Who has the MOST Recognizable Guitar Sound?

you ever notice i have a lot of gear in this studio maybe you haven't but if you look in the background here you see amplifiers some people actually think this is a green screen back here these amps the guitars the pedals why do i have all this stuff why do i have all these les pauls aren't they all the same well actually they're not all the same this guitar for example is really cool looking no i'm just kidding this is a les paul custom and it has a very different sound from this this is a les paul gold top but with p90 pickups the pickups sound completely different if i take this guitar out this is an old les paul deluxe and this has mini humbuckers as you can see these are about half the size of a regular humbucker and sounds in between a single coil and a full-size humbucker okay so why do you need all this stuff why do you need all these amplifiers some people use the term tone chaser a tone chaser is somebody that's always looking for a sound i think of jimmy page i think of jimi hendrix or david gilmour or eric johnson when i think of tone chasers people that are always experimenting trying to find that sound that they hear in their head trey anastasio when i worked with trey years ago he would be very particular about his sounds but really that goes for every famous musician especially guitar players brian may brian may sounds completely different from david gilmour and jimmy page and eric clapton as a matter of fact they all sound different from one another why is that well besides their they have different brains and different hands they use different gear brian may's guitar is totally different than jimmy page is 59 les paul and they use different amplifiers and they use different effects as a matter of fact one of the things that they did was go out and search for their own sound when i hear eric johnson i hear that violin tone that he has in a single note solos it really only sounds like eric johnson it's not just the content of what he plays he has a really original sound or tone same thing with his clean guitar sounds when i hear any of these guitar players i've been talking about their rhythm tones their lead tones i instantly know it's them it's not just what they play it's their sounds now you could say well can't you just get these same sounds out of digital gear i say well you can get different sounds out of digital gear but essentially when you're using some type of modeling device you're basically using the same algorithms as everyone else using the same amplifier algorithms the same speaker simulators same mics that are on them you know you might have different impulse responses but essentially everybody's using the same stuff the same effects the thing with analog sounds using real amplifiers for example if you want to say that's analog is that they have a different sound every time you turn them on let's take a listen to some famous musicians and hear what i'm talking about by this variety of tone [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] wow [Music] oh [Music] do [Music] do [Music] none of these players could be mistaken for another whether it's jimi hendrix's fuzz tone or tom morello's scratching that he's doing or pat metheny on acoustic guitar his tone is all in his hands in that clip so i started making the video here and then rhett until he showed up and i thought i'm going to show him the beginning of this what i have and get their opinion on it so rhett i have these clips jimi hendrix brian may eric johnson eddie van halen yeah it's interesting uh you're right most great players at least all of my favorite players have a unique voice on an instrument and they don't sound anything like each other not even remotely close it's like they almost speak a completely different language okay okay let me stop you with this um let's take a person like brian may i mean how many different sounds does brian may really have not many not many right yeah what about eddie van halen other than you know he's got his flanger he's got his just phase 90s he's got his echo i mean he only has a few different sounds really right i mean really different sounds eric johnson it's clean sound and his violin sound the fuzz face sound yeah right so most of the guys have very few tones right that they use derrick trucks plays one amp all night straight in one sound but with guys like that though there's a lot that's happening here yes and a lot that's happening here funny you should say that because i comment on neil shone's videos and neil is always moving his volume knobs and tone knobs and switching pickups and he he joked we you know i commented on his instagram and he said you know a lot of people think that doesn't do anything but i remember going to see pat matheny years ago back you know 40 years ago now and he just kept turning up the whole gig on his 175. he's like how much was he at zero he's just working his way up he keeps turning up how can he keep turning up i never see him turn down the first time i ever heard anybody or saw anybody do that was about eight or nine years ago um when joe bonamassa started getting on youtube for the first time he'd pop up on like the premiere guitar videos like early in the premiere guitar youtube days and he was the first guitar player that i saw actually talking about that like there is an infinite number of variations an infinite amount of variations of tone between you know if you're on a les paul you know these two uh you know your volume and your tone knob or strat or telly or whatever and he's right especially if you've got a really good amp and a good uh you know maybe if you're playing a fuzz like a really reactive fuzz or something that you know you back off three or four notches on your volume knob here it's a completely radically different change yeah when i do my videos on instagram i almost never when i play my my les paul special i'm usually on four on my on my lead pickup for some reason right i don't know i just back it down to where it feels like it's has the right amount of weight well you're probably cutting through a little bit more you're getting less low mid range and low end from the pickup yeah you're getting less low end information which especially on a phone is going to come through better it's going to come through the microphone and the the speaker better but i think going back to this idea of sounds i think that's a big part of it uh with with a lot of these