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Author Topic:  Tone and effects on your playing
Richard Tipple


From:
Ohio, USA
Post  Posted 26 Dec 2017 10:05 am    
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Does your tone effect your playing ? It does me a little. Although it should not, it seems to do so a little. If the tone is not what I want it seems I make more clams than usual LOL. My right hand is moving around the neck trying to find a better sweet spot or I may be picking harder or fiddling around with the Mids & on & on Confused

Although Im happy with my tone 90% of the time, there are those times when Im searching and tweaking & making,,clams Sad
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Brett Day


From:
Pickens, SC
Post  Posted 26 Dec 2017 12:30 pm    
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Sometimes tone affects my playing if the amplifier is on the wrong setting. The tone I like is no effects and no reverb or echo. I like my steel to have a clear sound with no echo or reverb, so I don't really use effects
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Henry Matthews


From:
Texarkana, Ark USA
Post  Posted 26 Dec 2017 10:30 pm    
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It sure does or does me anyway. If my tone is bad to my ears, it takes a toll on my playing. Usually, i never touch my amp and my ears will finally adapt. There is one place here in town play that just zaps my tone. I've tried different amps amd settings but still sucks. I know it has to do with the accoustics of building but it just can't be fixed so I do best I can.
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Chris Templeton


From:
The Green Mountain State
Post  Posted 27 Dec 2017 2:18 am    
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I think of reverb as adding "distance" and musicians in a session will often ask the engineer to add reverb to their instrument in the headphone mix (not being printed) to give this distance to their playing, giving more "perspective", as well as how things will "sit" in the mix.
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Tony Prior


From:
Charlotte NC
Post  Posted 27 Dec 2017 4:55 am    
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My take would be that really bad tone is a distraction. Reasonable consistent tone allows for consistent playing. Really awesome tone (in my mind) allows for hearing things differently and may cause said player to stretch beyond the normal phrasing. Such as working the sweet spot on the instrument. When it reveals itself, you know it.

The thing about it though is we should be close to consistent tone on each gig and not trying to reinvent the wheel. Sure a few MID changes to compensate for the room or stage but starting from scratch each gig seems out of the ordinary. That would drive me crazy ! Sad
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Fred Treece


From:
California, USA
Post  Posted 27 Dec 2017 11:09 am    
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I agree with everything Tony said.

Tone absolutely affects how I play, and how I feel about the music being played. One of my big “discoveries” was how the orientation of a speaker cabinet could change the sound I was hearing. Now I go out to just about any gig with the same amp settings, and spend more time figuring out how to set up and aim the speaker than I do fiddling with knobs.

Other than that, I have a great amp and great instruments plugged into them and very effective effects that I enjoy experimenting with, and if I can’t make myself happy with all that then there is always the Attitude Knob. Winking
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John Brock


From:
Xenia, Ohio
Post  Posted 29 Dec 2017 4:10 pm     Tone
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Maybe I'm out of line here, but I always think there are 10 stettings for tone.5 on each hand. The best players could always make anything sound like the best...jus my pinion.
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Ian Rae


From:
Redditch, England
Post  Posted 30 Dec 2017 1:00 am    
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John, that's true of the great players but I need help from my gear!
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David Mason


From:
Cambridge, MD, USA
Post  Posted 1 Jan 2018 7:33 pm    
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The entire Q's about reverb & delay - the short ones, where you're shooting for a doubling effect, 30ms or so? This is absolutely BEASTLY if you're not accomodating to the ROOM. And there's this certain... correlation of an age group of players (me) and an interior design phase which resulted in a bunch of linoleum floors, plasticized varnishy cheap veneer wall treatments and plastic ceiling tiles being thought of as the ideal acoustic treament for the reverb tunnels called "my gigs." I've got a tiny rep as something of a psycho about this, but there's a certain kind of (soft-ish?) foam ceiling tiles that still have a hard plastic outer side - possibly easier to clean the vomit off your ceilings? To MY (psycho) ear, it does a great job of sucking up your upper mids - 2K to 4K, say - but still reflecting back a full-tilt tin-tone trebly major ickness in the highs ABOVE 6K, like. (Excuse my overly technical terms.) But: upper mids = Yay!; treble tin-tone = ick! It's not really hard to EQ out, but you have to HEAR it and diagnose it.

I actually consider the most important part of setting up to be: play a simple, pretty RECORDING through your amps AND PA and whatever else might be inflicted on your patients. And go out 30 feet and 50 feet and LISTEN to what's zooming out of your stuff. Even when you (mentally) accomodate some mega-tonnage of meat absorbing the worst of it... god, it's easy to figure out why so many bands sound awful! If you're really in one of those plastic-lined tunnels, you can do everything possible to avoid "reverb" and still sound like anti-music. Drag your singer and drummer out there too, yikes.

My fave test recording is some version of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for violin, one dude with a fiddle cranking away in the crucial middy frequencies. It's simple, you know what it's supposed to be like, it's pretty... except... Shocked Shocked Shocked And nowadays with the phones and baby disc recorders and all, you can listen to yourself even. And what's wrong(-est) with the MAJORITY of quicky band recordings? REVERB-ERB-ERB-ERB-ERB...
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Kevin Fix

 

From:
Michigan, USA
Post  Posted 9 Jan 2018 7:57 pm     Tone
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If you are looking for a way to get that perfect tone check out Paul Franklins new "Modern Music Masters". He will show you how to dial in that great tone we all love. You won't find a better way to dial your amp in.
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