Hello PG Forums,

What is your favorite tone of Guitar? I recently rediscovered an old favorite from Chino (lead singer of Deftones) side project Team Sleep. That guitar in the beginning is superb.


What is your favorite guitar tone?

One of my favorite guitar tones is any song Derek Trucks plays and, remarkably, he uses no pedals. I think I recall him saying he didn't want anything between him and his amp.

Derek - Midnight in Harlem

FWIW on some of our blues projects for which we didn't collaborate with a forum guitar player I rendered a blues RT solo "direct input" and applied a Logic Pro amp sim called "Black and Blue Distortion." Not being an electric guitar player I've had to learn a few fundamentals from electric playing friends since the amp sim allows many options on the head unit, cabinet choice and virtual mic placement, etc. It's been fun and feedback from those same friends has been positive. Very old dog and new tricks

Bud

There are many great guitar tones out there but for me this is the tone that I really like:

Johnny Smith

A Strat plugged directly into a Fender Twin Reverb with no effects.

Best daggoned sound in the whole wide world.

Mario,

I think you made a mistake.

I am pretty sure you meant Johnny Marr from the Smiths right?

Isn't this the link you meant to paste?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnpILIIo9ek

Nope, I meant Johnny Smith. I love pure full bodied jazz guitar tones.

Like I said there are a lot of excellent guitar tones out there. BB King, Stevie Ray, Albert King, Chet Atkins, Tony Mattola, George Benson, Zappa, and the list goes on and on. But I always come back to the pure jazz guitar tone.

Hey guys,

One of my favourite tones is Jonsi from Icelandic band Sigur Ros. He's famous for playing his guitar with a cello bow, then soaking the signal in reverb to get some really bizarre sounds. It can produce some really nasty screeches and also some nice shimmery ambience, a great example of just how versatile an instrument the guitar can be. The guitar in this video really gets going at about 1:20.



Also a big fan of a nice Telecaster into an old Fender amp, pushed just to the point of breaking with a tube screamer with a touch of spring reverb. Simple, proven and oh so effective.

So... I could name a bunch of guitarists with good tone... but none of that really matters.

So, I thought.... what about MY tone? I like the tone I get most of the time and if I don't, I make the adjustments to get it right.

I like a crunchy but smooth kind of tone.

I think this sample is one of my personal favorites. Kinda on the gritty side in a sweet way.

Ought to count for something in the solo which starts at 2:29 into the video.

It was straight guitar into my POD2 by Line 6 IIRC. Normally I don't like to use any FX stomp boxes but here recently I have become a convert to a certain smooth booster.... but this one was straight to the POD from my 69 SG.

I like how the solo builds in intensity as it progresses, very smooth!

So many. Almost too hard to list out. Here's a few from the top of my head across a variety of genres:
Van Halen in Ain't Talkin Bout Love
Knopfler in Brothers in Arms
Dean Cab For Cutie in El Dorado
The Edge in a whole bunch of songs with the dotted 8th delays

I will add to my list

Death Cab?

You have a lot of similar interests to me. I like all of those.

Hard to beat Link Wray, in my opinion. Excellent use or reverb/delay, and just enough distortion to give the guitar some bite.

https://youtu.be/8qcQ5yx9O_A

https://youtu.be/eJ9-3OMxf0k

Absolutely agree with you except I have never heard of no:3 until now

I add Queen and Brian May in Killer Queen, or in fact any solo by Dr May.
Gary Moore in Parisienne Walkways
Hank Marvin in any Shadows song
Carlos Santana in Samba Pa ti
Roger Mcguinn and his 370-12 Rickenbacker 12 string, in say Tambourine Man.


Alyn

Way too many -- actually I don't have THE favorite guitar sound. There are some exceptional players who achieve(d) a great sound more than once.

(Listing in no particular order, and others have been mentioned already)
Les Paul
Jørgen Ingman
Peter Green
Wes Montgomery
B. B. King
Paco de Lucia
Arthur Smith
Django Reinhardt
...

Yes! Oops. Dang typing on a phone!

Here's another set that have come to mind:
Neal Schon in Lights
Nancy Wilson in Barracuda
Steve Lukather in Rosanna.
Andy Summers in Message In A Bottle
Stevie Ray Vaughan in , well everything he ever played

Somebody mentioned they hadn't heard Death Cab For Cutie
Here's a link to the specific song I mentioned

http://youtu.be/BAdwiRPxFuc

Great hook. Great tone and effects

SPAM clean up in aisle 3.....

I love when Ronnie Earl turns down the volume and really lets his fingers pull out the tone of his Strat through a Twin or Deluxe Reverb.

Here's one of my favorite versions of Monk's classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twXcZIygbY

Frank

Electric: Joe Pass
Acoustic: Oscar Castro Neves

Hi ChinCH, all great guitar tones! - Digital Amp simulations have become quite popular. Have you heard about Sansamp? if not you can learn more about it here: http://www.tech21nyc.com/products/sansamp/

Joe, sans amp products are analog only, if I'm not mistaken. No digital amp simulation in their entire product lineup.

Thank you for reading the post, Joe. No I didn't know that yet. And as rockstar_not writes, there are "only" analog simulators. By description of the products, those that I'm interested in are sold out.

But guitar tone is not only the amp. Guitar tone is
the body of the guitar,
the gauge and the material of the strings,
the pickup or the combination of pickups that you use,
the qualitiy of your fingers or the pick,
it is the force that you use to treat the strings (do you hit them hard or do you caress them -- as the extremes),
and it is the settings of the different knobs available to you.

Actually, I'd risk a bet that you can't figure out the setup if you listen to guitar tones without knowing who plays which instrument, using which amp, and so on. (Caveat: The songs that are played are not the well known recordings.) Here I gave some examples on a different question where the tone of the guitar might mislead you about the actual instrument played. Have somebody play that for you so that you only listen but don't see player and instrument and take your guesses.

I have a real soft spot for Fripp's tone in this video, it's so violin-like.

Yeah, Fripp has some very memorable sounds.
Belew had some cool ones too.


Heroes is another of Fripps memorable sounds.

I have a preset in my Zoom G5 which yields this tone spot on with a neck humbucker selected.

Here's a quick little example I made tonight using this preset - of course more practice is needed with such a high gain setting.

https://soundcloud.com/rockstar_not/fripp-example

The tone is only part of Fripp's sound. It's also his interval choices which are at play.

Yes they had some memorable sounds. Don't forget about Jeff Beck!

Wow, this sounds great. Thanks for putting this together! And you're totally right about how important the intervals are, he nails a lot of sympathetic resonance with the distortion overtones.

The Bowie cover? From Heavy Construktion (or whatever the name is)? Y'know, I'm actually not too familiar with it. I should check it out!

But goodness me, who could forget:



The distorted bass that starts up about halfway through... Chills!

Hi Rockstar_Not, There is a plugin version of a Sansamp that is included with certain Avid products. I used it while running Pro tools 8. I found the tones from it are quite solid! Check it out here: http://www.avid.com/plugins/sansamp-psa1

Did not know about that. I was just referring to their website content. Pretty ironic that there is a plugin version of their analog amp simulators (which are great products by all accounts). I'm a huge amp simulation fan; have been for over 10 years.

Pretty much anything by Duane Eddy,

++ HERE ++ is a video of him on David Letterman.

That was the stock patch. I would probably change the noise gate threshold higher to get rid of some of the scratchy sounds.

That's a great vid, Jim, but did you mean to link to this one?



Which is also great!

Thank you for the link correction Will B.