What makes tone warm vs. cold, sterile and metallic?

[Frank67]

But mid content also plays a role, right?
Those heavy metal tones are seriously mid scooped and bass heavy.
jazz the opposite ... Archtops are pretty 'middy' isn't it?
that and the overtone thing ...

AlsRan - these Marshalls JVM's are serious rock machines. My band colleague has a 205 and sounds awesome (great player too). I have profiled it and that is my main tone with the rock band. Isn't the 410 incredibly loud?

[AlsoRan]

But mid content also plays a role, right?
Those heavy metal tones are seriously mid scooped and bass heavy.
jazz the opposite ... Archtops are pretty 'middy' isn't it?
that and the overtone thing ...

AlsRan - these Marshalls JVM's are serious rock machines. My band colleague has a 205 and sounds awesome (great player too). I have profiled it and that is my main tone with the rock band. Isn't the 410 incredibly loud?

That Kemper is something else! Here, you have the JVM410, and you don't have to worry about weight, tubes, or anything other than the original cost of the device. So nice.


And yes it is loud and I love it for my non-Jazz tones.

[Frank67]

Yeah, the Kenper is awesome - small portable, all those original sounds at any volume, noise free, tons of nice effects, plenty of output options ... Could not be happier.

[Jabberwocky]

Heavy metal is a genre, not a tone. Some of the best Teutonic heavy metal like MSG have warm fat distorted tones that keeps you head-banging. A huge part of the heavy rock-metal genre came from the tubed amps overdriving into euphonic even order harmonic distortion. The other thing is this: the axe associated commonly with heavy metal is a humbuckered Gibson Les Paul Custom or Flying V., hardly ever a single-coil Strat. It's that even-order harmonics-favouring Gibson humbucker sound.

Warm tones are like drinking full cream full fat milk. Cold tones are like drinking skim milk. Warm goes with Fat. Cold goes with Thin. Warm goes with Gold. Thin goes with Metallic.

These are the word associations that audiophiles play. It is the vocabulary of subjective audio reviewing that is scoffed at by the measurement-über-alles-double-blind school.

Audiophiles get some bad rap because of the silly price tags of audio gear for their fix. That is a matter of finances. If you love music as captured on a good slab of Blue Note vinyl, Coltrane's The Love Supreme, for instance, go visit a pretentious audio salon with some tube gear, Audio Research Corp.., David Berning Audio, Conrad-Johnson, Jadis, VTL, etc..and a good turntable/deck with some good British loudspeakers and you will have an ear-opening experience. It will be as close as you can possibly get to hearing John Coltrane play live today. If you don't get goosebumps and go, Wow, you are possibly dead or deaf.

The price tags though are on another plane of reality. Whether you see any dollar-value in it or not is up to your personal hierarchy of values. Sometimes, it is like arguing with the Heritage guy why a Gibson archtop is worth so much more than their axe. When they don't see it, they just don't see it. I like broccoli, cooked with steam and then given a stir-fry with garlic and olive oil. Tell that to someone who hates broccoli that the cruciferous veg tastes great.

[vernon]

This thread is hilarious!! What fun!

[lammie200]

...3rd order sounds less harmonically pleasing.

...tubes generally produced even-order harmonics, solid-state tends to produce odd-order harmonics, hence the tubes sounded "warmer."...

I have to admit that I haven't performed extensive research on the subject, but from what I know odd order harmonics tend to perpetuate while even order harmonics tend to cancel themselves out. Hence listening to transistors all day can be fatiguing while listening to tubes much less so. I think that total harmonic distortion is unrelated, however.

Edit: Greentone, I didn't see your link. That may explain things better. I will watch it later when I am at a computer with sound.

[christianm77]

I have quite a few metal guys say that you need mids to cut through, in fact. Dimebag nonwithstanding...

I have no idea what a warm sound is. I suspect it has a lot to with the player, how much expression they put into their playing, etc.

I would describe some players as 'cold' or more likely 'cool' - this is not always a bad thing. Sometimes I really like it. I find Adam Rogers straight jazz playing as very 'cool' - and this is something I really like about his playing. His tone - 335 through a Fender Deluxe Reverb IIRC, may have something to do with it. I like the somewhat cool 'scooped' sounds of the Fender blackface amps, as most jazzers do... But Wes I'm sure could make the same set up sound 'warm.'

I find the tones of a lot of the contemporary guys as 'cool', 'detached', 'distant' perhaps 'cosmic.' It's definitely a vibe.

[mr. beaumont]

Love 'em or hate 'em, Metallica's "Load" re-introduced mids to the metal world.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

Setting warm/cold aside, I have an odd/even question: If tubes add even harmonics and transistors add odd, what's to stop modeling amps from adding even harmonics. Oh yeah, nothing

[Jabberwocky]

There are solid-state transistor amps which do the even-order harmonics pretty well. Check out single-ended transistor pure Class-A amps which are based on MOSFETs. Check out battery-powered amps and preamps which are relatvely free from powerline AC distortion and noise.

Vacuum tubes due to their glass envelopes do produce microphonics even on a very subtle level. These microphonics impart an upper midrange sheen to voices and instruments with strong upper midrange such as the saxes or horn instruments. When reproduced these microphonics impart a sense of "aliveness" to the music. You got to hear it for yourself. It is very different from a digital modeller or solid-state amp imparting artificially generated even-order harmonics. For one, how far up the even-harmonics order do you wish to go for simulation or artificially generated? Second, naturally occurring even-order harmonics modulate each other. They are not always so nicely stacked on top of each other. This is what timbre is all about.

