Why I HATE Tube Screamers? (and your other questions)

hey everyone brett shull here so it's been a little while but i think it's time to do another tuesday q a here on the channel it's been several months since i've done one of these uh so i reached out to you guys on instagram and twitter and asked you to send in questions and boy did you there's some really great ones this week we're gonna pick some to respond uh but before we do a quick plug today's video is sponsored by my guitar courses i have two guitar courses available with a third one on the way very soon as soon as i can start playing again i have the tone course which is a video course dedicated to the ins and outs of understanding great guitar tone and your rig and how to get the sound out of your head through your speakers and i also have the nashville number system course which is of course dedicated to giving you a complete understanding of the nashville number system and if you use the discount code in the description box down below you can get 20 off both of the courses so that's on retroguitarcourses.com also you can find other links down there to some of the gear that i'm using to make today's video those are affiliate links which really helped me out in producing these videos so thank you with all that out of the way let's jump in and take a look at the first questions came in on instagram from jay gearkind music he said is it true that you had the doctor put brass in your collarbone to improve your slide tone it wasn't brass it was actually glass we went back and forth a little bit in the pre-op the surgeon wanted to do brass specifically the aged brass that i used for my signature slide but i decided to go with glass knowing that it'll be a little bit more fragile overall and i'm a little bit higher risk for breaking the bone again but i think the smoother tone of the glass is a little bit more versatile and in line with the type of gigs and the sounds that i typically go for so we uh we took one of these my signature rock slide glass slides they melted it down did some kind of uh wizardry and implanted it in my collarbone these are also available down below shameless plug this next question came in on instagram from reagan desalvo reagan asks if there is one what guitar have you played that's the one that got away and there is one in fact i think about this guitar almost on a daily basis and i first encountered it about two years ago actually almost two years ago to the day i was in london england playing a show with noah guthrie in good trouble and because we flew to london we're trying to travel lightly so i only brought one guitar i brought my novomirus and my pedalboard that's the fabled gig where the tsa agents in boston dismantled my pedalboard and ended up basically destroying it and i had to go direct into the amp for the show but while we were there gibson kindly loaned us some guitars for the gig and the guitar that i ended up using was a 2014 gibson custom shop collector's choice dutch burst clone i've played a lot of les pauls over the years i've played vintage les pauls i've played bursts i've played gold tops i've played custom shops that particular les paul is without a doubt the best or second best les paul i've ever played second best behind the 59 that i played at carter vintage last year but that one is the one that got away so i asked if it was for sale and at first the answer was no it's in their artist inventory it's not for sale but then after some convincing they offered to sell it to me at an artist price which was still astronomically expensive i couldn't quite afford it and so i decided to you know wait and see and that turned into months which turned into years and i recently found out that they did in fact sell that guitar so if you out there if you own that les paul first of all congratulations that's one of the best les pauls i've ever played and if you're ever interested in selling it send me an email that's a serious offer by the way it's not a joke this question came in on instagram from mitch tyler mitch asks what's been the most effective piece of guitar theory that you've learned triads seriously learn your triads starting off with the caged system so you can learn the five different positions the basic positions of triad shapes up and down the neck learning your notes on the fretboard and learning your intervals on the fretboard when you combine those three things together it completely unlocks the neck it completely unlocks the fretboard for you to build on top of and add more complex ideas and chord voicings and scale shapes on top in fact i think this is so important that this is the topic of the next video course uh that we're currently working on that is on hiatus for the moment but um yeah the next chorus is essentially on unlocking the fretboard and understanding the entire fretboard and a huge part of that is understanding your triad shapes up and down the neck this next question came in from eli osc on instagram eli asks what's your favorite plugin at the moment let me uh let me show you so this is a plug-in that i've been using for the last two or three years i use it all the time on my drum sounds on my bass sound sometimes on guitar as well i bought this plug-in on the recommendation from my friend jamie the singer from deacon knight and it's the good hertz wolf compressor now this is a collaboration that good hertz did with wolfpeck some years ago to kind of give you that super juicy thick compressed wolfpec drum sound kind of thing and it works incredibly well so what we've got going on here is just a simple little drum loop that we threw in and i'll play it for you with the plug-in bypassed [Music] it sounds pretty good on its own but when i throw in the wolfpeck compressor we get [Music] instantly more saturation more compression that sounds worlds better to me immediately and the cool thing is it's got some really great presets so for instance i love this uh punch and crunch preset right here [Music] and you can go in and add more saturation more compression and more of a mix so yeah for me that's an absolutely essential plug-in uh i haven't installed on this computer and my laptop i use it on almost every single track that i make i get a lot of questions about how i do my drum sounds uh and this is a big part of it this uh good hertz wolf comp plug-in it's literally my favorite plug-in i've ever owned all right this question came in on instagram from ethan c ethan sayax i don't know ethan asks why do you hate tube screamers [Applause] okay so i told chris he has to forget everything he learned in jazz school for this one okay so tube screamers let me start off by saying hate is a strong word i don't hate tube screamers but in the proverbial echelon of overdrive pedals tube screamers are by far my least favorite and the reason is because what they do to the mid-range tube screamers are very mid-forward overdrive circuits and typically the type of amp sounds that i go for whether it be in a modeler or one of my normal tube amps over here are traditionally pretty mid-forward the guitar is a mid-focused instrument electric guitar lives in the mid-range and if you think about where the electric guitar sits and the context of a mix with a band on stage or in a record the mid-range is a pretty crowded place you've got the guitar you've got the vocals you've got the keyboards for example so it's really easy for a guitar sound to get too mid heavy and a little too muddy now tube screamers are great if you are playing mid scooped amps think blackface fenders for example to me that's the only