Why You Should Play LOUDER! (but protect your hearing)

hey everybody i'm rick biato dave honorardo so dave and i have been talking about players that play really loud and how we like to play loud i always played loud in my bands dave played loud in his bands and this was kind of what we grew up doing because amplifiers to get any type of gain typically you see back here all these amps back here are really 50 or 100 watt amps and to get them to distort you had to crank them up and part of that is learning how to control the sound let's talk about some of the the players dave you're talking about ingva for example when you yeah i i one point i i worked with him uh at triclops of studio here in town we did this record called the seven sign and he came up from florida and to do drums and guitar and um we had just a whole basically wall like this at the at the studio and he came in and i got to really see him basically sit there and play these amps at full volume but play like he does as cleanly as he does and it's really something to see somebody of that caliber play like that on an amp that is is that loud and can control it and and you don't hear mistakes you don't hear the typical you know slop notes or any kind it's just very you know and obviously you know i mean invade some people don't like them some people do you know i i could take him either way but after doing that session with him uh my respect for him went through the roof because watching him play it that cleanly and that loud and out loud dave on oh he we had we had like two or three full super leagues flat out i mean wide open okay so just non-master and all he used was his volume control there was no booster there was no nothing we just ran them wide open um it was yeah it was it was deafening okay so dave said something interesting uses volume control so this is one of the things when i play on if you watch me play here on youtube or on instagram i use my volume knob all the time and i almost never turn my volume up all the way unless i'm really going for a loud you know unless i want a lot of gain you know gain on a certain line or something like that but i love the tone of my guitar when it's at five or it's at two and i like having that um the the ability have the amp loud but then control the amount of gain by just using the volume control and the output because it makes your playing way more dynamic when all the notes are too even and you're using compression like that if your amp is really distorted distortion equals compression and dave will always say oh that's too compressed of a sound if he's trying to amp out and he has too much gain that's his first thing he'll say oh that's it's too compressed well and it just because it gets boxy it tends to start to be very cubicle sounding to me and it limits certain frequencies out and you just you just get this one particular parameter of the amp whereas if you back the gain out a little bit and then bring the guitar up it sort of like makes notes sort of bloom and it makes that's right gives it this air to it um that's interesting too because in the studio i would always use compression not just to control the transience of notes but to control the tone to affect the tone of an instrument because compression can really change the sound as dave's saying sometimes you want it to sound boxy you'll want an instrument and you'll compress it a certain way or you'll put an eq before or after compressor in this control room this after the sound's being recorded and i'll shape a sound using compression and now you can shape sound using multi-band compression and stuff like that but but the but with guitar being able to control loud guitar amps is an art talk about eddie van allen for example well ed was really the first guy that um as a kid when when van halen one came out i was eight literally i was eight years old and you've never you know to that point you know you heard distortion on guitar a certain way um and then there was a few guys that were like boston like tom schultz had ryan may had had a lot of games because brian may had a really distinctive thing but eddie what i noticed right off the bat with eddie was that that it was recorded loud i mean you heard you know you really got me those first couple sure it's like you could tell how loud that is yes you know and even with the reverb that they added which was a great empty plate but it was just loud you know and angus was another one that you heard he was like man they are just pegging those those you know amps to the board and the correction and the board is even adding to it um but he played if you know if you watched van halen he used his volume control constantly and he was never always all the way up a lot of times he would like back off and he would you know there was a lot of dynamics the whole the whole first record yeah well he's just controlling the volume on that to you know if you think about um yeah any pick any song yeah any of them in the verses he brings his gain back yeah he backs off a little bit when he's doing a lot of arpeggiated chords yes and trying to get a lot of definition yeah because he did have you know and then when you do a fill line he just brings up and then brings it back down again right but then you hear him swell into the choruses that was a big thing and that's really what pretty much all those great players you would hear do they'd swell their guitar into the chorus and they it's it's a whole different technique of playing an amplifier it's it's it's like the amp is making