Painting with Guitar Tone - Part 2
3 Stages of Tone
This post is Part Two of a three-part series designed to give you a unique and inspiring approach to understanding and selecting your electric guitar tone. Electric guitar tone is shaped in three progressive stages: Guitar, Pedals, and Amplifier, which I would like to present to you in terms of painting. Today, we will dive into the second stage, the Pedals. I sincerely hope this helps you see your instrument and musical tools in a new light and provides new inspiration for making tons of great new music!
Pedals - The Paint
Electric Guitar pedals come in all shapes, sizes, and serve a variety of different functions such as Overdrive, Compression, Reverb, Delay, etc. Guitar pedals shape the tone and color in a variety of interesting and creative ways. The types of pedals used and the order in which they are used yield an infinite number of creative possibilities in the realm of tone-shaping.
Are you wanting to paint a thick wall of sound that envelopes the listener in swirling echoes of tone? Delay is a good choice. Try a simple quarter, eighth, or dotted-eighth-note delay running into a stereo delay with different delay times on the Right and Left, perhaps eighth-note on the Right and dotted-eighth on the Left.
One of my favorite delay experiences can be found on the Line6 M13, which has an entire scene solely dedicated to just delays running into delays, running into more delays, and ending with even more delays for literally the biggest guitar tone I think I've ever experienced. This experience can be similarly duplicated by manually running two or more delay pedals into each other. You can even experiment with changing up the way the signal flows into the delays—Chained, where each progressive layer of delay affects the previous layer, or Parallel, where the incoming signal is split and each delay or layer of delay functions independently of the other(s). In any case, so long as the delays are tempo-matched to function as a rhythmic division of a given beat or BPM, the end results should turn out generally pleasing and will almost always yield interesting and song-sparking results.
Do you want to paint an opaque, mist-filled picture of a sweet, melodic voice calling out from a distant hill or mountaintop? Or perhaps immerse the listener in an underwater dream-world where soft pulses of shimmering sound meander through an aquatic medium like a soothing whisper? The tool of choice in this case would be a Reverb, which serves, among a variety of useful applications, primarily to place a sound within a space or at a perceived location on an aural soundstage. You can think of Reverb as a Background-to-Foreground sound placement tool, as well the creator of the tonal and behavioral characteristics of the space in which the sound is being moved. Reverb can make your guitar sound like it is being played in a concert hall, a cave, in outer space, or basically anywhere you can imagine. Recently we have seen a rise in the use of Modulated Reverbs in the Praise & Worship genre, such as the Strymon Blue Sky, Boss RV-5, or in my case, the Line6 Octo Reverb found on my POD HD500, all of which provide a large, lush background of shimmering reverb for your guitar to sing on top of.
This brings us to perhaps the most classic of all Guitar effects pedals: Distortion. There are several main categories of Distortion: Distortion, Overdrive, and Fuzz. Distortion is characterized by its consistency, meaning that no matter how you play dynamically, be it hard or soft, the distortion will take place at a consistent level as set by the gain or drive knob. Overdrive mimics the volume/clipping dynamics of a tube amplifier which responds to the player's volume intensity, providing more gain as higher levels of volume are produced by the player while playing at high intensity and less gain as the player lightens his touch while playing softly. (More on these two dynamics in the upcoming post about Amplifiers.) Fuzz pedals have two general dynamics which provide interesting bi-polar tone qualities: gritty, grainy distortion while playing chords in the low end and smooth, creamy lead tones while playing in the upper register. These two opposing tone qualities make fuzz a go-to tool of choice for indie rockers looking for stand-out tones which yield unexpected behavioral characteristics. In the Praise & Worship world, Overdrive easily wins as the most heavily-used tonal tool for creating distortion. I have always viewed the violin as my tonal model and therefore like to set my overdrive so as to generate as much sustain, intensity, and gain as possible while meanwhile keeping grit and graininess to an absolute minimum. To achieve this, I set my overdrive to act as a simple clean boost, with the drive set to little or nothing and the level set to near-maximum. This approach relies on the clean volume boost to push the tube amplifier's pre-amp to the point of clipping, creating natural tube overdrive from the amplifier itself.
Basically, there are near-limitless possibilities for changing the colors of your tonal paint through both proper and improper use of guitar pedals. Here is the biggest question to ask yourself when choosing your tonal paint: “Does this sound like ME?” Can your audience hear YOU through your music? Can they identify your name when using only their ears to hear the sound you produce? If so, job well done!
What are some of your favorite "tonal paints?" How do you use them in creative ways to paint YOUR musical pictures? Which effects pedals do you use to create your signature sound? I would love to hear your thoughts, so please feel free to comment below!
Happy Painting!
Daniel
P.S. - For my tonal paint palette, my tool of choice for the last few years has been the Line6 POD line of effects, beginning with the X3 Live and currently the HD500. For any POD users out there, I post my up-to-date sounds on my page, which can be viewed and downloaded at www.danielmow.com. Feel free to use them, tweak them, and experiment to your heart's content! (FYI: I am currently working on some exciting new tone configurations so check back soon for the latest updates! You can also subscribe to our email list here to be in the loop as soon as new sounds are added!)
Stay tuned for Part Three of the three-part series "Painting with Guitar Tone," featuring an insightful discussion about Amplifiers coming next week!
Subscribe to our email newsletter to receive the latest updates, news, and posts as they are released!