What Is More Difficult To Achieve As A Player: Tone Or Technique

[Pope on a Rope]

Good technique is where good tone comes from. If a player's technique sucks their tone will will suck as well, regardless of the gear they are using.

[straycat113]

Well they feed of each other as having a killer vibrato which is probably the most personal aspect of your tone, comes from hours,days and years of practicing your vibrato technique. Yes you can plug into SRVs or Vanhalens gear but minus there chops where are you. Technique takes years and is really an infinite journey. Just give a guy with tremendous technique and one with limited a Martin acoustic-get the drift.

[foppy]

I really don't care or think that much about tone.

 

I think electric guitars tend to sound pretty good. As long as they're not too processed or effect-ridden.

 

Get a Ric or a Les Paul with reasonably good humbuckers or strat with good single coils or a Gretsch with dynas or hilos or filtertrons, or another of many other guitar/pickup combinations. Then plug it into a good tube amp with the knobs at twelve o'clock. Strum a chord. Listen to it. Then fool with the knobs a bit to give it what you think it needs. Strum the chord again. Voila! Good tone.

 

Yes, there's vibrato and attack and blah blah blah, but that's obviously technique, if anything is.

 

I agree that once you start to move up the gain ladder, it gets tougher to get a sound that doesn't sound like crap. So don't do that. And sure, if you want your tone to sound unlike anybody else and not like crap, well that can be difficult.

 

Guitar + good pickups + good amp + minimal processing = good tone. But again, I like how electric guitars sound, in general.

[exclamationmark]

From my perspective, getting the perfect tone will always be the hardest thing to achieve. I can sit in my bedroom and practice 14 hours a day if I wish. For me I find that creativity and technique form a fundamental symbiotic relationship. Creativity inspires me to play things far out of reach from my technical abilities and hence I learn. The same can also be said about technique; music will suddenly pop into my head after I learn how to achieve a specific sound.

I find practicing guitar and perfecting my technique to be relaxing. The same cannot be said about twisting an infinite number of knobs in the pursuit of some imaginary sound. I can always push myself to be better in some way in terms of musicianship but to have something perceived to be holding you back that is out of your control is ultimately frustrating. I think it's just the shear amount of possibilities that really bothers me about tone.

[BrokenFighter]

They go hand in hand. You have to have the technique that allows you to hear the good tone. If your technique leaves strings ringing while your playing, then your tone will sound muddy. Also, you have to learn the techniques of picking slightly harder or softer to get slightly different tones.

Both.

[Special J]

To me, tone is a combination of your sound (the gear you use) and your technique (picking style, vibrato, chording, etc.). As your technique improves, your tone naturally improves with it and you develop your "signature" tone. Your rig, of course, takes you the rest of the way. That's the way I see it. So, technique is what you need to develop, as well as choosing good gear, in order to achieve good tone. My vote is for technique.

[ashasha]

I'm not a huge fan of tone is in the fingers saying because it comes off as an absolute; it's a combination of a lot of factors. But yes your technique and style will impact your tone immensely.

 

But for me it's a lot simpler to go out and buy the 'tools' needed to facilitate your tone than it is to master the technique to deliver it.

 

I look at it like painting. You can go out and buy all the best paints, canvas, brushes and whatever else you need to do the job, but if you suck at painting it's going to look like crap. It may be shiney or have texture or whatever, but without the skillset it doesn't matter. Conversely a great painter could probably do something with a little kid's watercolor set that would be amazing to look at.

 

Anyone can buy the tools to do the job. Not everyone has the ability to do it well.

[DaveGrima]

Id say overall technique is harder to achieve but theres definitely something to the "tone is in the fingers" theory. Case in point: I started teaching this guy how to play guitar a few years back, and he went out and bought a Les Paul. Now i used to think his guitar sounded like {censored} for a long time until I played it. I could make it sound really good so I realized it was just him playing it that made it sound bad. I think having good chops, or a good "style" contibutes to having good tone.
Id rather hear Jimmy Page play thru a Squier and some cheap amp than some noob playing thru a brand new boutique hand wired bull{censored} amp and a custom shop Strat.

