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Tone Talk 🤔
Too much time on my hands, so here’s some random thoughts on tone.
From the times I have completely removed the laquer and paint on several of my solid body electric guitars, I have learned that without the thick layers of laquer and paint the guitars not only feel considerably lighter in weight, but they also resonate in a different way to produce more sustain. As the only place a guitar string is actually “touching” or sending vibrations through the body and neck is at the nut and bridge, the tone shaping qualities of those vibrations with a heavy layer of poly laquer on top of the wood is equivalent to putting a plastic bag over your hi-fi speakers and therefore in my opinion so small as to be negligible. I don’t believe either that the body shape of an electric solid body guitar has any other properties than being a platform for the eletronics, pickups and bridge/stoptail hardware. But to return to my first statement, I do feel that a solid body guitar with the laquer and paint removed, resonates so much better that it may actually affect the vibration from the nut and bridge in such a way that the longer sustain may benefit the tone picked up by the pickups. So my feeling is that 90% of tone with a heavily laquered solid body guitar comes from the pickups and only 10% from the body and with the laquer/paint removed the percentage could be 60/40% which is a huge difference. I don’t have any scientific proof to back me up on this up, just my ears and a gut feeling working on two of my guitars. I do however think that the cosmetic reason for putting all that poly laquer on is just to make more shiny eye candy for potential customers. No older guitars made by hand from the beginning of guitar making up to the 50/60’s have such thick gloss laquer and for a very good reason. Today it’s almost as if guitars are totallly encased in plastic.
I predict that one of the next big selling points for guitars will be going back to a thin layer of Nitrocellulose paint and skip the gloss poly layer for added “authenticity”, which will in turn benefit tone/sustain considerably and as an added bonus the thinner paint layer will make the guitar achieve a “Roadworn” look naturally in record time, forever putting an end to the “new versus relic” discussion..
Would love to hear if you have an opinion on this.
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14 Replies
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Jim Lill has a good series about this topic:
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That was very illuminating. 😎🤘🏽
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This is not a response to @Notecracker regarding the presence/absence of lacquer on electric guitars, but a general observation on the subjectivity of tone.
An aspect of assessing tone that I never hear discussed is the presence of 1) unobserved and unmitigated tension in the body of the listener 2) unobserved inflammation in the body of the listener.
Mind-body disciplines such as the Alexander Technique and others, exist to help us understand where our bodies are holding on to stress and tension in ways that work against our core alignment. To oversimplify, this tension manifests when large muscle groups get “stuck” in a habitual way of doing things, such that they lose their range of motion. At least two things physiologically occur after this condition appears: 1) because the muscles affected stay stuck in a relatively fixed position, they slowly lose lubricating fluid between themselves and the fascia. Now when they do actually contract, they are pulling a host of synergistic muscles out of alignment, very often places in your body far away from the bound muscles 2) Your stabilizer or “core” muscles, the ones that along with other connective tissues keep your skeleton together (check out tensegrity) must compensate for the weak/bound muscle groups, further exacerbating tension in the body.
So, depending on the amount of unobserved tension we’re already carrying around, we then pick up a guitar and, based on an already faulty anatomical set-up, we introduce unknown amounts more tension because we think it’s required to play the guitar. Of course, some tension is required to fret with fingers, hold a pick, strum, barré chords, etc. But it’s astounding just how much tension all of us (especially me) “loads up” to play guitar. Every bit of this tension defeats one of the fundamental goals of musicianship, which is to learn to make the body a resonant chamber that synchronizes with the resonant body of the guitar so that they amplify each other. Habitual tension away from the guitar, and especially habitual tension with the guitar, vastly compromises your body’s ability to do what it wants to do: to play comfortably with no strain; and to use its sensory receptors (Lamellar Corpuscles being but one of an important group for musicians) to really feel the music and to move it along in a way that excites the player to want to make more beautiful music. How can anyone truly assess tone if they’re tense in so many places that they don’t even know where they’re tense, and therefore don’t know how many sensory receptors they are compromising? How much is their collective tension preventing sound waves from physically getting to the Central Nervous System so that the entirety of the body becomes a resonant chamber?
Inflammation of the body and brain is inextricably linked to diet. Inflammation of the brain causes innumerable breakdowns in our ability to process information. And it literally affects how the complexities of the ear canal transmit information to the brain, both by compromising the automated mechanisms that transmute sound waves to the brain; and then how we assess that information.
Not only is tone subjective, but how one perceives it (or not) is likely based on hundreds of different variables peculiar to one individual at one point in time on a continuum where just one change in one of those variables can alter perception.
Rather than chasing tone from without, I opt to chase tone from within, by: practicing working on optimal body alignment away from the guitar; studying the many papers circulating on the Internet about “posture” and your instrument; and adopting best practices with diet to reduce body/brain inflammation in order to optimize my hearing and sensory perception.
Just food for thought…
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The food of that thought was quite filling and I appreciate the meal.
But seriously it does make a lot of sense.
