Own Your Tone

Great tone is about sound, isn’t it? Or is it about how your gear responds to your touch? Actually, it’s both. In this month’s cover feature, we explain how to unlock the full potential of your gear by tailoring it like a Savile Row suit to your style of playing

- Jamie Dickson

Guitar players often talk about achieving the ‘sound in your head’. We all know what they mean. Inside every guitarist’s mind is an archive of beautiful, soul-satisfying sounds that are based on some of the world’s great recordings. But here’s the thing – tone, as experienced by the guitarist doing the playing, isn’t just a sound. Every time you play a note, there’s a feedback loop going on between your gear, your fingers, and your mind.

We’ve probably all had a moment during a gig when you just aren’t feeling good about your sound. The result? You don’t play as well because you just aren’t getting into it. But if your ears are hearing something they like, you start expressing yourself with more conviction. So far, so good.

But there’s more to it than that. It’s not just the sound but the feel of how the notes come out that gets our creative juices flowing: some players’ styles require a fast attack and for each note to be crisp and clearly defined for them to give their best. Others, like the old-time blues guys, prefer lots of sag and crunch. It’s like the difference between drawing with a crisp ‘H’ pencil and a soft, smudgy ‘B’. You can draw wonderful pictures of both types, but they suit different types of artists.