players is like they figured out early on how to get the sound that was in their head out of their rig and that's part of what makes them so great is we love the way they they sound you know well it also influences be beyond their their lead playing their voice because they have a lead voice and many of them have their rhythm voice and their rhythm voice many times is their lead voice turned down and maybe with a you know some gain pedal up but right most of the guys we're talking about would have very few pedals that they use right now if you think about the things that modern players use axe effects helix kemper things like that right or neural dsp when you are playing these things i say in the video that everybody has the same algorithms now i would argue that it's that analysis paralysis right you have so many possibilities that it becomes almost impossible to decide on one thing and say that's my definitive voice whereas when you have an amplifier and you have a finite amount of pedals let's say you you have one overdrive pedal a delay pedal and one modulation pedal something like that right well it's an interesting discussion so i i'm kind of of two minds about it i agree with i use modelers a lot and i have for a long time i've had a kemper from and i'm not anti-modeler i have them all put your pitchforks and torches away actually my first kemper i bought from you that's right uh like six or seven years ago yeah yeah i've i had it that's one of the i think one of the early ones yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah early rack mount yeah yeah so i've been using them for a while and the thing is you're right when you've got like the helix for example how many models and dozens and dozens of amp models well for me i know what i like i spent enough time on you know playing real amps analog amps and kind of found the sound that i like to get that i know generally what ballpark i'm going to work in but even in that there's oh you like an ac30 sound where here's four different ac 30s then here's three different matchlesses and then here's the divide by 30. here's 25 different cabinets yeah and it does in fact i've been getting to the point where at home practicing i just want a little 112 combo that's not crazy about that's tube that sounds good turned down that i can sit next to my chair and just sit down flip it on plug it in it's got a little reverb and i can sit and play and i don't have to flip on the modelers and go through all the menus and all that kind of stuff which it's really not that difficult all things considered but on the tone side of it i think you're right everyone is sort of starting with the same baseline when you compare that to uh let's look at clapton for example in london in the mid 60s he was buying amps direct from jim marshall yep this is the early days of marshall amplifiers each one was totally different yeah they used different parts whatever they think whatever they could get their head the tolerances on the parts were all over the place right you know when he bought his blues breaker you know he it's because uh i believe the story is he left his jtm45 head and cavity gig and he needed another another cabinet or another amp he could play and throw in the back of his car so he asked for a g1845 combo and that became the famous blues breaker sound the beno sound that was completely different than his earlier stuff if he had been using a modeler i don't i don't know if he would have found as original a sound maybe you know it's interesting that i think when people use modelers too there's i've noticed this that in the in the past most people would not use a compressor pedal for when they were using distortion that's really a new thing for a lot of the new techniques that people play uh that the people use left hand techniques there's uh compression has become a real part of the sound to even out the notes if you do hammer ons from nowhere and things like that whereas historically i never saw people with compressor pedals very rarely unless very rarely an effect on its own yes if you're doing some type of reggae sound you wanted a nice compressed compressed tone i'm not a fan of the always-on compression thing uh i get it if that's the sound you're going for and you're doing a lot of um you know tapping on the fingerboard or something where you need something to even out that dynamic i totally get it but to me the best part of an amp and to be fair a lot of the modelers are getting good enough now that they can do this is the touch sensitivity and the dynamic response of an amplifier completely goes away when you put a compressor in front of it it also affects to me it affects your feel because rhythmically the dynamic variations between notes are what make things rhythmic if i take a style this is an extreme example like bebop well bebop when people play phrases they typically will accent every time a note jumps up in pitch they always accent the high points of the phrase yeah that's what's give that's what gives it its sound um are those accents and if it's compressed there are no accents you can't hear them everything is all the same dynamic level so it doesn't have any kind of feel with it right and we were talking about players like john schofield one of the reasons john schofield's got very dynamic playing right he leaves a lot of space he he has a really uh what is the word languid the you know liquid uh like uh sound with his lines yeah thanks fluid and that's because of the dynamics that he has in his lines because he's not using a compressor pedal right well and going back to the modeler thing there the other side of it is while yes people are starting from the same baseline it's opening up the possibilities for especially younger guitar players or guitar players that you know are on a budget you now have access to every just about every single type of effect and digital representations of some of the most favorite effects and amps and and sounds that are out there that you can then start to combine in unique ways and i've seen a lot of people start to do that especially in like the um this sort of modern neo soul guitar thing that's popping up on instagram you know paul jackson jr probably wouldn't have used like an octave up effect on his sound playing with luther vandross or whoever he was playing with but i'm seeing that kind of thing happening now a lot on instagram and it's pretty cool it's a pretty unique sort of sound so i think there's