you play a certain way you're not uh you're not dictating what the amp is doing it's dictating what you're you know how you gonna control it and it affects your playing and what i notice with a lot of younger players that they're not playing on an amp that's loud so their dynamics tend to be very straight across and it's it's sort of like and it's not that they're not good players it's just that the actual what their interface with their amplifier or what they're playing through is just very straight so dynamics get lost a lot of the um sort of the the airiness of of well a lot of them have put compression before just really distorted guitar parts and guitar sounds or guitar simulations and a really just heavily distorted guitar if you're using a jcm800 model or using an evh model or a pv5150 or a mesa model those things are when they're that distorted they're compressed already yeah you can't get any more compressed yeah that's true yeah and if you wanna and one of the things about having good tone i would always have bands in the studio i'd take i get them to play their parts and i worked with a lot of new metal bands and they would play with so much gain every amp that came in here was a high gain amp so i would have them play and i'd say you know we get a lot better tone if you just back off the gain on the amp yeah and it would be really uncomfortable for them to play i would back it off to where it sounded good to me and if they needed it for a pinch harmonic or something i would sit there during the performance and i would just play with the preamp yeah add it as well as i go like as a performance or something or punch it in but then they would realize oh my god that sounds so much better because it actually has dynamics to it right right and and it's not that you know was the player's fault it just was that that's those were the amps you know that's how they're voiced and so a lot of new amps are voiced with with scooped mids and unfortunately you know scooped mids is great to a point but if you go too far with it you you just don't have any dynamics at all right you have to have some kind of mid-range in there um so like he like he was saying you would take you know maybe a heavier distorted amp on one side take a cleaner amp mix them both um to get everything in the bandwidth you know um and unfortunately but you know like now we have like kempers and and all these models effects yeah helixes quad core texas and those those machines most of the people that use those that i know that are for my friends they use really heavily distorted sounds or they'll use really clean ultra clean sounds with a ton of compression and you'll notice a lot of guitarists use the wraps on the fingerboard or around the neck to dampen the strings which is really what we're talking about here if you heard eric johnson play how loud was eric johnson back in the 80s i i saw him twice i saw him in 85 86 and he was deafening what about stevie ray vaughan i saw him in 85 he was i mean it was yeah wide open you couldn't get any louder i mean and i like loud there's loud and then there's painfully loud and stevie was painfully loud when he would go to his clean tones and and i mean rip your head off yeah man i mean you know it i mean it was glorious it was stereo i guess i'm going to go def go to you know go deaf by him that's fine but but it really was overkill do you think that that in-ears actually affects people's playing too greatly yeah greatly um in fact i just saw a band um recently um there was a band sticks that oh they all use any everybody who's either any you know that's the norm now you have to and um i could tell from those guys a night ranger played with them too those bands played completely differently than the times i'd seen them before early in the early days and not that they were bad or it was worse or whatever it was i can see from a sound man's perspective it's really easy just to be like here out front everything's controlled but there was none of this like guitar just pushing you like yeah okay that's you know that's really well what's interesting too one of the downsides of getting old with with with guitar players and and i you know i didn't play a lot of g i haven't played a lot of gigs because i've been producing for the last 25 years or so so i've luckily saved my hearing more than people that have been out playing right like me uh and and you'll find a lot of older guitar players that they have a lot higher gain uh now in their in their tones because their hearing is going and you need a more complex wave form in order to hear it better yeah the treble is way louder than it should have been and gain his way a lot more yeah so the a lot of the players that would play with a lot less gain as they've gotten older their their amps get gainier because to them it sounds like it used to well perfect example and i'll probably get a bunch of crap for this but to me that's what happened with van halen in the 90s you listened to his amplifiers going from the first 5150 which had tons of gain i mean the first one my first fender version sounds amazing and at each successive one that was 2000 yeah so what i'm saying is they would get more gain they would get even more gains right and it got to the point where it was like like on the model 3 i've never even used the lead channel that's right it's so gained out yeah it's almost it's almost unusual right the second channel is like the like the right like the lead channel used to be right and so and i kept going i kept saying to myself