Analysis of good tone

[Peter C]

[Frank67]

That is about the nicest sound and playing I ever heard of Pat Martino. Thanks for sharing!

[Encinitastubes]

I'm always amazed at hoe different my tone is between my garage and my living room. Same amp, same settings, but totally different sound. Then, when I play with other instruments with different cancellations, totally different again. I wish I could take my living room with me wherever I play!!

[Dutchbopper]

This discussion we had at RMMGJ several times over the years. Probably all good players sound good but, suprisingly, many guys at that jazz guitar newsgroup thought that Joe Pass' early sound was probably no 1 in the straight ahead jazz tone department of all time. Maybe because it's such a classic jazz guitar sound.

The albums named were "For Django" "Joy Spring" "Intercontinental."

All early sixties.

But, granted, there's many tone monsters nowadays.

Regards,

Dick

[mr. beaumont]

I always have a tough time when people say they like Joe Pass' tone, but these are good examples.

Overall though, I find Joe's tone was very inconsistent throughout his career, and often bordered on terrible.

[Dutchbopper]

All you say is true. We are talking about early Joe Pass. He sounded fabulous on the 1964 albums. And listen to Intercontinental. Beautiful sound.

Later Joe could sound pretty tinny on that Ibanez Joe Pass guitar (that he never liked). Also, he just plugged in whatever was available live. I don't think he was very concerned with his sound in general.



Regards,

Dick

I always have a tough time when people say they like Joe Pass' tone, but these are good examples.

Overall though, I find Joe's tone was very inconsistent throughout his career, and often bordered on terrible.

[docbop]

I remember Joe Pass from my high school days hearing about a great guitarist in the Synanon jazz band and hearing Joe many times around Los Angeles. I always liked Joe's sound except his first Virtuoso album that was too janglely sounding to me with the acoustic sound of his 175 mixed in. Joe's live sound was pretty consistent and most the time was his 175 and a Polytone. The last time I was him he did use his Ibanez not sure what amp, but his sound was still pretty much the same. I think the inconsistency was Joe would let recording engineer experiment he just wanted the notes captured.

[Chimera1to1]

Waveforms would be nice. I can remember a few misspent sessions with access to recording oscilloscopes and waveform analyzers with just enough experience with them to be dangerous. A 75 Les Paul in my lap and tube amp at my side, we were looking for the perfect distortion. As you might expect, this proved to be elusive. You can drill sown to every bit of the waveform though and if you knew how to extract what was 'warmth', 'stringy', etc. it might even prove useful.

Still, and paradoxically, I would describe this problem as both too simple and too complex for these tools. An expert on human hearing might explain some of the differences in how we hear things versus pure vibration. It's complex and interesting stuff. An experienced guitar play will tell you to experiment and use your ears and save the test equipment lease fees..

I get that Spook and, I was wrong! The thread was good sounds not good tones.....but it is a thread that is currently 42 pages long....

So have a look at this please

this shows graph type images of the effects of EQ. Now I can appreciate that looking for analysis of perfect distortion is going to be very complex. But why is looking at the waveforms of clean jazz guitar not going to yield similarities between those artists on those 42 pages?

I'm sure amp manufacturers analyse this stuff. Put it this way if I rang Fender and said, "Hey this amp sounds crap!" I can guarantee the response would not be....."I'm terribly sorry Sir! It's your fingers!"

[feet]

we talking solo or in a band? live or studio? on stage or on your couch?

i'd love to hear some of this slightly overdriven tone from way back, if anyone can provide some examples. from digging into a non master volume amp.

[Chimera1to1]

we talking solo or in a band? live or studio? on stage or on your couch?

i'd love to hear some of this slightly overdriven tone from way back, if anyone can provide some examples. from digging into a non master volume amp.

All of the above, but I suppose for simplicity's sake it's easiest to analyse solo stuff. I don't know how you can seperate tracks from wav files but I'm sure it can be done.

I've downloaded Sonic Visualiser, its free, and started recording some samples in Reaper.

SV gives an spectrographic output like you see on Soundcloud samples. You can stretch the axis out and see more detail. I like the slightly overdriven sound too