Buy On Amazon 
Chapter 1
Getting Tone
You might think that a guitar is played loud so you can hear it. Still, there are many more reasons why electric guitar sound loud, and they are important for any electric guitarist to know about. If you go into a store and play an amp, you will likely be offered a soundproof cubicle, probably not much bigger than a small bedroom. You will discover how loud any amp, even the smaller ones, can get. It soon becomes apparent that electric guitar sounds will travel and travel loud. They are designed to do exactly this. Bigger amps are designed for bigger venues. Smaller amps for smaller venues.
If you are thinking, “Why not just get a big amp and turn it down?” you are asking the right question and will learn that volume and the sound an amp makes are linked. Not only the volume changes but the amp’s tonal characteristics. If the sound you want is the one heard at a large venue, then most likely, that amp played at bedroom volumes will sound different, not just a little bit, but a lot. It is not the sound you paid for. When you try to get that sound with big amps by increasing the volume, you may be shaking windows and potentially damage your hearing if you continuously play like that without ear protection. It will be too uncomfortable physically with some amps. You might even feel unwell. So volume is a foundation topic for electric guitar. We must find ways to get the sounds we need at a volume we can manage.
Heavy metal is probably the most sought-after sound, but we will deal with everything here, from vintage sound to modern high gain. It is important to understand them all. Many amps are multiple channel amps offering all those possibilities. The good news is that the guitar sounds you hear while listening to your favorite songs can be replicated using the right gear, even in a bedroom. You can record guitar sounds nearly as good as the music you hear on a band’s track from your music player. To understand how we must look a bit about sound itself.
Sound Dynamics
Listening to a song from a playback medium like streaming, LP, or CD and listening to an electric guitar live are two totally and tonally different things. In many cases, the live sound coming from the equipment on stage is not the recording equipment. They are different situations. Most guitarists usually have a much smaller setup for studio recording, and often a manageable combo, or amp head and 2×12 (don’t worry, we shall explain all this in time) is all they need. However, at venues, they require a louder sound system. So we see them use lots of big gear live, but this is usually not what we need to play in any smaller room, including a studio they record in.
People walk into music stores and get the amplifier they saw because it was in the music video. You don’t want to do that because there is a chance you will get it wrong for your situation. Music videos are often staged. A much better option is to check out live playing videos. You stand a better chance of observing what they are using for real.
So what are they using to record, and what do you need? Studios have some of the answers to this and all of the experience. All of them will tell you that room acoustics is crucial to some degree. The physical studio design itself matters. Even studios have had to develop ways to deal with poor room acoustics in the studios designed for audio recording. So imagine how your home will be compared to that. However, much of that technology has filtered down now to the home user.
The main problem for the home electric guitarist is a combination of room dynamics and human hearing endurance. Not only do humans feel pain when the sound is too loud, but specific frequencies can even make us feel ill. Stage rows of several 100 Watt amps and speakers can get very loud at festivals. They can be microphoned up (mic’d up). Using a PA (public announcement) system, this microphone sound is sent through the house speakers running at thousands or tens of thousands of Watts. That may also be called the venue’s FoH (front of house). Sound mixing desks connect to the band’s microphones and line outs by long-running cables or wireless. The in-house speaker system allows the sound engineer to adjust the volume levels, equalization, and other parameters depending on the system’s complexity.
85db (decibel level) is the decibel level of about the sound of a lawnmower. Prolonged exposure to this can cause hearing loss, so concert-goers wear earbuds, and the band on stage has in-ear monitors. 90db to 110db can be loud headphone music or concert music. It has caused hearing loss in many musicians who constantly play at these high volumes. You should learn about the medical problem of tinnitus which causes a constant ringing in the ears that never goes away or keeps coming back. You want to avoid this at all costs. Protect your hearing.
As an electric guitarist, you must know how uncomfortable loud playing is for you and your audience. Playing can also annoy people nearby. To avoid that, consider keeping everything down to 70db or below. Not that you should never go above 70db. There is a time and place for going above that.
There are ways to sound big or thick without playing at those volumes. Also, don’t think loud is reserved for heavy metal 100W high gain amps. Neil Young rocking his 12W Fender Custom Deluxe tweed or Brian May breaking free on his Vox AC30W will shake a barn. All of this is avoidable by considering your neighbors and the people around you. If you can do this, you will have more fun and far less worry.
