Imperfections of Great Tone
Ludwig77
guitar tone (and a better sounding guitar player but that's a separate
post).
For instance, the imperfections of tubes vs the precision of
transistors and cpus found in digital modelling give tubes a better
sound. BTW, as digital modelling and transistor amps can be
intentionally designed to replicate the design flaws of tubes, they
start to sound closer....
The guitar itself is a compromise as it is never perfectly in tune.
The Buzz Feiten system attempts to get closer, but I'm not sure I want
to.
Even wood, the most popular material to make a guitar from, has
imperfections compared to composite materials that make it such a
popular and great sounding material, with it's variances in pores,
density, across even the small square surface required to make a
guitar body or neck.
Another example of such imperfections leading to a great sound was
illustrated to me as a friend and I were tweaking a dual delay effect.
He had two analog delay pedals one set to 400 ms and the other set to
200 ms. Knowing the power of imperfections, I suggested to him that he
might prefer to bump up the 200ms delay speed so that it is NOT
exactly half of the counterpart. We tried it and sure enough we both
heard a better overall sound.
I write all of this to solicit suggestions on further leveraging such
perfections. What are other things we can do with our rigs to make
things a little less precise without going to the extremes of playing
out of tune, poorly intonated guitars with fret buzz through early
80's solid state gear.
I've already read talk that says that true bypass isn't always better,