situation that i would ever find myself wanting and relying on a tube screamer and the reason it works well in that situation is because the amp the blackface amp is traditionally mid-scoped meaning it doesn't have a lot of that mid-range so when you're using the tube screamer it's replacing the mid-range that the amp is lacking but like i said most of my amps that i use on a normal basis already have quite a bit of mid-range so right now the pedal we're playing is the modern classic from lawrence petross now i don't want you to think that i'm saying this pedal sucks lawrence is a friend who builds great pedals and i think as tube screamers go this is a really great one but the tone we have dialed up here should kind of show you what we're talking about so chris bypass the pedal okay so that's kind of an example of a typical tone that i would use on most of my amps you can tell it's overdriven it's you know edge of breakup if you play a little bit lighter the amp will clean up [Music] but you can tell there's already quite a bit of mid-range there so when you kick on the tube screamer now there's a lot of mid-range there's too much mid-range and you might be hearing this you know through your computer speakers or your headphones i think well actually that sounds pretty good but in the context of a band and full mix that tone would absolutely get you buried the guitar would not step out if that was going to be your solo tone it would be hard for you to be heard over everything else that was happening now one way around this on the tube screamer is to actually roll the gain down so chris turn the gain down yep to like 11 o'clock or so there now try that [Applause] right so there you can tell it's better we're not getting as much of that mid stacking uh is happening the mid-range is a little bit cleaner and it's a little bit brighter which is going to help the guitar cut through more but still the pedal is just not interacting well with this type of amp setup so that's why i don't like tube screeners i don't like the mid-range i don't like the eq curve on them i don't like what the tone control does and so as a result i just typically avoid them i think as far as overdrives go there are plenty of other options out there like the blues breaker circuit that i think is a far superior overdrive and i realize saying that is probably gonna piss some people off in the comments but just my opinion all right this question came in on instagram from alex weeble music alex asks flat wounds on guitar do you think there's any use to them in a career path like yours so i actually have two guitars with flat wounds on them uh one is my mule caster the metal kind of telecaster that people always ask about that i use slide on all the time that has flats but it's currently not here i'm letting my friend michael westbrook borrow it because he's filling in for me on the noah guthrie gig actually today they're playing in wisconsin today but the second guitar that has flats of mine is this uh d'angelico here uh i got this earlier this year from d'angelico they sent this out for me to check out and i and uh this has flat wounds on it so if you're not familiar with flat wounds if you think about a guitar string specifically the wound strings most of your typical electric or acoustic steel strings are wound with a round wire it's kind of hard to say and this leads to your typical kind of electric guitar sound they tend to be a little brighter you can bend on them a little easier flat wounds however are wound with a flat almost like think of it like a tape if you will sort of like a metal tape and what this means is you get a string a wound string that is perfectly smooth you can kind of think of it as your unwound string your high e and your high b but all six strings they kind of have that same feeling as a result the strings tend to have a little bit more tension they don't bend as easier and tonally they're a little darker they don't have as much top end attack and brightness as a round wound string and they just have a different feel [Music] overall [Music] bye so that's sort of the typical way to think about of a flat wound strong guitar right but from my style of playing not being a jazzer i like flats because they they can give you a really nice sort of woody dark tone i don't typically use them for playing solos because it's hard to bend on them and i do a lot of bending in my playing but for a guitar where you might be doing some some really beautiful chord stuff or a lower tuned guitar flats can be really cool so i would encourage you to try it out if you have a guitar that you think might be a good candidate go buy a set of flats they're not much more expensive than your typical round wound strings and throw them on see how you like them also if you're playing slide if you have a slide guitar flats are great for slide guitar playing they're nice and smooth they don't rust nearly as low as quickly as round round strings do so they last a lot longer i think they're really cool kevin stevenson sent this in on instagram he asked what song do you feel made you a better player by learning it and actually i have a solo instead of a song and it's the solo from help the poor by robin ford right when i graduated music school i was taking lessons from one of my former teachers named steve rick steve is an amazing guitar player amazing teacher in fact if you're in the atlanta area and you're looking for a great teacher i'd highly recommend looking up steve but steve had me transcribe and learn robin ford's solo from help the poor and i'm a massive robin ford fan i have been for years his playing his tone is just insane but i remember learning that solo for the first time it had a massive impact on how i approach playing lead stuff even today that one solo really opened up my my left and right hand and the style that i have in fact if you watch this channel for a long time you've probably seen me play those licks from that solo over and over again because it's just stuck with me for that long it's one of my favorite guitar solos ever so yeah help the poor robin ford so that was tuesday q a thank you guys so much for submitting your questions don't forget to follow me on instagram and twitter linked down below for the next tuesday q a also we're running twenty percent off of my video courses at rhettshullguitarcourses.com use the discount code in the description box down below to get 20 off the tone course and the national number system course and be on the lookout for the new video course that should be coming towards the end of this summer as always if you want to learn more about the gear that i use to make these videos there is some affiliate links in the description box down below as well if you buy something through one of those links i earn a small commission which helps me out in running the channel and i really appreciate it also huge thanks to everyone who was asking about you know my arm and recovering and how i was doing and when i'm gonna be back to playing i really appreciate everyone looking out i should be back to playing guitar pretty soon i'm hoping in the next uh week or so but we'll see but i'm feeling much better so thank you so much for asking about that anyways i'm rhett shull thank you so much for watching and remember there is no plan b

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 214,118

Keywords: ibanez tube screamer, tube screamer, ibanez ts9, ts808 vs ts9, tube screamer ts9, Rhett Shull, Tuesday Q&A, question and answer, guitar pedals

Id: m0mNukQkx6M

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021