Does anyone here besides me not care about tone

[snowaie]

when listening to records? It just doesn't bother me much

[Elias Graves]

What's a record?

 

EG

[Bro Blue]

What's "tone" ?

[Oldskool Texas]

I mostly only notice tone when it's bad.

[Chad4751]

 

I mostly only notice tone when it's bad.

 

 

This.

[smorgdonkey]

Often it is the song that matters most. The production can be 'crap', the drum sound can be 'crap', the timing can be 'crap', etc. It comes down to the song.

 

The thing is that if you have a great song and you also have great tone, great drum sound, etc. then it tends to make the entire appreciation of the song more profound.

[Willyguitar]

I'm an advocate of deliberately crap guitar tone.

 

Crap guitar tone can sound very cool in the right context. I can think of quite a few Beatles guitar breaks that, standing alone, probably sound a bit terrible, but they just work perfectly in the context of the song. The first Clash album - some terrible sounds there on some brilliant songs. Admittedly, also some brilliant sounds.

 

On the other hand, a lot of what most others would consider to be great guitar 'tone', I find to be over-produced over-processed and cliched.

 

I like to hear the rattle of strings not properly anchored, some skidding up the fretboard, or even downright mud...

 

... which perhaps demonstrates that I do care about tone!?

[clay sails]

I very rarely think that someone else's tone is crap.

 

Tone is something I obsess about mainly in my own playing, because I want it to sound a certain way.

[dattebayo1]

As a steadfast Pixies fan, some part of me must not care too much i suppose

[BoneNut]

Only thing I know is that what sounds great here at my house, doesn't work at all when I get together with friends to jam. Completely different settings.

[Bro Blue]

 

Only thing I know is that what sounds great here at my house, doesn't work at all when I get together with friends to jam. Completely different settings.

 

 

 

So true, so true. When the space changes everything changes. Add people into that space and it changes yet again. Put it context of a band and it changes yet again.

[Roy]

meh. i use what i got. ain't great but that's not gonna stop me.

[BG76]

All you need to know about tone is right here.

 

Eric Johnson would kill himself to get this tone.

 

RQcQD35Zyu8

[etawful]

 

 

 

Not to mention his vocal range makes Freddie Mercury look like a hack.

[BoneNut]

 

 

 

Holy smokes!

 

I'm no greyhound but I now understand the need for belly cuts.

 

I'm surprized... No, I'm {censored}ing amazed people can be so thick skinned. Doesn't this guy watch his own videos? Doesn't he have a friend that could offer constructive criticism?

 

I never though I'd get a chance to say this but {censored}, even I can play and sing better than that.

[Brewski]

I find my tone improves as my drinking increases.

 

I get really great tone between shot 7 and shot 14 - after that I just wake up the next day and don;t remember a thing.

[Elias Graves]

Tone by the bottle.

 

EG

[Grantus]

I care about tone to a point. There's a point where this endless search for the perfect tone gets to seem a little masturbatory.

[theManfromAlabam]

 

I mostly only notice tone when it's bad.

 

 

+ 2

 

I wish I could sing:facepalm:

[GAS Man]

Nah, I'm into tone. The more I've learned to play over the years, the more I appreciate the tone of others. Most music listeners just think it's "plug and play", I listen and think "how the f@#k did they do that?

 

And then there's folks that I admire greatly but didn't always like their tone, like some of Roy Buchanan's piercing bridge tele tone or even, dare I say, some of Hendrix' harsh screechy tones. Love the players, but fatigue sets in.

 

And then you you hear something like Slash's November Rain solo and you know there are Guitar Tone Gods

 

[YOUTUBE]HdUFmQk7gm0[/YOUTUBE]

 

Or even further out there, the tone that Tak Matsumoto gets from his LP on either of these two

 

Koi Uta

[YOUTUBE]BPWMpcNbXTY[/YOUTUBE]Amazing violin-like tone

 

Or here his is copping a Gary Moore tone/tune but with a bit more polish.

[YOUTUBE]0auUw19cgQg[/YOUTUBE]

This last clip being my fave of the 3

[jamdogg]

It's largely about tone. Sorry.....

[metallica_00]

Luckily good players generally have good tone. But it definitely bothers me when an album is poorly recorded (in general, not just guitar) and/or has bad and fatiguing guitar tones.

 

Look, most of us are tone geeks, spending time on forums just to talk about guitars and amps...it's not surprising that good tone is an important thing among this demographic.

[Tubefox]

 

Luckily good players generally have good tone. But it definitely bothers me when an album is poorly recorded (in general, not just guitar) and/or has bad and fatiguing guitar tones.

 

 

I'm cool with bad recording if it fits the music. For example, it would be kind of weird if early hardcore albums had good recording quality. Transilvanian Hunger by Darkthrone (One of my favorite albums) is truly made by it's primitive production, without which it's atmosphere would be totally different.

 

On the other hand, the one tone that will make me stop listening faster than anything else is the super-gain, produced way too loud tone that's been showing up in modern metal lately. Metallica's Death Magnetic is a good example.

 

It just makes my ears hurt.

[foppy]

I don't think or talk about tone in the way that is the norm at places like this.

 

A guitar with good pickups plugged into a pretty good tube amp will tend to sound pretty good.

 

It's when you start adding layers of gain and processing and effects that you have to start worrying about what's getting lost. And I don't listen to that kind of music much.

[Cyprusg]

Tone matters but it's not the type of thing non-musicians think about, they don't care whether your guitar is 2000 bucks or 50 bucks. I'm a tone nazi but I know that's just the result of playing guitar for many years, before I started playing I didn't care about the differences in a Gibson or a Fender or what guitar pedals someone was using, it was just a matter if I liked the song or not.

 

Really it's still the same way today, when I listen to something on the radio most of the time I can tell you what kind of guitar they're using, but it's not like it matters to me unless it's so bad it's distracting. But could songs sound better if different gear was used? Probably, but it's hardly ever a make or break. On the list of factors that make up your sound, guitar tone is probably near the bottom of the list. Speaker system, the mix, room acoustics, bass response, etc... matter a lot more to how an audience perceives your music than guitar tone does.

 

So in my opinion it matters, most of it is on a subconscious level and guitar tone is less important to the overall quality of the sound.