a lot of players out there they're utilizing i think modelers are great tools and there's a lot of players out there that are utilizing those tools to create new sort of sounds that weren't it's not that they weren't possible before but they were a little bit more difficult to get okay well i'm gonna say this so rhett when rhett got here i said okay i'm gonna play you some players that you know on instagram i'm not gonna name any of them i'll say tell me if you can recognize them and they're all people rhett knew he couldn't recognize any of them now why is that well because they don't sound different enough from one one another that's why they use a similar vocabulary a lot of the same sounds um it's not black and white like when you hear brian may i mean his lead tone sounds nothing like jimi hendrix's or eddie van halen's just nothing like it right yeah now if you were gonna start with a sound right let's say you had one amplifier and you had three effects right would you start with a distorted amplifier or a clean amplifier i would start with a clean ish amplifier i would not go totally flat clean because i i like a little bit of um i want the amp to impart some personality and i've found that an amp that's on the edge of breaking up or at least that you're putting into its sweet spot i made a video on this couple weeks ago uh that you're putting into its sweet spot that's where it needs to live i like vox amps for that to me vox amps are really great with pedals but you know historically people have used things like high watts my high watson's killer with pedals uh my orange the new mad amp that we played through that we'll use in a video here is beautiful clean amp has a ton of headroom it's it's has a beautiful chime to it but these boxes have i i think are a really good platform for for the sounds i like a really good platform to to build a tone with pedals yeah well they've got a good uh well they've got a good even response i think i agree i've used vox style amps for a long time for that kind of a pedal platform amp i think you're right i would pick a vox circuit like an ac30 over something like a tweed deluxe circuit although tweeds can take pebbles really well too but the other side of that too is like the fender thing you look at guys like stevie ray vaughan he was often times i mean he was kind of playing everything but a lot of his sound is that mid-scooped that's right fender sound which is why things like tube screamers work so well for those guys yeah because they're bringing back that mid-range that the amp is naturally lacking especially playing with a stratocaster you're lacking a lot of that mid-range so it's really fascinating i think stevie is another good example of a player that has such a unique sound you and there's a lot of people that try and get close to that but they never quite do and it ends up sounding like they're just trying to okay so getting back to what i said at the beginning of the video why do i have all these things why do i have all these amps one of the reasons that i have them is because i don't want to have to put a pedal in front of an amp if i'm going to put a pedal in front of an amp that's a high gain amp for example and i'm doing something that's metal or heavy rock something whatever it might be i'll put a pedal to uh take some of the to high pass it before it goes into the hand maybe i'll put a distortion pedal on with just a little bit of gain but it'll high pass the guitar especially with low tuned guitars and just tightens up the sound now now there's pedals that do that you know that'll will high pass it but i like to take i like to get the sound as close as i can get just with the amplifier and my thing was that when i was making records all the time when i put a pedal in front of something it ends up taking the personality to me away from the amp many times and if i can get that amp tone to be where i want it to be really close to what the amp naturally sounds like i always felt like i got a lot more harmonic information on tape or in pro tools well is eric johnson taking the personality away from one of his plexis when he puts a fuzz face in front of it no because that is about that sound right so that's the other side to this yeah yeah if you put you know let's say uh you know whatever an eq or a boost or a tube screen let's say you just put a tube screamer in front of a marshall it's like yeah that's going to change the sound of marshall and if you were going for that marshall sound that's not that may or may not accomplish what you're looking for but guys like eric johnson figured out i guess early on through experimentation and trying stuff that man this this this is personally why i love effects and i love messing around with sounds and sort of the craft of making sounds is because the sound that's coming out of your rig directly informs your playing totally you're inspired by the sound that's it that's everything honestly if you have a bad sound if i have a bad sound i can't play now there's a few people that can play even if their sound isn't good when i went to nam when we were at nam and i saw frank gambali play at the kiesel booth he played through some strange amp he had never played through he had some backing track playing but he didn't care he just played through the episode he sounded phenomenal like frank it doesn't matter to you you're so good yeah it's cause he's a monster player i mean it didn't even matter it's not his sound or anything it just he just sounded great he was just grooving and it was like but i mean what just pick three pedals what are they gonna be for me uh some kind of fuzz probably an octave fuzz of some type um a delay a really good delay if you had to pick one what would you say this week the delay would be the strymon valente um good choice yeah and then uh so and then in between so the fuzz would be first the delay would be last in between i'd probably do a a tremolo because i love with the tremolo a good like harmonic tremolo to be more specific um guys like joey landreth i think are good modern examples of players that use a harmonic tremolo as a texture and it it direct it changes the way you play when you've got that sort of because a harmonic tremolo is different than like an octave tremolo or a bias trim loads it's it's shifting the pitch of the amp of your of your sound through the amplifier and it's a it makes the amp feel more um it's hard to say i almost bought a a old fender the