Home Tone vs. Gig Tone

“home tone” vs. “gig tone”. This is something that experienced performing musicians know intuitively, but which often slaps newcomers to the live venue right in the face when they come up against it for the first time. To preface: there’s so much talk of “tone” these days, and so many guitarists are chasing it for all their worth, but more often than not this pursuit is undertaken in the isolation of a player’s living room, bedroom, home studio, or some other “home alone” environment. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, and these places are where we practice, learn, discover, and sometimes record the results. But honing our ultimate tone in these subjective environments can often lead to disappointment when we get out into the entirely subjective real world. Let’s find out why.

Among the net blogging tone hounds, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on guitar and amp sounds that are “smooth, warm, round, organic…” This might run to everything from the general preference for neck-pickup tones to a love of the round, thick, early breakup of heavily worn-in vintage speakers. Certainly any of these can bathe the ear in their juicy goodness when enjoyed sans distraction, and sound a lot more pleasant than anything that hints at a “harsh” or “cutting” sound. What the ear perceives from a solo electric guitar, however, and from a guitar blended into the mix of a full band are two entirely different things. In the latter, that smooth, warm, round tone too often can become… well, nothing at all.

The fundamental notes—meaning the pure, fretted notes, without any consideration of overtones (harmonics)—of guitars with 22 frets cover the frequency range from the low E at 82 Hz to a high D at 1,174 Hz. It so happens that the human voice has a range from approximately 85 Hz to 1,100 Hz. The human ear can detect frequencies from around 20 Hz (a further octave below the low E on a bass guitar) to around 20,000 Hz (or 20 kHz), but the average human’s hearing is biased toward detecting sounds in the midrange frequencies, which is to say it hears them more easily (they are perceived as louder), while upper-mid and high-frequency sounds will also jump out as being more noticeable within any blend, if not louder in the pure sense. Those midrange frequencies, it turns out, encompass the human voice as well as the guitar. As it happens, they also define a lot of what a drum kit produces (drum frequencies trample all over the spectrum), anything your bassist will create above his first octave or so, and anything a keyboard or horn section will produce. In other words, without some clever tone-shaping to distinguish the note production of each instrument, you can be left with sonic mush.



Meanwhile, thanks to the range of overtones (harmonics) that any plucked guitar string also produces, the guitar’s frequency range is actually extended far above the frequency of its highest fundamental note, and it takes up a lot more space in the sonic stew than just this chunk of around 1,000 Hz toward the center of the midrange. Put the guitar through an amplifier, especially a semi-distorted one (and most of them are, right!?), and these harmonics are accentuated further.


Revisit that “warm, smooth, round” tone that is so easy on the ear at home, and you’ll find that it achieves this quality by minimizing the aural spikes that strong harmonic overtones represent. Get it up on stage, though, amidst a drummer, bassist, vocalist, a second guitarist and maybe some keyboards, and this spike-free tone is often about as effective as a rubber crutch. Stand back from the stage, and—in a large, loud band, at least—such a tone will often be all but lost when everyone is playing, contributing more to the general sense of low-end presence and midrange body of the band’s sound, rather than ringing as a distinct part on its own. Of course, sometimes that’s exactly what you want, from a power-chord rhythm guitar part or the chunk-metal second guitar that’s backing another guitarists riffs and lead work. Also, if you’re playing in a small blues combo, with a more minimalist drummer and no extremes of volume, your smooth, rich tone might be delightful just as it is. In so many other scenarios, though, you’re likely to be hoping that your own playing will be heard for itself, and that your rhythm and lead parts alike will shine and get some attention out there in the crowd.

Often, a newbee to the live scene will just keep increasing their overall volume in an effort to get heard, which usually inspires the rest of the band to crank up, too, ultimately accentuating the mush. To get that tone heard properly, you’ll want to dial in some upper-midrange cut, some attention-getting shimmer in the highs (though without creating an ice-pick-in-the-ear for anyone in the first few rows), and a firmer low end. This might involve simply tweaking your amp’s tone and gain controls, or selecting a different pickup, but it might also require a total rethink of your rig between the current gig and the next. More drastic changes that can help might include switching to a firmer, punchier speaker, exploring a brighter guitar (or amp) with more harmonic sparkle… or you might simply need to put on some fresh strings. There isn’t room here to cover all the possible adjustments, and I’m mainly getting you to face up to the theory, but you’ll know the condition when you hear it.

