Guitar Tone 101

The art of playing guitar is a subtle, long term-pursuit. You can learn it quickly, but mastering it takes a lifetime. The same can be said about getting a great guitar tone, but in reality, it’s not as big a task as playing. It just takes a few knowledge points, some patience, and the will to experiment.

Here, we’ll go over some basic fundamentals to guitar tone that should help speed up your process.

Basic Guitar Anatomy

Understanding the basics of your guitar’s anatomy is the best place to start in getting a grasp on shaping your sound. So, at the risk of repeating what you already know, let’s review that anatomy.

• The neck is the part of the guitar which holds the strings in place and runs perpendicular to the body. It's usually made of wood such as maple or mahogany but may also contain various metal components such as frets and truss rods.
• The strings produce the sound when they're plucked or strummed. Guitar strings range from very light gauges (.008) to heavier gauges (.013).
• Pickups are small magnets mounted on the body of the guitar that convert string vibrations into electrical signals. The type of pickup will greatly influence your tone; single-coil pickups tend to have more clarity while humbucker pickups provide more warmth and power.
• The body is where all these components come together - it houses the strings, pickups, hardware (such as tuning pegs), and anything else that helps make a guitar playable. Different materials used for bodies - such as ash or mahogany - contribute to tone as well. For example, mahogany tends to be warm with an even frequency response while ash produces brighter tones with more emphasis on mids and highs. Alder is often used for vintage-style guitars since it provides a nice balance between clarity and complexity. Poplar is usually used for heavier sounds due to its denser structure.
• Finally, hardware such as tuning pegs keep your strings in tune while bridge pieces control things like string height and intonation.

Three Key Components to Guitar Tone

Now that we’ve been reminded of the components and how each affects your overall sound, we can dive into the big three factors that determine guitar tone: strings, pickup selection, and amplifier settings.

Strings

Strings play a huge role in shaping tone since their tension affects both volume and sustain (the length of time a note is sustained after being played). Lighter gauge strings are easier to bend but don't necessarily produce as much volume; thicker gauges provide more beefy tones but require more finger strength for bending notes. Experimenting with different gauges can help you find your sweet spot!

Pickups

Similarly, pickup selection plays a role in determining how your signal will be heard by an amplifier. Single-coil pickups tend to be brighter while humbuckers offer thicker tones with less noise interference; if you're looking for something more unique try P90s or Filter'Tron-style pickups might be worth considering too.

Amp

Clearly your amplifier settings have the most influence over your final sound than any other component, so it makes sense that guitarists (and engineers) spend plenty of time with their amps.

Start with gain (don’t confuse this with volume). Your gain setting will affect both your volume and distortion levels. If you want a cleaner sound, set the gain lower. If you want a more overdriven sound, bump or even drive the gain hard

After setting gain and dialing in your dirt, go after the EQ. Use the low to get beefy crunch but watch for mud. Cutting mids can help add clarity, but you may not want to go too far there. The truth is, this is all about listening and dialing in – remembering that especially your EQ settings may need tweaking depending on the room you’re in.

Once you’ve got your dirt and EQ set, then bring in your reverb. When selecting reverb effects, consider what type of environment you're trying to emulate (small room, hall, etc) but don’t forget to consider where you actually are. If you’re already in a live-sounding venue, too much reverb on the amp may just muddy the waters. In the studio, unless you’re going for a unique sound you can’t recreate in post (or that really affects how you play), your engineer will almost certainly want you to cut it dry. After you can add verb later, but you can’t take it away.

Using Effects Pedals To Craft A Signature Sound

There’s a subtle art to shaping a great tone with just the guitar, amp, and playing technique, and some guitarists make it a point of pride to really dial it in before adding any pedals. That said, there’s no rule against ‘em! The right pedal board can be a wild ride or you can simply use strategic pedals to get a great tone quickly. With something like Carvin Audio’s VLD1 - Legacy Drive, you can get an amazing tone and skip the amp entirely.

Of course, even if you have your basic tone dialed in, extra pedals give you access to an entire world of tonal possibilities that would otherwise be unachievable. Chorus, flangers, more distortion, wah wah, delay, reverbs, phasers – there are no real rules here other than this advice: Do dial in your favorite tone before hitting the effects, that way you have a go-to unadulterated tone. Depending on your genre, you may want this basic tone to be clean or close to it – after all, if the guitar/amp combo isn’t clean and you need clean for a song, you’ve got nothing to do but manually dial up a clean sound midstream (unless you’ve got a switch between clean and gained-up tones on the amp). You can always get overdrive from the pedals.

Guitar tone is a little bit science, a little bit art, and a little bit magic – at least to some. But it’s not necessarily rocket science. Mess around until it sounds awesome. If it sounds awesome, it’s awesome. There’s no secret where you think it’s good but it’s not. In that sense, getting a great tone is just a matter of you being you.

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