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@Jake you’re welcome. You’re the first person to comment on my post, but was hoping my it was spin off into its own thread, but this new SixString community is hundreds of times smaller than the previous incarnation. When this app launches for phones again I think there will be a huge surge in membership, and statistically, more people who don’t mind wading through my posts.
I get that one of the main purposes of this site is for guitarists to share their joie de vivre for playing guitar through audio/video clips, and drooling over new gear. It may not be popular, but after over 30 years of studying guitar pedagogy (teaching how to teach guitar), I see the same breakdowns in playing technique over and over again. Many people claim they want to get better, but they’re not willing or disciplined enough to do the work to reach a state of better. I will persevere, and continue to deliver detailed observations of anyone’s guitar playing, along with multiple avenues for approaching seemingly complex intersections of flesh and string 😎
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Hi. I don’t ever recall the former SixString app having more than 40 or maybe 50 active members posting on any given time for the 10 years I was on it. Yes, there were upward of 20.000 registered, but very few of them that actually posted on a regular basis. 😎👍🏽
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This reply was modified 1 year ago by Notecracker.
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Btw, right now there are 175 members on here, albeit 67 of them are faceless accounts that seldom post. But that’s pretty good for a start. 😀🤘🏽
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Sorry, that should be 127 users at present. 😐🤘🏽
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This reply was modified 1 year ago by
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I think that among other reasons there’s one important, and very personal, aspect of anyones reasons or “goals” for playing guitar that is as valid and worthwhile as any deep laser focused desire to put in the work to get better and that is the simple therapeutic joy of playing music at whatever level you’re at while having fun and just being in the moment. Personally I want to get better, but I never liked going to school or be in any way disciplined learning anything and I don’t have the time or mental ability to understand complex music theory. My brain can’t handle it and that may very well be my loss, but in the meantime I’ll be here, happy and fulfilled doing my thing. I know quite a few others that I grew up with in the 60’s and 70’s who feels the same way. However, I do know I will get “better” by listening to the music I love and for more inspiration I have a brilliant guitar teacher who always have easily understood answers to any specific thing I want him to teach me, which is exactly the agreement we have. I tell him what I would like him to teach me, which is often something I have heard on an blues/jazz album and then when I have fully absorbed whatever we have worked on I call on him for another lesson and the pattern repeats itself. Sometimes it takes two weeks and sometimes it’s a month. Works like a charm.
Just some thoughts on my own alternative learning progress/process.
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True, thanks for the refinement of my comment, the old app did only have a small fraction of its membership represented by consistent posts.
Learning styles are as individual as fingerprints. To anyone, in general: if your learning style is working for you, and you’re consistently (near daily) getting in repetitions on your latest lesson(s), you’re going to progress.
While learning via the aural/oral tradition will never be out of vogue, there have been some real advances in teaching and learning in general over the past 30 years. I’m curious about these things so I seek them out. My joy in guitar, what works for me, is having the knowledge to deconstruct what I’m trying to learn in order to teach myself how to successfully produce the sounds that I hear in my mind’s ear. No single approach to teaching guitar can accommodate a student’s biology, physiology, history of illness/injury, learning disabilities, age, mood, or, probably most important, a student’s level of discipline. Music theory, aural skills/sight singing, composition, playing in a wide variety of ensembles, fronting bands, trusting my voice to sing, overcoming what I was convinced was a real inability to accompany myself on vocals with my guitar (that took 30 years or so), all of these things are consistent with my philosophy of being an auto-didact, someone who self-teaches. Everybody does it, to the extent they are capable. A good teacher understands your learning style and doesn’t try to shoehorn the student into a learning approach incompatible with how the student learns. A good teacher teaches you to teach yourself, because after that hour-long lesson, what you do with the other 167 hours in the week is up to you.
The joy of actually playing in the moment comes down to this: whenever we can get into a state of flow, where the music puts us in a trance, when time seems to stand still, but many minutes or hours have passed, I think this is what keeps us all coming back for more. How anyone learns to get into a flow state is somewhat mysterious, but it’s a joy to behold.
Here’s to flow!
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Can you possibly teach me how to teach myself better? I’ve been playing for a year now. I make sudden surges of progress every now and then and I can’t afford lessons. Got any advice? I just recently took up learning music theory because I want to be able to deconstruct everything about it. I have this child like wonder while playing guitar and I started playing at 19 and I’m 20 now and I still have such a passion for playing. It’s difficult to find more than 30 minutes a day during college semesters (getting my masters in accounting) but summer is when I do nothing but work and play guitar. I have some books one it and YouTube can only be so helpful 😂. I’m still learning the language of guitar and the “grammar” rules per say but I have essays to write in my head that only guitar can translate.
Sorry for the life story 😂
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@Jake apparently the new SixString app is still a work in progress, not a problem, it’s got to be a huge job! Please shoot me an email, [email protected].
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@Jake I value the opportunity to help. Let’s test the message function and move this coversation away from this thread, sending you one now…
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I just sent you an email and I’ve been offline for a bit. It’s finals season in the business college and I’ve been getting swamped with work. But after today I’m done and I’m free
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