i know talent plays a large part! but i was intrigued by one of Matt's posts about the sound of a sax.

bearing in mind that a strat is a plank of wood with electrics attached, strings can be duplicated make and gauge, and an amp is an electronic piece of kit and fx are reproducible, even if i match Hank's gear exactly i won't sound the same.

far fewer variables than an acoustic sax. so where does the magic come from?

As I understand it a lot is how hard you play. The most however is that pure sense of timing. It is how your fingers hit the fret board, where you strike the strings (toward the neck or back toward the bridge) and as I said just how hard you hit them. How you lift your fingers from a string or the vibrato you play with. Even the plectrum plays a part (how hard or soft). Even the age of the strings used when recording.

I’ve found two guitarists will get two different sounds playing the exact same setup and guitar.

Tony

agreed
I've heard my own guitar do things I can't make it do, just by handing it to someone else.
<grin>

The other thing I didn’t mention earlier but did in the post about sax is how hard one grips a plectrum can really change the tone of a guitar.

Tony

Aside from the knobs on both the guitar and amp being adjustable....

You are correct.

Tone is in the person and more specifically their hands and fingers.

I've witnessed 2 players with the same guitar and amp. One sounded ok... The other guy sat in on a few songs and the difference was dramatic. The first guy was at the table with us and commented how was the set in getting such a good tone..... Yes, it's the player.

Hi, Bob raised this some time back but here is something I never thought of and it does help. I looked at this chap set up Guitar Rig using two delays one set at 120ms the other at about 500ms it does in fact sound a lot like an echo using two heads missing the middle (something one did with the olde CopyCat leaving the middle head turned off).

Have a look https://youtu.be/17pRIIYGGj8

Maybe this will help a bit. I did similar in Overloud TH-U using two delay stomp boxes and it did in fact make a big difference.

Just a thought,

Tony

Hi

I have found that the Harmonix Memory toy a useful pedal
This is a bucket brigade delay Analog device and emulates a tape echo very well.
Delay up to 550ms
With careful adjustment you can even get it to do dotted eighth note delays, much used by David Gilmour (Pink Floyd)

Mike

Hi Mike, I think the trick here is not so much how long the delay takes but the fact it goes “da, tickety, da” rather that “da, da, da”. Basically you get a fast repeat followed by a space then two fast repeats then a fading space followed by two fast repeats.

With some of the old tape echo units the tape would record then play back over a series of play back heads. The sound could be achieved by turning off the second play back head for example.

If I’ve found the right video here is what I mean
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZhEHVuRbZc

I managed to get it using two simple digital delays in TH-U setting one at 120ms going into another at 500ms.

Tony

Edit: “Found the right video”. Oddly enough Hank Marvin used a similar way to describe it in the video above. In my previous post the video was doing the same thing.

Tony