[Burgess]

Wanting to resurrect this thread after suffering through a horrendous tonal evening last night at an outdoor gig. I couldn't get a pleasant tone to save my life. Yet my technique was there the whole night. So I am once again going to say... Tone is more elusive and difficult to achieve than tone is. Tone is a fickle bitch! :-)

Outdoor is a whole different can of worms...

Basically because there's no reflection so your basic setup will rarely work. I have very few guitars that sound good outdoors and I tend to stick with those when faced with an outdoor gig. I also may add a little more reverb but too much is not a good thing either. A little less gain than usual may also help but the best thing you can do for your outdoor sound is just to execute as cleanly as you can.

What I've learned is that when your tone is not exactly what you want, clean execution can more than make up for it. Remember, tone is subjective and really what you are dialing up is simply something that makes you comfortable enough to play effectively. When you're playing in your comfort zone your audience will be receptive since you're playing well. They really don't care about the subtle nuances of the tone you've so carefully dialed up. What they care about is that you're playing your ass off!

So basically what I'm saying is, when your tone is not optimal just play your ass off and in the context of the bigger picture (the mix of the entire band) you will find that your tone is, for all intents and purposes, probably working quite well after all.

[mistersully]

interesting that technique is winning this poll by a mile over tone

yet i wonder the perecentage of people here who actually spend more time playing than talking about chasing tone (in all it's forms)

[Burgess]

interesting that technique is winning this poll by a mile over tone yet i wonder the perecentage of people here who actually spend more time playing than talking about chasing tone (in all it's forms)

 

 

I put in my time many years ago. Hours upon hours, for weeks, months and years. I don't worry about it so much anymore. My chops are what they are and I'm pleased with them. I can basically execute whatever it is I need to play. In terms of tone, by the same token, I'm pretty confident that I can make just about any rig sing.

 

Interestingly enough my first instrument was an alto sax. Any horn player knows that your embouchure and the sound you produce is of utmost importance. When I started playing guitar that stayed with me and it simply translated to the manner in which I struck the strings to produce sound or as we commonly put it, execution.

[cephus]

Since this is mostly a guitar-owner discussion board where people discuss purchased and desired gear more than anything else, it makes sense that everyone would think that you buy tone.

Tone to me is not so much what comes out of the speakers as what comes from the strings. If you don't have the proper touch, the tone at its essence will not be good. You can hide it with lots of gain and outboard processing, but the tone starts at the sound from the strings.

I have seen lots of guys who couch pick all day and can shred like animals in Samash on saturday afternoon. But when they play a single note, you can hear this shaky, pathetic weakness in the pad of their finger. I have played with many guys whose vibrato is thin and fast and unnatural. Some guys pick so hard that every note plunks like a banjo.

So, the poll is flawed. Technique and tone are the same thing. I've never picked up a guitar I couldn't get a decent tone on, unless it was some $39 short-scale student acoustic or had something really wrong with it. I have a squier mini strat I bought as a prop and i have gigged with it. That thing is a total piece of {censored}.

[ashasha]

Since this is mostly a guitar-owner discussion board where people discuss purchased and desired gear more than anything else, it makes sense that everyone would think that you buy tone. Tone to me is not so much what comes out of the speakers as what comes from the strings. If you don't have the proper touch, the tone at its essence will not be good. You can hide it with lots of gain and outboard processing, but the tone starts at the sound from the strings. I have seen lots of guys who couch pick all day and can shred like animals in Samash on saturday afternoon. But when they play a single note, you can hear this shaky, pathetic weakness in the pad of their finger. I have played with many guys whose vibrato is thin and fast and unnatural. Some guys pick so hard that every note plunks like a banjo. So, the poll is flawed. Technique and tone are the same thing. I've never picked up a guitar I couldn't get a decent tone on, unless it was some $39 short-scale student acoustic or had something really wrong with it. I have a squier mini strat I bought as a prop and i have gigged with it. That thing is a total piece of {censored}.

 

That actually is closer to what my opinion is. You can buy the tools necessary to do whatever you need to do. But if you don't have the skills to use them whatever you try to make is going to suck.

 

I suppose that is flawed.

 

But conversely I know that I can get a great tone out of my gear right now playing simple stuff. When I try to play something more technical it falls apart and sounds like {censored}. So for me it's easier to get a tone that I like; it's harder to communicate my ideas because of technical shortcomings.