As we said, and worth repeating, if you don’t find some way to cope with loudness, you will likely suffer a hearing loss of some kind and maybe entirely, although tinnitus (constant ringing in the ears) is more common. That is just a fact of the electric guitar-playing lifestyle. If you work around a pneumatic drill, then you wear earplugs. The electric guitar is no different. Yes, you do have to hear what you are playing without earplugs at some stage, but for decades now, guitarists have been able to replicate the tones and sounds they want you to hear while wearing earplugs or in-ear monitors. It is learned through practice, just like any other aspect of guitar playing.
Many guitarists go legally deaf within a decade of playing, and some can pinpoint the session that tipped the scale[1]. If you want a recommendation, I can only give you a surefire way to preserve your hearing that sound engineers use. You need to invest in circumaural closed-back headphones, which means the earpiece covers the outside of your ear and blocks off all outside noise.
Solid outside with foam completely housing the ear inside.
Do not use open-back headphones, as these can allow you to hear more on the outside. Do not use super-aural headphones as they only press against the ear and do not cover it. There will be some noise leak with them. Some earbuds have earplugging capability, and professional ear monitors can be custom molded for every artist’s ear. However, it seems that circumaural closed-back headphones work best for comfort, staying on as you play your instrument, sound quality, and keeping the sound around you from hurting your ears as long as it maintains a tight fit. If you can get into using them, you may find you can preserve your hearing for longer.
Sound engineers have these types of headphones for a reason. Their ears are everything to them. They should also be for you as a guitaring artist. You need to have some way of monitoring your sound to know that it is alright. This text will explain how all this can be done. Now is as good a time as any to understand decibel levels. I recommend downloading a decibel app for your phone and giving it a go. You can and should start to consider measuring decibels (db) every time you play. I don’t want to lecture you on how loud you should play and what safety measures you should take. The choice is yours.
Room Reverb
Now that we have addressed human hearing endurance, we can look at room dynamics that cause problems. It goes for all audio and not just home recording. All rooms of different dimensions and designs sound different. The bigger the room, the more echo and reverb you will expect. The smaller the place, the more sound focuses intensely within a specific area, with sound waves reflecting off each other and high resonance. Many dynamics in these areas, such as surface materials and atmospheric conditions like humidity (which can even cause tuning changes in equipment, especially stringed instruments) and mean sounds change depending on the environment.
Sound dampeners are a great way to help make a room more sonically friendly.
Foam with pyramid shapes is a typical soundproofing design. These panels are stuck to walls to get optimal reflections of sound. Shapes can change, such as with hexagons, which are also gaining popularity.
Play some music outside in the open air and again in a small room; you will hear the sound differently, even if it is all digital because the environment plays a big part in sound dynamics. Most of us go about the day not noticing such differences as our voices indoors or out.
As you progress in guitar, your ability to discern more differences in tonal qualities will help you fine-tune what you are trying to do. You must train your ears to hear all sorts of new sonics; practice is the only way. You will not gain superhuman hearing. All that happens is that your brain will be processing sound more informatively and better able to discern tonal differences. You start to find sounds you didn’t pay as much attention to before and replicate them. When you get better at playing guitar, and the brain begins to do it automatically, you can focus more on the subtle nuances in the tone. That phase takes your tone to the next level when you can focus on the sounds you make rather than on chord shapes and strumming.
Tone and Amp Dials
In the world of electric guitar, getting good sound has a name, getting tone, and you will hear other guitarists talk about it. If it sounds good, it’s good, and you will have tone.
There are two main ways to discuss dials on guitar equipment or amp. You can use clock terminology to direct where the dial indicator should be. This clock terminology is commonly used on dials that aren’t labeled numerically, such as saying noon, the 12 o’clock position, or straight up. 9 o’clock would be horizontal left, and 3 o’clock horizontal right. However, despite not being numerically labeled, some dials may have notches. When referencing a particular amp, you can talk about each notch as a number. 12 or 10 notches are standard division amounts found on amps. Some may be numerically labeled, in which case, reference the number. So there are many ways in which we can talk about dialing in something, but it is always best to stick with the amp’s designations. The critical point is that 9 o’clock and level 9 are usually different. You need to double-check this sort of thing when configuring complex rigs.
Let’s look at some examples of the sounds you want but can’t do in the home when you engage the volume above 1 or 2.
Vox AC30. Think Queen and U2.
Marshall JCM800. A “Full Stack” means two 4×12 cabinets, one stacked on top and then the amp on top. Think 80s heavy metal.
