Byrnesys Blabberings

In the last post I introduced a series on the electric guitar in contemporary worship, this post is a continuation of the series which looks at what affects the tone or sound of an electric guitar within a ’set up’, I also mentioned that I would start posting pictures of the ’set ups’ of guitarists who have played live or on worship CD’s whose tone you might want to replicate, for those of you who might be new to electric guitar set ups the reason you might want to see what gear people are using is primarily to be able to replicate it.

So for example when you hear a CD, and think "Wow, that guitar part sounds amazing" and then you find the tab, or work it out, and it doesn’t quite sound the same. Well apart from the fact that the CD was probably mastered with some very expensive equipment and perfectly mixed, the thing you are missing is the tone. Tone is best understood not simply as the moving axis between bass and treble but also that un-definable ‘voice’ of the riff or chord sequence.

There are 3 main things that define tone in a normal electric guitar set up:

1) The Amp: Now it might seem strange to you that the first thing on this list is the amp and not the guitar, but there is a good reason. Most guitarist will attribute up to about 80% of the tone to the amp and the reason is this, imagine you’re brain thinking of a song, now that is the guitar, it directs then it sends a signal, this signal is now transferred to your vocal chords and you sing. The amp is your vocal chords, it either vocalises the beauty of the song in you brain or it doesn’t sound anything like the song in your head and you sing badly.

2) Guitar: If we wanted to get very technical we could talk about the different things within the guitar that affect the tone such as, the pick-ups, necks, strings, electrics/switches, but for now guitar will suffice, it, using the analogy from before is the original creativity of the sound. Out of the list of things on the guitar that changes the tone, the most important are the pick-ups, many professional guitarist buy a guitar and the first thing they do is replace the pickups, because the pickups are the capacity to ‘pick-up’ the sound, they can colour it into a harsh mess or they can send sweet smooth tones for your amp to, err, amplify! Within our earlier analogy the pick ups are like the part of the body that transfers to info in our brain to our vocal chords, if it isn’t communicated or transmitted in a way that preserves the original tone to be amplified you might as well not be playing at all.

3) Effects: These are like hoops that you send the signal which comes from your guitar, through before it meets the amp (this is in a typical set up, there are also more complicated and alternative set ups which include the signal going to the amp and then back to the effects, but we wont deal with those for now). The effects can be found in a variety of forms, they can be inbuilt in your guitar, in the form of individual pedals, in multi-effects pedals, or in racks, but they all provide the same broad function which is to alter or colour the signal, which is the sound of the guitar before it is amplified.

Now you understand why these three things affect your tone, hopefully you’ll appreciate a point in the right direction from some gear photos as to what type of gear you need to create certain tones from CD’s or live worship bands you may have heard.

Related: Electric Guitar Worship Series Intro