The Quest For Tone
(17 Jul 03)
...and why to do it
I KNOW that that does not sound as exciting as a sermon about PG's newest "Terror Death Lick", but I think that, if you really are serious about your playing, if you want it to sound good, if you wonder why guys like Satch, Steve Morse, Eric Johnson and others can make even simple things sound beautiful, you should pay attention to that side of playing, too.
Even when I practise, I try to make it sound good. Does that sound weird? Well, it means that, if I i.e. work on some scale sequence, I don't only try to get the lick down, I also try to make it sound good, to have the notes ring out, to experiment with the attack etc.
Some people laugh about all the time and effort Eric Johnson invests into searching for obscure stuff like the "sweet spot", or why he uses some extremely un-economic fingerings to play a line, simply because he is convinced that that 3rd note of that melody sounds better on the G-string than on the B-string in the context of that melody.
But you cannot deny that EJ has an amazing sound and tone. And that is not only because of those killer-vintage guitars and amps he uses. It's because he went beyond mere bpm-counting and picking-tricks. He worked on his technique, and then tried to make all these cool licks sound good.
There is a limit to the tone-factor. If you play something like an extremely fast picking run, you have to make a compromise. You can still have a certain tone going there (listen to Paul Gilbert play a fast picking run, then listen to Tony MacAlpine... if you listen really hard, there IS a difference), but you can't do as many subtle things to alter the tone anymore.
But your playing should not only involve runs at the speed of light, but also melodic stuff, and those require good melodic ideas, nice phrasing and a good TONE.
Osmosis
OK, the last thing I'd like to talk about is LISTENING. I chose that subject line ("Osmosis") because Abi von Reininghaus used it to describe a certain process I wanna talk about now. One ESSENTIAL part of working on tone, getting aware of it, seeing its potential and learning about it is LISTENING.
Listening to players. Not wasting months staring at photos and videos of that player to see exactly WHERE he picks the string, but listening to hear and comprehend that players "texture", the texture of his tone.
Listen i.e. to Jeff Beck... those snappy sounds in between, used in combination with soft, fragile notes, combined with a plethora of different kinds of vibrato... that's his texture, the texture of his tone. If you listen to it a lot, you might feel tempted to try to get similar sounds out of your guitar. Or you don't even feel tempted, it just happens.
It's the language-comparison thing again... if you spend a lot of time listening to just one person talk, you might pick up certain elements of that person's way of speaking. Certain terms that person uses a lot, certain ways of i.e. raising the voice on certain words. Subconciously, you might start to use those same elements, say words the same way that person did.
Or you do it "half-subconciously". Imagine you watch a bunch of Schwarzenegger-movies. You know, the guy with that weird Austrian accent. Now, imagine you think that is funny, and you start copying it, just for the laughs. ("I'll be backkk...")
If you do that for a long period of time, if you don't even think about it anymore, you might just find yourself using that accent subconciously all the time. It has become a part of your way of speaking. You intended to copy it, and it, in a natural way because you used it a lot, became a part of your way of speaking.
And it's the same with playing the guitar. Example: I am a huge fan of Jeff Beck. And I always liked all these weird sounds he uses, like the pre-bends, whammy bar-phrasing, snapping notes. (And this actually is more phrasing than tone, but bear with me). So I tried to get those sounds, and after a while, I noticed that, without planning on it, or even thinking about it, I was using those things in my own style of playing. And it can be the same with tone.
So... I did an experiment Abi von Reininghaus had done before. Before I tell you about it, you should know that I hardly ever watch TV. I don't even have one, I watch TV when I am over at some friends house. If I wanna watch a movie, I rent one or go to the movie theatre, if I want news, I go online or buy a newspaper. I don't listen to the radio a lot either. I sure do so when I am driving around with a friend and he has got the radio running. But most of the time, I only listen to the music I wanna listen to (CD's). So it was kinda easy to set up this experiment.
I made myself two tapes. Tape 1 was a 120 minutes, Tape 2 had 90 minutes of music on it. Tape 1 had a bunch of ballads and slower pieces by Steve Vai on Side A and a lot of ballads and slower songs by Joe Satriani on the other side. Tape 2 featured a collection of my favorite guitar ballads by players like Jeff Beck, Andy Timmons, Steve Morse, Eric Johnson...
And I listened to nothing else but these tapes for 3 weeks. Really. I mean, of course in between I put in another CD, i.e. to transcribe a song for a lesson or whatever. But other than that and those rare occasions where I i.e. was in a club, a bar, a diner or in someone's car, I listened to those two tapes only, over and over again. Not always paying attention... I was reading, eating, doing all kinds of stuff, and those tapes were running in the background.
I didn't play along to them. When I practised I turned them off. And guess what? After three weeks, I invited three friends of mine for a jam-session. And guess what? My playing had changed a little bit. Listening to those tapes had gotten me used to the phrasing of those guys. I had that Satriani-texture, or that Vai-vibe in my mind, it had become an essential part of my life because it was my soundtrack for three weeks straight. It was a rather subconcious process (have you ever read about Steve Vai listening to Zappa-songs while he was sleeping, which helped him to learn and memorize them? Or him listening to a 440 hz tone through headphones while being asleep?)
But it was obvious. And it kinda showed to me that developing tone requires a lot of listening, a lot of time, and a lot of "not thinking about it".
If I may use my comparison to learning a language once more: You can sit down and focus on learning that language with a dictionary or reading books. You can use phonetics to learn how to pronounce a word or phrase something. You can remember the way the waiter at the diner said a sentence this morning, and try to emulate it from memory.
But an essential part of learning a language, learning to speak and phrase is listening to other people speak. And you don't notice that a lot, cuz it's a normal part of your everyday-life. You can't avoid hearing people talk.
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