Fender custom deluxe ’57 tweed deluxe. A 12W combo amp that at full volume can rattle a barn. Think Neil Young. Think Country.
Orange TH30. A “Half Stack” means only one 4×12 and the amp on top. Four 12” speakers are inside the cabinet—hard rock and metal.
Fender Deluxe Reverb ’68. Blues to Rock n’ Roll. Very clean and heard in lots of alternative music also.
Roland Jazz Chorus 120. Solid-state combo that nails cleans and Jazz.
What you have seen there is a collection of some very choice amplification and cab setups. Some are amplifier heads separate from cabinets with speakers inside. Others are combo units with everything inside.
These particular units are very loud amplifiers. They are for larger venues and not suitable for home playing. They are not suitable for recording studios either without some soundproofing. Big volume (as in stadium volumes) usually means a big-ticket setup for when you get more confident playing to crowds at higher volumes. However, most players, including many professionals, don’t need to get this loud. The big sound they seek can sometimes be obtained at much lower volumes. This text will show you how.
How to Get Tone
Tone results from getting what sound you want and eliminating what you don’t. That is the straightforward part. The hard part is learning how to recognize tone. It is not something you can sit down and study. It is the gradual exposure to many different electric guitar sounds throughout life. Tunings, string gauges, pickups, playing styles, amp settings, cab types, speaker types, room dynamics, microphones, recording tech, software, and editing means a limitless soundscape for sculpting. The issue is that most of these combinations will result in a below-average appealing noise of some kind we might try to call music. So you must select and eliminate within the soundscape and keep fine-tuning until you sculpt something you can call a good tone. The adage is, “If it sounds good, then it’s good.” Good is good, regardless of how you get there.
Tone hunting is not something you do once and it’s over. It is something you do every time you play the guitar. You will still fine-tune to some degree, even if you turn the volume dial on the guitar. At different venues, a guitarist may have to dial in quite differently for each. That is part of the reason why venues do sound checks.
Like every sound, gear in one environment will not be the same in another. For example, your amp combo settings in a basement or attic will not sound the same when you put them on the stage. The only way to learn this is through experience, which ultimately means knowing your gear well, every piece of it. Also, in the world of electric guitars, a guitarist that has owned an amp and guitar for years can discover something new they didn’t before. Experiment and learn your equipment. You will know what you need to adjust when you understand your gear. When you spend enough time around enough equipment and know what to change, you will also become an experienced sound engineer. This means that electric guitar and sound engineering are inherently linked.
The electric guitar, by definition, involves sound engineering. Electric guitarists are not just guitar players. They don’t have to be outstanding sound engineers, but they have to be good enough to know much of what the person sitting behind the recording desk should know about guitar music. Many electric guitarists become guitar techs and sound engineers by always tinkering to sound good live or on a recording medium.
A guitar amplifier will have features to dial in a tone. That is every electrical guitarist’s direct encounter with sound engineering aside from the dials on their guitar. As we said, a great tone in a recording does not automatically mean it will sound the same live. There is a lot of variation along the recording chain. Just think of the differences between someone recording that live venue sound on their phone instead of an output from a mixing desk to a recording device with a sound engineer behind it. These are two different worlds of recorded sound. Good sound engineers know how to process sound. Do you want to sound like the guitar from someone’s phone recording[2] or a sound engineer’s rig? They will sound different despite recording the same source, although in very different ways. Also, as we have already discussed, how you playback those sounds matters. The soundscape for electric guitar is galactic in size.
1w tube is too much for a bedroom
Let us return to the problem a home player will have, as it is common. Due to human endurance and room size, what the player wants in this setting will be unbearable, likely upset more people than you think you are pleasing, and possibly bring law enforcement consequences for sound ordinance violations in populated areas. So why not just lower the volume, you ask? That is the Catch-22 in electric guitar. Tone is also a function of volume, especially for electric guitar tones. There are instances where volume isn’t as important, but turning up the volume can make all the difference in tone that a guitarist wants to achieve. Why should volume behave like that?
Try playing some music at home. Turn down the volume. Now roll the volume up more. You should hear more happening than just things getting louder. The sound fills out more, and sounds you didn’t recognize at first should appear. Volume at low levels is like a bottleneck for frequencies. The bottleneck expands as you up the volume, allowing more frequencies to get through. If you listen to only a single instrument playing, the tone changes similarly.
