What goes into a great electric guitar sound?
Jul 07 '05
The Bottom Line Take what I've outlined here and have some fun with it! You'll be shocked at what you can come up with - and the world will never be the same.
Lots of my guitar students have started out with an idea of who they want to sound like. Eddie van Halen, SRV, Steve Vai, YM, Jimi, Jeff Beck, whoever it is I can always steer them in the right direction. Of course I'm speaking of technology here. Amps, guitars, pickups on your guitar, settings on the guitar and amp, guitar string material and weight, even the type of pick - all of it makes a huge difference to your tone. If you have the resources to buy anything, then you can get on the right track to sound like your guitar hero.
Maybe you can even play sort of in the same style - that's kind of the problem here... just how much does your PLAYING sound like the playing of your hero?
Sit back and listen to something by your idol on a cd. Try to find a solo with one note played alone for a long enough time to hear the inflections used. The vibrato - is it slow, fast, wide, narrow, pull only, push only, both, or maybe more of a fret depth-based pressure vibrato (ala classical guitarists)?
Don't even think about the technology. Just grab a comfortable guitar, it can be an acoustic even if your idol is playing a single pickup Kramer rocking masterpiece. Just try to copy that one note, the attack, vibrato, anything that you can duplicate within your own body to make it sound like the original.
After you've spent a week learning just one long solo perfectly, I mean with every pitch identical so you can play with the cd and it sounds like you're not playing, THEN you are at the stage where you can start playing with gear and trying to match what the master plays.
When it comes to sounding like your idol - it's vital to remember that they sounded every bit as good, and were still obviously "them", no matter what guitar they played. Listen to Hendrix play on a gibson - wierd huh? It's darker, but it's still him - OBVIOUSLY him at that. Listen to Eric Johnson in his three guitar supergroup (who's in that one? Steve Vai? LoL), and you'll hear him play an old hollowbody gibson. He's a speed monster. He plays an old jazz/country guitar. It works. It's still him. Then listen to him on his strat. Now have a beer and shuffle your mp3s and listen again without knowing what he's playing when. Can you still tell it's Eric Johnson? I would hope so...
So spend the time to be the guitarist you want to be. Don't buy $4000 of gear only to still make the same mistakes in "Smoke on the water"... learn the art first, then you'll probably find you don't even need all of that gear.
PS - another nice trick is a modelling amp - it helps you find your sound, and also allows you to easily match the basic amp tone of your hero. I use a vox ad50vt - my students can sound like their hero (to the best of their playing ability) but I can shift it to a different setting to teach them that they can still play the same licks and it will still work - it might be harder, or less imitative, but it might also be more original. A sound you can call your own - that's the ultimate goal here.
And now for the best part - learn from the best players, the ones you love, but don't just copy them... take what you learn and move it in a new direction. And that "new" direction can be an old one, like take Steve Vai licks and put them in the context of southern rock.
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