It’s important to realize, too, that your tonal requirements will vary from night to night, room to room, and to remain flexible in all gigging situations. All of which is not intended to say that you should entirely scrap that warm, luscious, ear-candy tone that gives you goosebumps in the bedroom, just that you should prime yourself against being too precious about it out in the real world. When you get “your tone” set up and ready to go in sound check, then find it is lost in the ether once the band kicks in, don’t be too proud—or too stubborn—to change it. Dial some punch into the midrange, some cutting power into the higher frequencies, and some tightness into the low end, and get your tone out there to the ears that matter most to the live performance: someone else’s.


Taken from Gibson Tone Tips

Classic Amps: The Early ’60s Vox AC30

The old adage holds that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s also an easy gauge of any vintage amp’s “classic” status within the realm of great amps designed in the past 60 years. A quick tally of contemporary amps inspired by the AC30 — which includes great models from boutique makers such as Matchless, Dr Z, Bad Cat, TopHat, 65 Amps, Trainwreck, Bruno, Komet, and several others — shows us just how inspirational Vox’s 50-year-old circuit has been, and how secure its status as one of just a handful of seminal blueprints.

Like so many other great guitar and amp companies, Vox’s roots are pre-rock and roll, but the eventual boom in this new musical genre would help to secure its success. Tom Jennings, himself an accomplished accordionist, built electronic organs in the 1940s and started his Jennings Organ Company in 1951 to sell portable organs. He founded Vox amps’ original manufacturer, Jennings Musical Instruments (JMI) in 1957 with the specific intention of cashing in on the British rock and roll boom, and while the AC30 wasn’t Vox’s first model, it was the amp that really put the name on a bigger map.

The AC30 is a descendent of Vox’s first successful amp of the late 1950s, the AC15. While many guitar amps of the day were derived from circuits published by tube manufacturers for general amplifier applications in radios and gramophones, Dick Denney, the electronics wizard who designed the AC15 for Jennings, approached the job with the guitar’s own sonic performance in mind, adapted these circuits accordingly, and the results speak for themselves. This amp’s cathode biasing and lack of negative feedback give plenty of sparkling, slightly unchained chime to the guitar’s upper-mids and highs, thanks to the way they encourage second harmonics as artifacts of distortion. This offers a flattering tonality at low and middle volume levels, and a creamy overdrive when cranked (note that these design elements just aren’t suitable in larger amps, so you don’t see them in 50W or 100W models). Also, in letting the output stage run “open loop” – that is, free from any negative feedback-derived damping – Denney’s design offered a rich, touch-sensitive, and therefore very playable performance when pushed. These amps’ tube rectifiers also add to the touch-sensitive, slightly compressed playing feel that so many players love. While both the AC15 and AC30 are often sited as “classic class A amps”, it is probably more accurate to sum up their sound as the result of these features: their cathode biasing, lack of negative feedback, tube rectifier, and easily overdriven EL84 output tubes.

With rock and roll’s continued growth, a more powerful amp was needed, and by the late ’50s the popular British group The Shadows (featuring Hank Marvin on guitar) came knocking to ask Jennings and Denney to build them a more powerful amplifier. In late 1959 Denney and Jennings simply doubled the 2xEL84 output stage of the AC15 to give birth to the 4xEL84 AC30 – a more versatile and more rocking amp all-round, which is actually capable of putting out more than 35W in good condition. (Note that AC15s and early AC30/4 combos both used the lesser-seen EF86 preamp pentode preamp tube, but this was soon dropped in the AC30 for the more plentiful and reliable ECC83/12AX7 type. Several contemporary makers, however, have rediscovered the juicy EF86 and currently use it in their own designs.)