and i went to a few nam shows and i saw van halen at the namm shows and stuff and and it got to the point where he's we as collective of some good friends of mine who are really good players i won't name them but we all kind of said i think he's losing his hearing because he can't hear high end anymore because these these amps are so buzzy in the high end he would take the presence control and just i mean way up and we're just like man what you know and we just laugh because we're sitting on he probably can't hear it you know and so the game got much more buzzy and and and so did the presence control and so and i'm not look man you know i love gain as much as everybody else so but i'm just saying i got to love games yeah we i mean you know believe me i mean look at look at all the animals look at the green screen back here i mean put this way one of my favorite amplifiers is a mesa mark iii so you can't i mean you know it has now dave get you can also have dynamics is is like a big part we were talking we were listening to al damiel a little earlier al playing recently from two weeks ago playing his nylon string and al plays so dynamically and so rhythmically that uh that his right hand is is that's where all the groove comes from same when when i put when tommy emmanuel when i interviewed tommy tommy took this gibson off the wall he knew that the strings were two plays as like strings were too light he goes i'm tuning in he says it in the video i'm gonna tune it a little bit sharp and he did he didn't even have a reference tone he tuned it sharp yeah because he wanted the string tension to be right because we didn't have someone there to set it up yeah and he needed that resistance to be right and you could tell when he tuned it up he played like he would normally play you could tell it was a difference he he was like no i got to do this and he did it and he was like okay but the dynamics the the whole rhythmic feel yeah dynamics with acoustic guitar playing or if it's pat metheny my interview with him when i was sitting this close to pat you know pat said i never played two notes back to back the same volume and he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't his right hand is constantly changing volumes of notes if you listen to the um his travels record for example some of the ballads on there that he plays some of the notes are so quiet that you have to really strain to hear them he play and is beautiful that's what i love about pat's playing is that i mean beyond the incredible melodic uh melodic ideas and development of ideas dynamics are so just amazing and it makes the it makes the songs exciting when you when you hear somebody swell into a chorus of of a song or something or you know yeah the dynamics can make or break a song i mean really i mean and most most of some of the most famous guitar parts are simple swells or simple that's right things it's not you know it's not this huge attack but you know knowing how to use those dynamics and then having an amplifier to to shoot that back at you too you know it's it's it is a really kind of a lost art a little bit well i noticed it on the queen uh you know on the the multi-tracks that uh how brian's tone when he backs off the volume yeah i mean he's got the face which is on his guitar too the multiple face switches he uses all three pickups he has such a variety of tones and then you put the volume control with it yeah it's like you got four guitars there without even having to play through it yeah yeah and i i was at one time i i had seen um tied to boar king zak so i went to a sound check and he was basically standing right here and he had his old uh strat elite and same thing there you know he would move the volume knob like just barely and they told the complete completely different amp sound just by the volume control i mean his guitar was active so it had a lot of different tones in it right just with the with the volume control um but you i could tell his playing would change dynamically just drastically just by that volume control he would play it a certain way and i even mentioned to him i said yeah i said that kind of gets lost in some of the records he kind of was like yeah i'm working on that you know so but it it was it's really interesting the player how an amplifier can really make a certain player play a certain way especially like you said brian may is a perfect example i mean those ac30s are wide open and they they have a certain tone to them and he's dave talk about how loud an ac30 is so the people i know people don't play don't get a chance to play through these things i mean i'm lucky i've got an ac30 and i have and i have a couple of marshall plexis and i've got these these these things are loud yeah an ac30 oh my god it's it's definitely a very loud amp and a very directional amp so it's it has that tendency to to really split your head open if it's wide open and you're standing directly in in line with it it's it can be painful so we were also talking about the the beatles documentary and how they were using the 68 uh fender twins a pair of them and how loud they had they had two u67s norman u67s on that but how loud twins are unbelievably loud yeah they're extremely and they were probably pretty loud in the room yeah they seemed i mean i don't think they were you know they weren't like wide open but i would say they put those answers probably halfway up yeah um and they played a certain way you looked away like how john was playing and even how you can tell that john controls his the