Best Guitar Tone Ever
Mohammed Huberty
Brad Tolinski is perhaps best known for his work as the editor-in-chief of Guitar World Magazine for 25 years. He is also the author of Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (Crown); and Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound and Revolution of the Electric Guitar (Doubleday), which was the basis for a 2019 guitar-focused exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Most recently he edited the 50th Anniversary Commemorative Issue of CREEM magazine, and his latest book Eruption: Conversations with Eddie Van Halen (Hachette) will be coming out in October 2021.
Of course, the debate rages on over the hows and whys of the most iconic guitar tones. Indeed, even the players themselves are given to forgetting or mis-remembering the gear and circumstances that led to their creation.
Jonny employed an HS-configured Fender Telecaster Plus and Fender Twin for the recording, before switching to a Marshall Shredmaster running through a Fender Eight-Five combo for the distorted chorus and solo.
The original track features an Epiphone Casino running through a Fender Twin, which was then played back through four Twins set to the vibrato channel. Johnny Marr and producer John Porter struggled to keep the parts vibrating in time, which resulted in the pair recording the riff in 10-second bursts.
Neville Marten, editor of our sister publication Guitar Techniques and pro touring musician, recently had the task of nailing this tone for sets paying tribute to Hendrix and Clapton as The Cream Experience:
A self-taught player who learned by immersing himself in Charlie Christian records, Montgomery is the sort of maverick who comes around once in a generation. His tone is the perfect synthesis of feel, technique and gear, in that order.
We could have so many great individual Brian May tones but his solo tone here is so instantly Bri we keep coming back to it. But with a heavily modified Red Special and equally hot-rodded AC30, can we all get it?
Summers was a one-guitar man in the early days playing a 1963 Telecaster that had already been modded by the time Summers bought it with some unusual features to make it a versatile instrument (a Gibson PAF neck humbucker and an out of phase switch). More unusual was its built-in preamp controlled by an on/off switch and a gain control.
Eddie was also a leading proponent of high-gain tones, regularly running a Marshall Super Lead with volume and tone controls on 10. This was then run through a variable transformer to lower the volume before it hit an H&H power amp.
You need to be using the clean channel on high gain to add enough of the necessary light distortion chime of the studio version. The fast attack on the compressor is also important for that. There's also a chorus (possibly a Boss CE-1, but unconfirmed by Frusciante) in the second half of the song.
In the chorus the mix of strumming chords and ringing arpeggios require chorus and reverb to recreate the expansive girth of the double-tracked recording. Lifeson had Advanced Audio and Roland digital delay units in the studio for Moving Pictures with a LOFT chorus unit (good luck finding one) but most chorus pedals will get you close.
The song Animal took all those three years to get right alone. The 25 million+ sales suggest it was time well spent and that finely-honed feel of the lush chorus cleans and crystal precise palm mutes of Phil Collen and the late Steve Clark can still be captured with a pedal combination for the title track.
Compression and chorus with a frosted icing of delay is a highway to the danger zone of 80s tonality (see also Run To You by Bryan Adams) but if you want to add a surprisingly effective additional layer of multi-band compression to get you closer to Hysteria, try a Boss Acoustic Simulator on the Jumbo setting with Body set down and Top up (full credit to player John Dale below for that).
Their music is okay I guess. Pretty boring but not offensive to my ears or painful to listen to, just many other things I would rather listen to. As for their tone, yeah it's pretty censoreding huge, but there's not much else you can do with tone that big and bassy and distorted other than chug chug chug.
Acacia Strain is pretty bland hardcore IMHO. I just think that there are so many better bands out there that are in the same tuning genre kind of thing. I mean think Emmure is better then them, there songs are in drop A as well and they break just as much probably, but it seems like there's more going on.
I can't believe they are getting that tone from a Krankinstein! Gotta love "Whoa Shut it down". The tone coming out of the guitars in that track is massive! Best tone ever? Not so much. Maybe for what they're doing.
