+++ The One Thing Every Influential Guitar Tone Has In Common +++

The one thing every influential guitar tone has in common...

A great guitarist you want to sound like.

Wish: Man if I could just get that tone then I'd sound like________!

Fact: No you won't!

Just develop your own tone(s) and quit trying to emulate some famous guitarist. YMMV

Amen!

You're never gonna duplicate it anyway.

In another board someone asked about getting the sound that Santana gets for "Black Magic Woman."

The best response was:

"He has the money to throw at his music to get the sound that he wants. We don't."

Best response I have ever heard.

...Deb

So once I was in a praise and worship band and they brought in this guy to give us a master class in guitar playing.

It appeared that he knew how to play one chord.

I think it was a G5.

But he had a pedal board with literally like 60 or 70 pedals on it and the whole attitude that you would expect with a person who has such a setup. He also had a shaved head and a partial goatee I think, if that helps you to picture it.

It all sounded incredibly horrible as you can imagine. But he was quite convinced that he could teach us to play the unicorn sound if we would only pay attention to his massive pedal board.

He got on to the part about playing dotted eighths. I told him I didn't need a pedal to play dotted eighths.

He said that was impossible and how did I do it. I said I did it with my fingers. He didn't believe me and passed me his guitar and told me to do it in front of everyone.

So I play dotted eighths manually. He stared in amazement and said it was some kind of trick and I was fooling him and he didn't believe it but I needed to use a dotted eighths pedal.

I got up and walked out.

Tone doesn't really come from a pedal board or any other magical trick, and if you want to mic your amp great but there are other ways to get tone without mic-ing your app. There are a million ways to get tone without mic-ing your amp. Sometimes I mic my amp and sometimes I don't.

95% of tone comes from your fingertips and your technique.

And in my humble opinion the best tone that's ever been created is a Stratocaster plugged directly into a twin reverb with no effects whatsoever.

But you have to know how to play.

Not buying that for a second. True, the gear has something to do with it, but mostly it's the player.

A good player can make anything sound good. It doesn't matter what gear a poor player has, he will still sound like a poor player.

Amen brother.

Spoken like a true guitar player.