other day just because of the harmonic tremolo it completely changes how the amp feels which then changes how you play and what you play and i i love that so yeah i go octave fuzz harmonic tremolo and delay if i had to choose i mean i would probably take some of my vintage pedals my old memory man pedal um my old mxr flanger that i got which was my first pedal i ever got in 1978 but it's really noisy but when it worked it can sound like a leslie it's it's amazing i mean it's just it really can do that sound i'd probably take some type of a gain pedal i like i like fuzz pedals um but i might take a gain pedal really i mean for me it depends on what kind of amp i'm playing through um because i i also like for modulation effect i like things like um you know phase shifters phase 90 something like that or maybe a univibe's something yeah yeah yeah univibe i find it with some harmonic tremolos you can get into univibe territory if you slow them down enough because they're not that different from one another the thing with fuzz though the reason i would choose a fuzz over an overdrive i think not all fuzzes there's some fuzzies that are so out there and wild that they're kind of a specific character effect but a lot of like a fuzz face for example is one of the most versatile pedals in sound you can get an amazing clean sound if you want a clean sound that'll cut through a mix turn on something like a fuzz face and back yeah back your volume down that's the thing with fuzz that people don't realize that fuzz pedals are great when you back your volume down i mean so much of this stuff is dependent on your volume control people do not use their volume controls on their instruments and that's why they're there volume and tone controls pickup selectors things like that you know if you just if your natural inclination is to go right on 10 with your lead pick up your rhythm pickup you're you're missing out on some really cool sounds i think i think the guitars just react better once you start backing those things find that sweet spot or keep changing it during your solo or during your rhythm playing right you know or and just change your play because the symbol you can get a similar effect tim pierce talks about this turn your amp way up yep to its sweet spot and then just barely touch the strings yep just play soft and see what happens it's like this natural sort of bloom these beautiful huge sounding notes come through that don't happen when you play hard because the amp you're you're clipping the preamp section and maybe the power amp section depending on how hard you're pushing it and the amp is naturally compressing and you're losing you're hitting that ceiling you know play play softer or play harder or do both ride that and a lot of these things that going back to the compression pedals backing off your volume makes very little difference in in your actual and you being able to do that and change your tone well that's because the compressor is doing its job right compressing elite like evening everything out one thing though on the modelers that i really like to do and i do this on pretty much everything that i like the helix this works incredibly well on um putting a compressor as the very last thing in the signal chain before it goes out of the modeler i find and i'm it's just a very light compression you know a light ratio three to one maybe but you're essentially kind of the light ratio is 1.5 to one but that's okay well i was i would say three to one but you know tomatoes but what i found is it's sort of emulating uh like what you would get in a studio like a mic guitar sound in the studio if you're running through you know a neve 1073 and then into an 1176 you can kind of emulate that sort of response because that's the thing with modelers a modeler to my mind is not necessarily going after you sitting in front of your amplifier playing it's going after the sound of the amp mic'd up in a studio situation and getting that kind of sound or the light so that's the whole purpose of it exactly it takes that that takes that part out of it actually or it adds that to it's part of the sound is the mic the mics being on the cabinet so i've gotten really good results with modelers making them feel more real by treating them like you would in a studio situation put a compressor as the last thing in line put an eq right before your compressor and you know you can you can dial out weird frequencies that are coming out or add weird frequencies if that's the sound you're going for a lot of like that brian may stuff there's a lot of strange mid-range sort of well it's all mid-range it's it's like a half cocked wah that that gives them that that sound which is it you can kind of pull that off with an eq yeah if you're totally boosting the right stuff you know yeah it's things like that that you might not think of buy an eq pedal you know put an eq in line with your stuff and see what you can do with that you know it's a lot to do we'd like to know your thoughts leave in the comments what you think what your solution to this is what pedals you have what amps you have or if you use modelers really like to know i'm actually you know really curious to see what people are using today that follow this channel thanks rhett thanks for having me man that's all for now don't forget to subscribe if you're a first time viewer ring the bell that'll let you know when i go live and when a new video comes out give it a thumbs up leave a comment that's very important if you're interested in the biato book go to my website at www.rickbeater.com follow me on instagram at rickbeat01 check out the new beatto ear training program at beautiertraining.com and if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the beatto club thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato

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Keywords: rick beato, Everything Music, Rhett Shull, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Van Halen, Brian May, Eric Johnson, Tom Morello, rage against the machine, Queen, RATM, Pat Metheny, Guitar, Music, Amplifiers, Amps, Pedals, Modelers, Analog, Digital, Axe FX, Kemper, Neural DSP, Helix, Fractal, Line 6, Darkglass, Compression, Distortion, Lead Tone, Rhythm Tone, Style, Sound, Podcast, best guitar tone, guitar tone, electric guitar, Pickups, Strings, Single Coil, Humbucker, Rock, Metal, Jazz, Effects, Neo Soul

Id: kFF0XEH0EE0

Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020