It is all a combination of physics and engineering. Amplification has to meet the demands of playing a sound to large crowds over a wide area. So engineers designed amps to run optimally at these higher volumes, focusing on getting good tones at those volume levels and less so at lower volumes. That is why so many well-known vintage amps work best at higher volumes. Things, however, have changed somewhat with modern amps. An understanding that we all aren’t playing in arenas full of screaming people, but maybe in small venues or even home settings, is there for players like us to take advantage.
Non-Master Volume (NMV) Amps
With many vintage amps, dialing in lower volumes is just an artifact of getting to the higher ones, and these amps aren’t designed for low-volume playing. Some older amp models sometimes have a single volume dial for volume and tone. That is how strongly correlated volume and tone are with these amps. They are sometimes called non-master volume (NVM) amps. Don’t try to make sense of that terminology for now, as some NMV amps have a volume dial labeled master. All it means is that these amps haven’t segregated the volume and tone into separate components, such as Master Volume and Gain/Pre-Amp Volume, which you will learn about shortly. Many modern amps will have this latter division. It offers you more ways to shape your tone outside of just volume.
Volume increases allow subtle sounds to be amplified and discovered where masked before. Sustain (a note ringing out over time once played) is a common characteristic of some guitar tones and is achieved by utilizing volume—the difference between no sustain and lots of sustain may be down to just a slight turn of the volume dial on your guitar or amp.
All of that should not be taken to mean that you should dial everything on max to get the best sound you can from a guitar amp or pedal. That will likely sound terrible in many cases due to the system running at its limits. Only some amplifiers are designed to be engaged this way fully. In most cases, max volume causes a sound called mud, meaning overly distorted to the point that the amp loses its character again. The volume you seek is usually a bit back from the max in these amps. A bit back from max can be the case for many dials on an amp, pedals, and guitars. On the contrary, a lot of gear also works quite nicely with the dials lower than you think, especially the gain.
This means some tones need somewhat middle to high volumes to obtain them. You will need to read about your amp model to know if a middle to high volume is required for what you need. It is more than likely for medium gain amps like Marshall Plexi and JCM amps. However, some high-gain modern amps like an EVH 5150, Peavey 6505, or a MESA Boogie Rectifier don’t require you to engage the volume as much to hear the tone you probably want. These high-gain amps will be known as ones you can play at lower volumes. If they need to be played at higher volumes to engage the amp, they will become known for it.
The problem is amps don’t advertise themselves like that. You must read reviews and what users say about each model to discover what volumes they need to operate optimally for your desired tone. An amp will likely be the most money you spend on gear, next to a guitar, so the more you read, the better your chances of interacting with the amp in the shop the way you need to.
It doesn’t matter if you are playing distorted electrical guitar tones or crystal clean tones, volume changes tone, and often it’s an essential feature in the sounds you like to hear. Not always, but quite often. When guitarists have experience recording conditions with volume constrained, and volume unleashed, the latter tends to appeal more. Recording studios have soundproof rooms that contain and record the audio created by such devastating loudness.
One Channel One Tone
One way to treat any amp is to imagine that one channel has been made to produce one great-sounding tone. Pretend for now that there is nothing else but that one great tone. The channel’s identity will indicate the dialing you are looking for. A clean channel will be a low gain medium volume setting. A crunch will be a middle gain, middle volume, or high-volume setting. Distortion will be higher gain and volume still. Finding distortion on a clean channel or clean on distortion is more advanced and likely outside the channel’s intended use. If you find one great tone on one channel, that is often all there is to that channel on the amp, which may surprise many people. This is one reason why it is common to find modern amps with multiple channels so that you are guaranteed multiple tones and not just one. There are ways around the limits of one sound, such as rolling back the volume on the guitar until the amp’s distortion sound cleans up, but it may not work with all pickup and rig combinations.
The point is that this approach helps you find the amp’s tone rather than some experiment in making the amp produce tones that are not intended. Advanced guitarists have found amazing tones outside of the channel intent by unusual dialings and pedal pushing, but anyone who finds the tone the amp was designed for will likely have a recognized sound compared to someone who doesn’t and ends up with something experimental. Some people might find that offputting in some way, especially other guitarists who understand rigs a bit better.
This is not any hard and fast scientific theory of amp tone. It is a method that works when you might find yourself lost in a sea of endless possibilities. Direct to amp, no pedals, and try to find what the engineers had in mind when they made that channel. Listening to tracks made with it helps a massive deal.
