“Guitar Tone” is how guitar players describe the sound of guitar playing. The phrase exists because there needs to be a way to talk about the sound separately from the note choice. With a little practice, you could know nothing about guitar and still be able to play the first 10 seconds of your favorite song by simply learning the notes, but you probably wouldn’t sound like the actual guitar player on the original recording. This difference would be the “Guitar Tone”.
Guitar Tone is fun because it’s like putting on a costume. You can plug a Fender Telecaster into a Fender Twin and sound like country, then plug a Les Paul into a Marshall Super Lead and sound like rock n’ roll, then plug an ES-335 into a Roland JC-120 and sound like jazz, then plug an Ibanez RG Series into a Mesa Dual Rectifier and sound like metal.
But why do those things sound like they do?
You might be reading this because you like science. Science is great for structure, organization, and logic. There is peer review, regulatory agencies, and third party inspections. Guitar tone doesn’t have that. It isn’t a vaccine that people take, or a bridge that they drive their car over. It’s the toy department. There’s a limit to how bad things can get if you mess up your guitar tone. This relaxed atmosphere is a refreshing break from the more serious side of life, and that’s part of what makes it fun for people to come home from work, plug into a guitar amp, and make fun noises.
But you’re not chasing any guitar tones yet, you’re brand new to this idea of guitar tone and you enjoy science. So I’m going to give you the closest thing that guitar tone has to agreed-upon scientific classifications.
Bright/Dark. This describes the high frequencies (treble). If there are two different guitar sounds, one with more high frequency content and one with less high frequency content, most people listening would describe the one with more high frequencies as brighter and the one with less high frequencies as darker.
Fat/Thin. This describes the low frequencies (bass). If there are two different guitar sounds, one with more low frequency content and one with less low frequency content, most people listening would describe the one with more low frequencies as fatter and the one with less low frequencies as thinner.
Clean/Distorted. This describes how fuzzy it sounds. If you plug an electric guitar straight into a computer and record it with no additional gear, it will probably sound sort of like it does unplugged. You’ll hear the strings making the notes happen. But if you plug it into a tube amp or an overdrive pedal and crank up the gain then you’ll start to hear the notes get fuzzy, because something in the signal chain (like a tube or a diode) is receiving more signal than it can accurately reproduce and is causing the signal to exit as a “clipped” version of the original. If there are two different guitar sounds, one with more clipping and one with less clipping, most people listening would describe the one with less clipping as cleaner and the one with more clipping as more distorted.
Dry/Wet. This describes how spacey it sounds. If you plug a guitar straight into an amp, place the mic right up close to the speaker and record it, the recorded sound will be very plain and unembellished. This is referred to as “Dry”. This is not a bad thing at all, my favorite guitar sounds were recorded very dry. If the mic is placed all the way across the room, or if the reverb knob on the amp is turned up, or if an echo pedal is turned on, or if a myriad of other spacey sounding effects are applied, then the recorded sound will be more elaborately textured. The balance of unaffected sound to affected sound is the dry/wet balance. If there are two different guitar sounds, one with less spatial effects and one with more spatial effects, most people listening would describe the one with less spatial effects as drier and the one with more spatial effects as wetter.
A bright, thin, distorted, dry guitar tone will sound very different from a dark, fat, clean, wet guitar tone.
Attempts to describe guitar tone using adjectives outside of these 4 spectra (bright/dark, fat/thin, clean/distorted, and dry/wet) are often unproductive. There is no consensus for vague words like “deep” and “powerful”, or for silly words like “creamy” and “rubbery”. If something needs to be described in more detail than bright/dark, fat/thin, clean/distorted, and dry/wet, then accuracy is dependent on actual numbers being involved. Frequencies in Hz, loudness in dB, time in ms, blend levels in %, those kinds of things.
But you don’t have to worry about those details yet. Next time you put on some music, just try to listen for the guitar tone. Is it a big bassy tone or is it a smaller thin tone that fits in its own space in the mix? Is it a bright tone where you can hear lots of detail in the way the pick is hitting the strings or is it a dark tone that is more smooth than distracting? Is it a clear clean tone or an energetic and sustaining distorted tone? Is it an in-your-face dry tone or a hazy-wash-of-effects wet tone?
It’s easiest to do this as a comparison. If you flip back and forth between two songs from different genres or time periods, you might be able to tell which has brighter guitars, or which has wetter guitars, etc., and that can start to tell the story of why that kind of music sounds like it does.
This first step into mindfulness of guitar tone might give you new ways to enjoy the music you already love, or new things to find interesting in music that didn’t previously hook you.
-Jim
2024-09-17