dynamics with his right hand watch john lennon's right hand he has to with that casino guitar it's completely hollow that's right so if he lets go of it it's just going to house yes he had to play that guitar a certain way with that amp a certain way and you can tell by the way he's playing and like i said watch both of his hands is his left hand the way he's muting things and and he's really controlling the tone a lot of people don't realize how good the beatles were as players yeah i mean just pro players mccartney would mute all the strings yeah when he's playing and that's a big thing with with all of these amps that are loud yes you your muting technique is almost as important as your picking technique that's because your deadening notes that would get away from you or any kind of sour notes that you might hear um it's a whole other way of playing and if you don't have a loud amplifier you know yeah you can use a compressor you could use all this stuff to deaden that but or you can wrap something around the strings right right so nothing rings over right so it you know but really when we're playing i'm muting with my thumb i'm muting with these fingers i'm muting with my right hand if i'm playing a note i might just go through every string and play one note on the b string and if you were to go and hit the strings every single string is dead except for that one string when dave's doing the same thing yeah i use the same kind my thumb over the over the thing sort of like jimmy did yeah and that was just instinctive because i had to keep those notes dead because you know this is from playing loud yeah this is why we learn that technique because otherwise it was just slop i mean i remember i remember distinctly i was doing a session i had a sun model t and um a sun model t and a high watt 100 and they were they were up okay i mean i was doing like the leslie west it was nailed and i had it and i had had a junior at the time you know one p90 one you know volume knob and you man if you let that thing go it was like a stuck pig it would just squeal and just go and and i remember having to turn a certain way in in the in the studio and play at a certain angle to get rid of the rf noise and to find the sweet spot where it would dead and outright and it was a whole thing it was like you know okay not only do i gotta play this part i gotta get clean i gotta do a solo but i gotta stand a certain way just to get it and then when i heard the playback of it it was it was cool because i remember one of the one of the engineers was like he was like man that was so loud he goes i seriously thought we were going to like pop something in the mic or something and he he said he said but man there's there seriously is nothing like hearing that that air moving on a track you know we would just isolate it and literally the guitar would like before i'd hit the note it would kind of go and then you'd hit the note yeah and it had this thing to it yeah it was percussive and that was what was so glorious about it and if you isolate a lot of 70s tracks of guitar players they it's they're it's that's there you can't get around it so it's this percussive sort of wallop he used to call it the wallop you know it's like you can tell even when i was uh just did my video on ride like the women with christopher cross's guitar solo when you solo it you know that that's a cranked amp you can tell that you can tell what a loud amp sounds it sounds like it has that wallop yeah yeah and and and all most of the 70s 80s rock stuff that's what you know that was part of it you know and of course obviously you still get it today but it but when you have the volume with it it's just a whole nother thing and you have to you have to control it you can't just let it go you know so there was a whole other aspect of playing a loud amplifier that is sort of lost unfortunately on a lot of new amps because it's so controlled and so compressed that people play they play sort of a different way now you know i mean there's still guys like phil x and and you know modern guys that are crazy phil i always think think of phil and dave are very similar in that the way that they attack the guitar and they they know how to just control the sound and get milk every nuance out of the out of the sound no matter how loud it is either they can they can just it's never it's always in control yeah it's but it's always on the verge of being out of control that's the thing it's like i you know for me like angus was the perfect guy for that because you you he always sounded like he was getting fall off the rails at any second but he was in total control like he he he played it to the team and and if you watch angus live in the 70s he would just his volume control that's all he did he had vine and he would and as we were saying before you know a lot of those tones when you go back and really listen to them they're not as distorted as you think that's right it's more vibrant and almost never if you think of when you think of jimmy page yeah and you you go and listen you really listen to it it's like that's hardly distorted at all right yeah jimmy page angus all those guys even van halen on on the scale of of you know distortion now they're real oh my god they're clean they're really not that distorted i mean so those guys really played those amps right and and and there is something to be said about um you know a player that who was astute enough to be like okay he knows he's a good player but he also finds his tone and he plays that amp you know i mean it