The AC30 originally carried a simple, single treble-bleed Tone control, plus a Cut (or “High Cut”) control that rounded off the harsher highs at the output stage. The archetypal AC30 was born a couple years after its introduction, however, when the powerful, interactive Top Boost EQ circuit was added in 1961. This at first came as a back-to-factory retrofit modification, which included adding the extra preamp tube required and mounting the Top Boost’s Treble and Bass controls on a plate bolted to the amp’s back panel. In 1964 the AC30 Top Boost model came direct from the Vox factory as an upgrade option, with the extra knobs mounted right on the main control panel. Wherever you find it, this Top Boost EQ stage adds the extra sparkle and high-end content that bands of the day were looking for to help them cut through the mix, and is a big part of that classic Vox shimmer and chime. Another big ingredient in the classic AC30 stew is the Celestion G12 alnico speaker, originally re-branded with a Vox label and now re-released by Celestion as the Alnico Blue. This great speaker is sweet and multi-dimensional when played clean, but aggressive and harmonically rich when driven hard. It’s highly efficient 100 dB rating also helps to make a 2x12” AC30 combo a low louder than its size and conservative wattage rating would make it appear.

The AC30 has been played by everyone from The Beatles and The Who, to Yank-janglers such as REM and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, to heavy rockers from Brian May right up to Dave Grohl of the Foofighters. It continues, in both its original and reissue formats, to be one of the most popular tube amps in the history of the electric guitar.

Taken from Gibson Tone Tips

String Height — Raise It For Tone!

In this installment of Gibson Tone Tips we’re going to take a look at a simple factor of any guitar’s set up, but one that newer players often approached from too a narrow standpoint. When a learner first picks up the electric guitar, he or she is often most drawn to an instrument that has the strings as low to the fingerboard as is functionally possible, because this is easier on tender, unfamiliar fingers, and makes that guitar feel more comfortable in the beginner’s hand. From this point on, our “feel preference” is often set, and we take this “low action=great guitar” bias with us from guitar to guitar, throughout our playing career, imposing it forever after on guitars that we set up ourselves.



Certainly low action makes a guitar easier to play, and for some styles it really is a necessity. What I would like to address here, though, are the high incidences of guitarists who perpetually chase “the perfect tone”, while continually focusing on string height purely as a function of playing feel, rather than as a factor of tone, which it most certainly is. The old set-up rule that you “get your strings as low as you can without buzzing” seems to make perfect sense. Set up to that criteria, however, while your strings might not buzz noticeably, their vibrational arc is more than likely still inhibited by the proximity of the frets. Also, play harder than usual — which, if you’re like me, you will often find yourself doing in live situations, even if you’re not aware of it — and that set up does also lead to a little unwanted buzzing, though your amp settings, the energy of the live gig, and any effects in the chain might help to mask it.

Just for fun, try taking this inverted approach to setting string height: instead of getting them as low as you can without inducing serious buzzing, set your strings as high as you can have them and still be able to play with some reasonable facility. Doing this correctly might also require adjusting string intonation at the bridge saddles, because their angle and distance across their speaking length is now changing slightly, too, but for now just try it as is, in case you choose to return your action to point one. (Note that raising string height at the bridge might need to be coordinated with a tweak of neck relief at the truss rod, although I will leave that to your own best judgment as there is plenty of debated between the flat-neck/slight-relief crowds, and this determination will depend upon your own preferences.)



Play your guitar a while like this, and notice how much more ring, richness, and sustain you get out of it. The strings should now vibrate for close to the full potential of the instrument (which, of course, also depends upon factors such as nut and bridge type and condition, body style, neck and body woods, and so forth). Put simply, your tone is likely to sound bigger and fuller, and to bloom with a broader voice and a longer note decay than previously. If this as-high-as-you-can-hack-it setting is a little too much for every-day playing, try backing the strings down a hair at a time, and hopefully you can find a height that offers a healthy compromise. Sure, it’s also possible you preferred it the way it was before you adjusted it at all, and if your playing style involves a lot of speed riffing, hammer-ons and pull-offs, or extreme bending, you might simply require that as-low-as-it-goes actions (and will very likely mask its drawbacks with some judicious high-gain tone). With any luck, though, you’ll have discovered an easy means of achieving a fatter tone, without purchasing or modifying a single thing.



