Tone Discriptors

[Billy Bones]

If there's a thread about this already, please feel free to let me know.

We were talking today about tone and how some people can almost see it. They can walk into a live room and within a few seconds and a few turns of eq knobs they can make a decent show sound amazing. We are trying to develope our ears, but it is like alchemy. I am finding with practice I can hear more subtleties and nuances from different pickups, but I have a difficult time labeling them, talking about them, and know what to adjust to get the sound I am after. Is there any established terminology or school of thought when talking about tone? Some absolute standards would really help me out.

Those of you who think of yourselves as tone masters, did you develop your skills or do you feel as though you were always able to hear things and quantify/qualify them?

I built a pickup and had a friend with an excellent ear come around and play it. He called the type and guage of wire and magnet. He doesn't make pickups but he is a recording engineer who knows a good bit about them. Maybe fluke, but maybe you folks really are out there.

[Possum]

...

Hanging around musicians with great ears is a real education. Do it as much as you can. Learning to play guitar better also helps. We all have our specialties. Lately I am so focused on PAF recipes I've learned I can spot a hand wound humbucker from a machine wound one pretty easily and don't like the hand wound ones at all. You get good at what you focus on 24/7. Unfortunately I am terrible at describing tone in words. Simply done sound samples say way more than words do so I rely on that to sell what I do....

[Billy Bones]

I think I've plateaued (that can't be how you spell that) as a guitar player. I don't think I'll ever be much better than I am now. I am a pretty good rhythm player and can do simple lead stuff. I have been playing the same Brian Setzer solo every day for 15 years, and I can't get it right!

Hanging around musicians with great ears is one thing, but we don't have the language to communicate about what we're hearing. So we make signals with our hands and funny noises with our mouths and it's embarrassing!

Billy

[Mark Hammer]

The music industry desperately needs a standard reference disc or library of sounds and the words people use to refer to them.

[David Schwab]

The music industry desperately needs a standard reference disc or library of sounds and the words people use to refer to them.

Good idea! Now getting everyone to agree on those descriptions might be tricky. But I think a lot of them are common enough.

[LtKojak]

The music industry desperately needs a standard reference disc or library of sounds and the words people use to refer to them.

Agreed. We should make up words to describe something like "nails on a chalkboard" or "make my teeth hurt and my ears bleed".

[Possum]

......

What is the word for "holy freaking shit, turn that horrible thing OFF!"

[Billy Bones]

Tron Deadly Disc Riptors. How do you edit thread subjects?

[StarryNight]

we have about 60 years of recorded history with pickups that I think many people use to reference timbre. It's such a complex area though. Pickups are only part of the equation. Also, there's the fact that pickups don't generate audible tone, they're electric inductors. It's like the difference between relative pitch and perfect pitch. We can tell that there's a sonic difference relative to another pickup but to classify pickups by any more than they're physical and electrical properties would be pretty near impossible!

[Possum]

....

Going by old recordings is a pretty faulted idea if you look close. Most of the old stuff we all love was recorded on tube gear and even then they used compression and plate reverbs etc. Then there's the mics used and the amps the guitars were played through. Guitar cords were crap for the most part. Pretty complex subject....

[Billy Bones]

Yeah, we recorded last month and the sounds I can get through different amps are worlds apart.

[Brad1]

Going by old recordings is a pretty faulted idea if you look close. Most of the old stuff we all love was recorded on tube gear and even then they used compression and plate reverbs etc. Then there's the mics used and the amps the guitars were played through. Guitar cords were crap for the most part. Pretty complex subject....

Exactly.

It's like all these Stevie Ray or Jimi wanna-be's who think they can "clone" the tone by buying certain guitars, effects and amps. Uh-uh. Ain't gonna happen, sorry to tell ya.

Absolutely everything is completely different from the brain of the performer, through the hands, through the strings, cords, guitar woods and electronics of whatever guitar that day, effects, amps, speakers...and on through the environmental factors of whatever room of whatever studio that day, through whatever mics placed wherever, cables, preamps/eqs/boards, through the recording medium, through the engineer's/producer's/artist's mixing and tweaking decisions, through the mastering decisions, through the recorded media...and then through whatever you listen on in whatever place you listen. Every molecule is different, and...well....absolutely NOTHING is the same.

Anyway, I think I did see somewhere a list of musical definitions of tone descriptions that would also describe pickups in many instances. "Buttery", "dark", "woofy", "twangy", 'bright", "biting", "smooth",
"grungy", "round"...etc..etc.

Brad1

[David Schwab]

Exactly.

It's like all these Stevie Ray or Jimi wanna-be's who think they can "clone" the tone by buying certain guitars, effects and amps. Uh-uh. Ain't gonna happen, sorry to tell ya.

And why would they want to copy someone's tone anyway? That's your signature. People should know who you are when they hear just a few notes.

I had a customer once that all he could play was SRV licks. So he played me some stuff, and then I said "OK, now let me hear YOU play something". We all have influences, but they shouldn't be obvious, otherwise everything you play is derivative.

What's next, you write songs that sound like your hero and start dressing and talking like them?

[StarryNight]

comparing anything in the present to anything in the past will be inherently faulted - IF you are comparing with the intention to copy or duplicate. But that was not my suggestion. By reference I mean we have an aural history that tells the story of what people were doing at a certain time and place with certain gear. That scenario is still being lived out today, but the gear, people and even the music is different. We can't duplicate the end result because it will never be the same (If I knew more about quantum mechanics I'm sure it would apply here).
What we can do is compare our recorded end result with the end result of past recordings (or actual gear because a lot of gear from the past is still around - keeping in mind the effects of age) and just notice the differences not the similarities. There will always be a variance between two "things", perhaps we should be measuring the variance. For example, instead of saying that Dave's pickups are a better copy of a Gibson PAF than mine, one could say that there is less variance between his pickups and a PAF than my pickups. It may seem like splitting hairs but it eliminates that whole "sounds just like" element which gets some people irate when associating things that sound similar with an attempt to try and mimic a sound or style.

[David Schwab]

"Buttery", "dark", "woofy", "twangy", 'bright", "biting", "smooth", "grungy", "round"...etc..etc.

The other issue is the guitar they are installed on. Put a humbucker on a Gibson scale guitar, and then put that same humbucker on a Fender scale guitar. The longer scale length will always sound twangier.

I have a cheap FirstAct guitar with a 25.5" scale and two humbuckers, basswood body, tune-o-matic bridge, etc. Even with very dark overwound pickups, it has the twang of a Tele, because that's how it sounds unplugged. At the same time the basswood body makes it kind of boomy with certain neck pickups, like a Duncan Jazz, even though that's a bright sounding pickup. I had to make a pickup with a tighter bottom for the neck position on that guitar.

Pickups can only take the tone of the guitar, and then filter that tone one way or another.