Rob is the Guitars Editor for MusicRadar, handling news, reviews, features, tuition, advice for the strings side of the site and everything in between. Before that he worked on guitar magazines for 15 years, including Editor of Total Guitar, and is a regular contributor to Guitar Player and Guitar World."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Rob LaingSocial Links NavigationRob is the Guitars Editor for MusicRadar, handling news, reviews, features, tuition, advice for the strings side of the site and everything in between. Before that he worked on guitar magazines for 15 years, including Editor of Total Guitar, and is a regular contributor to Guitar Player and Guitar World.
Back in 1994 I had been playing guitar for a couple of years and wanted to play in a real gigging bar band. I had been playing with my high school buddies in a band, and we did some house shows, but now I wanted to be the lead guitarist in a hot cover band that played lots of gigs.
So I went to all the local music stores and found the ads for bands that were needing lead guitarists. If you have ever done this, then you know how strange it can be to call someone out of the blue and try to convince them that you are a real guitarist. You meet some very interesting people doing these kind of things I will assure you.
So anyway, I found one ad that appealed to me and decided to give it a go. I was about 19 years old at the time and had never played in any bar bands, just house shows with my friends. This was unchartered territory for sure.
I called the number on the ad and spoke with the drummer about the music I was into and I little about myself. I told him I liked rock and blues music and had only been playing for about 3 years. He seemed to like what I had to say, so we arranged an audition with the band.
The Twin was a 1974, and the whole deal was about $500. That was almost all the money I had from working at Sears, but I figured this is what I must do to move forward with this music thing. So I bought the Twin, 2 pedals and started down the path of becoming a lifelong Fender amp player
Very nice article ! I am looking forward for others. Unfortunately I had have similar experiences but I was a bit late to understand what is dynamics in music. Speed, notes etc it is really nothing without dynamics. Good amount of the feeling is coming from dynamics. It should be clearly emphasized like in this article. Cheers !
I had a lightbulb moment and a major re-think about my approach to tone, amps & pedals after I found the Gilmorish website. Especially the section about why which pedals work with certain types of amps.
Improving the improved
To complete our task we needed a great wraparound bridge with the right feel. It would need to also meet our strict quality requirements. I contacted ABM and it turned out they were right in the middle of developing a new wraparound bridge. They sent me a prototype, which seemed absolutely great. They had milled it from a billet of aircraft grade aluminium, and the bridge sounded and felt phenomenal. I pointed out a little shortcoming about the total height of the unit, and to my amazement the guys at ABM were thankful for my feedback and improved the design before launching it.
Rock solid wraparound bridge solution
So now I had the ABM 3024 wraparound bridge locked in place with the Schroeder studs, and the whole unit anchored to the body with our own Lock-Thru-Body bushings. The most rock solid wraparound bridge solution ever!
Sometimes vintage sucks
There is another common debate about t-style bridges that I want to address. It has to do with the saddles. Should there be three of them, like it used to be back in the day? Or are six saddles better?
A pragmatic solution to a pragmatic problem
One way to fix the intonation is to file the saddles individually. This works fine, but if you change string gauge or brand, you might want to readjust. Not good.
Trev Wilkinson has come up with an ingenious solution to this problem by developing his WT3 saddle that swivels around its axis. The design allows precise intonation adjustment without compromising the string pressure at the saddles.
Hardened or not?
In some applications, hardened steel works better than brass. The Gotoh/Wilkinson VSVG that we use a lot in the Vsop and Aeon models is a vibrato bridge evolved from a vintage s-style vibrato. This bridge succeeds in eliminating some of the vintage design problems without compromising the sound.
When the saddles are made of hardened steel, it is essential that the shaping of the saddle is precisely right. Otherwise the hard saddle edges will snap off your strings, or easily cause unwanted resonances.
Also, the string spacing of the vintage bridge is unnecessarily wide, resulting that the strings are too close to the fretboard edges. Another great reason for me to use the VSVG (or other bridges with improved string spacing).
The knife edge makes a bridge vibrate more
Some players prefer a non-locking vibrato with two posts and knife edge movement. Even if it would feel counterintuitive to some, this approach actually requires even higher precision from the rest of the guitar in order to maintain the tuning in a satisfactory way. It is because the knife edge makes the vibrato more sensitive, just like a locking trem.