Higher strings can potentially induce some drawbacks that you will need to minimize. Before settling on your new action, you want to determine that strings don’t go out of tune in any fretting positions up and down the neck. You also need to ensure that using a capo, if you ever play with one, doesn’t throw all strings out of pitch too badly. Also note that if this experimentation results in raising your strings considerably from their previous position — and your guitar remains playable after doing so — you might also need to adjust your pickup height slightly. But, note that lowering the pickups further from the strings can often also help the strings to vibrate more freely, so leaving the pickups lower might be adding a double bonus to your new playing set up. Play with the options and see what works for you, and that will yield the “best right answer” for each individual player — and once you have achieved it for you, be sure to check and change your intonation, as necessary. If low action floats your boat, great, but it’s worth knowing that there’s a wealth of tone hiding in that thin slice of air between string and fingerboard.

taken from Gibson tones tips

Tube Distortion: What It Is, and Why We Love It

We talk of tubes as being the “amplifiers within our amplifiers”, but the fact is, while tubes do complete the vital mission of amplifying our guitar signals, they do a whole slew of other things at the same time that add up to so much more than that. Let’s take a quick look at why we really love tubes so much, and what they do for our tone.

These devices—vacuum tubes, to give them their full name, or thermionic valves in the UK (tubes or valves for short)—have enjoyed such longevity in the realm of guitar amplification not simply because they are capable of making an audio signal louder, but because of the way in which they make that signal louder. Most good electric guitar tones, and that includes virtually all of the legendary sounds recorded by myriad guitars heroes over the past six decades, rely to some extent on tube distortion to give them body and texture. Even amid guitar tones that we consider “clean”, there’s usually a modicum of natural tube distortion that adds thickness and increases the harmonic richness of each note. To hear an electric guitar played truly clean, plug into a very powerful amplifier such as a PA amp or a large hi-fi amp or a studio or PA mixer and play at a relatively low volume, monitoring yourself on large hi-fi speakers or headphones respectively. That thin, clinical sound your beloved instrument produces is the sound of a truly clean electric guitar. In order to give it the punch, sweetness, juiciness, and dynamics that we all love in great guitar tones, you need to process it with some distortion, and nothing distorts more sweetly, juicily, and dynamically than tubes—and the beautiful part is, they do it naturally.

The reason we love tube distortion, whether used very lightly, moderately, or slathered on like BBQ sauce at a Texas ribs joint, is because of the way these devices distort the audio signal when pushed into clipping. “Clipping” is a term used to describe how an amplifier responds when pushed beyond its ability to produce a clean signal. All clipping is a form of distortion, but the way in which different amplifiers clip defines the character, and thus the appeal (or lack thereof), of that distortion. When pushed past their limits, solid-state devices clip a signal suddenly, which results, in audio terms, in a harsh, jagged distortion, and one that is usually not very pleasant to the ear.

Tubes, on the other hand, clip relatively smoothly and gradually when pushed further and further toward their operational limits. The result is a rounder, warmer, fuller-bodied distortion that is also smoother and more “musical” than that produced by a solid-state device. View two different sound waves on a scope, one from a solid-state amplifier and one from a tube amp, and you can actually see the “squareness” and “roundness” of the respective signals. Also, in the process of distorting, even when distorting just a little, a tube also adds harmonics to the fundamental note or notes in the signal, which gives the guitar tone added texture and dimension.

When you’re playing through a tube amp with anything from a little to a lot of distortion, the extra harmonics that are added to each note layer up to build a sonic picture that is significantly bigger than the original, fundamental note. This is the enticing “ear candy” that any truly great guitar tone presents, the kind of sound that sucks you in and makes you beg for more—and we owe it all to the way in which tubes distort.

Of course, many guitarists today play through modern solid-state amps or digital “modeling” amps, and many of these are capable of creating some powerful tones these days, too (although the majority of professionals out there still use tube amps more often than not). When you dial up a juicy tone through one of these tube-less amps, however, you’re still benefiting—in a second-hand manner—from tube distortion. Digital amps come right out and say it in the amp selections on their preset menus, but analog solid-state amps have long “modeled” tube amps, too. In order replicate the desirable characteristics of tube-amp distortion, solid-state guitar amps incorporate a lot of extra processing to shape, smooth, fur up, and round off the signal… in short, to help them to sound less transistorized, and more tube-like. Many of the good ones do an excellent job of it, too, but by and large they are still chasing a tone that tube amps produce simply and naturally, and usually with far fewer components. Tubes… bless their dirty little souls.

