link Wray invented distortion by punching holes in his speakers. Were those "vintage" holes? What if he had put them in the wrong places? Maybe, just maybe, given that the entire stream of guitar signal is a sequence of distortions and nonlinearities, maybe what matters is not so much the minutiae of the gear, but how the player manages and reacts to the distortions in real time.

Maybe Jimi Hendrix would have sounded just as good using an amp with KT66 tubes with diode rectification, or a custom-overbuilt American 6L6 tube amp overloaded by British 230V line voltage.

I do not believe for a second that all guitar gear is created equal, but I also think that, given a certain modicum of sonic adequacy, there is a possibility that obsessive pursuit of everything vintage reaches a tipping point where it becomes fetishism.

More to come.
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