is i mean like you know i hate to keep going back but brian may i mean his rig is so oddball and so strange but it's so him and you couldn't hear him play anything else you know and that's why i suspect he's never played anything that's right because he found it he's like i found my sound and and that's how he plays you know so like any good player you know i mean i obviously i mean brian could probably play anything and it's going to sound like brian may but you know those tones and the way he plays he has to have his rig a certain way and i wouldn't want to hear it any other way well this is why i'm a big proponent of people finding their own sound with real gear because i think that that's incredibly important is you know when i think of any of these great players that i grew up you know as as my heroes they all had their own unique rigs yeah it's true i mean like of the list of all the guitar players that i would list as heroes of mine or people who really influenced me all of them had their own thing and and even it even if they played similar rigs i mean for example it's like i'm a huge richie blackmore fan um you know ingva has the same rig but they say but they sound completely different i mean you know and so david gilmour same thing you know i mean all these guys billy gibbons i mean you know robin trower uh it's just a list goes on and on i mean you know even like guys like johnny winner or albert collins albert king they all had their own thing and they all found a certain amplifier or a certain guitar that that sounded a certain way and then they played upon that i mean perfect example you know stereo yvonne he's using a strat used a plethora of different amps but stevie always sounded like stevie no matter what he played that's true and and but he had his thing you know i mean you you can't it's just it's that undefinable thing and it's it's that personal stamp so yeah anytime all the great players that i listen to i can hear a couple notes you know you know how it is you hear it and you're like that's that guy you know and it's like and to me that's even that's just as important as what you play you know um the voice it's so it's and it's hard to find a voice now to me i almost think like we have so many options we have too many options that's right and so you get caught in this thing of like you know i've got my kemper and i'm gonna sit here and i'm gonna dial this up for eight hours and try to find some whereas or you have your helix and you have 50 different presets that you're playing for your gig or you've got a yeah your x effects or your quad cortex and and which all you're trying to do is make that simulator sound like something real right anyway so it's almost like i i try to tell players you know go out and play amps real amps and play them and try to play them so you have a good reference when you go onto a simulator or a modeling amp that you know what you're trying to go for that's right like you you have a go point of like okay i love the way that you know that high watt sounds or that vox and i've really heard that amp and and studied it and figured it out and played on it and then go back and try to you know modulate or or modify something in a simulator you know i mean it's difficult if you can't really go into a music store and turn an amp way up and play i mean you can you totally well you can i don't do it but dave i highly recommend it dave will do it but uh well i don't go to music stores anymore well maybe not as much as i used to but yeah but i still hate that's what they're there for i mean you know it's like if you can't buy you know if you're going in to buy a guitar dave used to work at well dave used to work at every different music store that i was that i went to but we would go when you worked at midtown music for example um i would go in and play yeah i go in and play all the time yeah you came i remember that you came in and you played the high watts because we had that white stuff and you were like oh i'm thinking about buying one of these i was like you need this i play the oranges i played the marshes i bought like 10 jc m800s i just put them in the back room i'm like dude turn up as loud as you want man i mean you know and eddie would and it was like timmy that was like yeah that was half the reason to go to a music store was you know i it's like i don't want something in a box i want to crank it up before so some one of these days i'm going to have people come to the studio i'm gonna invite a few people that are watching the channel and come and play some of these amps turn them up see what they sound like see what how they react with your guitar and and move some air and move some air yeah so leave your comments in the comments section love to know what you think about our discussion don't forget to subscribe here and uh dave follow dave on instagram dojo guitar dojo guitar repair thanks for watching thanks that's all for now don't forget to subscribe ring the bell and leave a comment check out my new quick lessons pro guitar course that just came out also the biato book if you want to learn about music theory that's how you do it and check out my biato ear training course at beautiertraining.com and don't forget if you want to support the channel even more think about becoming a member of the biato club thanks so much for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Rick Beato 2

Views: 140,759

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Id: vJ9QQ6LrGNM

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022