Taken from Gibson Tone Tips.

The Capo—A Hand Where You Need It

A basic, unassuming accessory that used to be part of every “beginners’” guitar kit, the capo is an underappreciated, but extremely useful, piece of equipment that can come to the rescue of experienced players and newbees alike. Just in case this is new territory for you, let’s first cover the basics of what a capo is (capo pros, please be patient!), then we’ll explore a few tips and tricks.

Put simply, a capo is a movable clamp that attaches to the neck of the guitar to bar the strings at the desired fret, essentially shortening the playing length of all strings simultaneously. Players use capos for a variety of reasons. They are extremely useful for quickly changing the key of a song without having to transpose the chords that you might already be familiar with in a different key, if, for example, you’re backing a singer who decides on the spur of the moment to change the key of a tune to better suit his or her vocal range. A capo also provides an excellent means of achieving certain desirable open-string positions for riffs or chords that need to be played higher up the neck to fit a particular song. Plenty of experienced players use capos for a wide range of advanced techniques, but a capo is a handy tool for the beginner, too, and makes it possible to play a great many songs in a wide range of keys with knowledge of only a few basic chords. So you only know your first-position G, C, D and Em so far, but want to play a song along with other musicians who do it in the key of A major? No problem—slap on a capo at the second fret, and away you go.

Capos are indispensable to a wide range of more advanced playing styles. Players of country styles that want to access low, open-string runs in a range of keys to produce the characteristic bass-runs (often called the “G run”) of these genres will use capos to great effect. Also, a capo is an essential accessory for many blues slide players who use open tunings, enabling them to reset the neck, if you will, to suit the open and barred positions required by different songs without totally retuning the guitar. Likewise, many fingerstyle players and proponents of DADGAD and other alternate tunings would find life getting dull pretty fast without a capo.

A wide variety of capos are available. The most affordable takes the form of an elastic strap that wraps around the neck and clips in place to keep a firm rubber pad with steel backing in place behind the fret. These do the job adequately, and might be fine for the occasional capo user, but they can be awkward to position and reposition. More elaborate models, made by companies such as Kyser and Shubb, are made out of steel or die cast aluminum, with springs or thumb screws to provide the string-clamping tension. If you find a capo useful—and many players do—it’s probably worth investing in one of a decent quality, because these are usually easier to put on and take off the guitar, and frequently provide more even string tension and better tuning accuracy as well.

Once you’ve got your hands on a capo, you need to know how to use it. For most guitars, a capo works best when positioned fairly snugly up beside the fret at which you want to stop the strings (note, a capo is never placed right on top of the fret, but just behind it, on the nut-side of the desired fret). This positioning keeps the strings more secure on most guitars, and if your guitar was in tune before you positioned the capo—and its intonation is good—it should still be relatively in tune with the capo on. If your fingerboard has the higher frets that are popular with some players today (for example, Dunlop 6105s and the like), you might need to take extra care in positioning the capo, and perhaps move it further back from the fret, to avoid pulling the strings out of tune. Also, try to avoid tugging strings sideways, or generally altering the spacing between each string, when you position the capo, as this will both pull you out of tune, and create an awkward feel on the fingerboard. You can always re-tune once your capo is on, and sometimes this is necessary, but ideally you can clamp the thing on and off again with no need for readjustment, and no interruption to the flow of your performance.

Standard capos can be used to execute a few “tricks”, too. Consider that you perhaps want to play some higher-position chords in the key of E, but it would be nice to retain a deep low-E in the bass. Clamp a Kyser-style capo on at the 7th fret to hold down the five higher strings only (A through high-E), leaving low-E open. Now barring the D, G and B strings at the 9th fret gives you an easy E major chord with a big low-E in the bass, along with access to all kinds of interesting riffs that would be difficult to achieve without the capo in place. Or, tune your guitar to open-G (D-G-D-G-B-D, low to high), then place the capo on the 7th fret, again leaving the lowest string un-clamped, and you’ve got a cool, unusual positioning for an alternate D-major tuning with a resonant low-D at the bottom. Play around with your own tunings and positions, and you’ll come up with plenty of others of your own. Happy clamping!

Taken from Gibson Tone