Psychoacoustics of the ear-brain and how it processes sound is not an exhausted field. There was a study decades ago that the facial bones respond to vibrations to enable us to sense sound up to 50KHz and above. The accepted range of hearing is set at 20Hz-20KHz.

I don't pretend it is scientific, of course. Based on my observation and futzing around with tube or valve audio for the last 30 years with some solid-state thrown in. As in anything subjective, your mileage may vary.

I just now stumbled across a 10-foot pair of speaker cables retailing for the price of $52000.00. Yeah, fifty-two thousand US dollars. It strains the incredulity of even a seasoned audiophile like myself. It borders on phantasmogorical. That is why I got out of the hobby. Running a 30-year old pair of reconditioned valve amps into zipcord 12-gauge copper cables. Good enough then. Good enough now.

[lammie200]

...It borders on phantasmogorical...

We were suppose to be close to that border when we went to Disneyland last summer. Wasn't all its cracked up to be IMHO

[goldenwave77]

I never got seriously into the audiophile thing but when I bought a decent set of stereo speakers, Missions, almost 35 yrs. ago, which were British-made 2 ways, with a Thiele-design ported bass reflex, I was attracted to their relative "even-ness" of sound reproduction.

Many, many speakers of that day were sold because they had "pop" to them....which really meant exaggerated bass and treble...Missions and B & W's, and Celestions, all British-made were much more neutral. (Funny how Celestion guitar speakers are considered much more "color-adding"---essentially rock n' roll-y speakers....different tool, I guess, for a different job.)

The speakers with a lot of "pop" sounded great, for about 20 minutes...after that...you ended up with a headache. In comparison, with my more neutral sounding speakers, I could crank the Basie Band on record, or Earth Wind or Fire, and 2 hrs. later, people were still bopping.

Anyway, they still sound great, and I still have them. Will probably get buried along with them.

(Have an old H.T. Scott (Cambridge, MA) tube stereo amp, that was given me to me...mfg. in about 1963 or so...probably 15 watts or so...might be convertible into a decent guitar amp. If anybody is interested, let me know...for the cost of shipping, you can have it.)

[cosmic gumbo]

If you play your guitar after gutting catfish, it'll sound warm and funky at the same time. Smells funky too.

[Greentone]

I have used the more neutral, B&W speakers in my audio system for many years. They are quite nice.

[KirkP]

When I say "warm" I'm referring to the frequency spectrum having moderately rolled of highs, and maybe a bit of roll-off in the deep bass. I use "warm" to refer to the end product: the sound produced by the signal chain from fingers to ears. In other words, I avoid calling individual components such as pickups, amps or speakers "warm".

I don't find "cold" to be a useful term. "Metallic" means I hear something in the tone that sounds literally like metal being tapped or scratched. I'd like to ban the work "sterile" from all guitar forums, since it communicates nothing.

There's also been some discussion here about tube vs. solid state distortion and even vs. odd harmonics. It's not that simple. Here's a fairly technical article explaining why:
https://www.trueaudio.com/at_eetjlm.htm

Hartley Peavey had a somewhat different take in this white paper on the Transtube approach:
https://peavey.com/support/technotes.../Chapter_3.pdf

[NoReply]

I haven't read the rest of the thread, but if someone hasn't said it practice on acoustic guitar where you are the tone generator. It will teach you a lot about picking, tone change basic on where you pick, pick attack, picking and fretting hands in sync. Get good on controlling your tone on acoustic then transfer those skills to electric where a pickup is even more sensitive to those adjustments.

[goldenwave77]

Hartley Peavey had a somewhat different take in this white paper on the Transtube approach:
https://peavey.com/support/technotes.../Chapter_3.pdf

Wow, this is a fascinating discussion in Peavey's paper. The whole discussion reminds me "that a little bit of knowledge --(in this case in audio engineering)-- can be a dangerous thing".

Peavey points out, in effect, that there was a lot of serendipity, and crackpot empiricism involved in the whole process of building traditional tube guitar amplifiers. People knew how to produce good tube amp designs, reliably manufactured with "good distortion", but fell hugely short when it came to being able to do this with solid state.

(I can't help but analogize this to Django Reinhardt's guitar playing: He could not read/write musical notation (or any language, for that matter), but he certainly knew what he was doing, and hearing, and was able to play it, at will, even if he didn't know the "theory labels" that we might attach to it.) Actually, with Django's playing, its easier to "reverse engineer" it--we can listen to it, transcribe it, and figure it out, but this whole process of getting good distortion out of solid state designs proved a lot more difficult.

Maybe newer, modeling technology changes all this.

[JazzNote]

I work with a singer who sometime says "give me some warmth" meaning that she wants her voice to sound more mellow on the PA. I usually can do that successfully by changing EQ. Depending on the room it might be more lows, more mids or less high's or a combination of the three.

My favorite recording book (Practical Recording Techniques by Bruce & Jenny Bartlett, no affiliation) uses the term "warm" combined with raising low-frequency (below 500Hz), the terms "cold, cool" with reducing low-frequency, metallic with mid frequency boost (3-5 kHz).

I think the same applies to guitar tone. Lucky is who can find the right balance without having to tweak knobs.

[destinytot]

I haven't read the rest of the thread, but if someone hasn't said it practice on acoustic guitar where you are the tone generator. It will teach you a lot about picking, tone change basic on where you pick, pick attack, picking and fretting hands in sync. Get good on controlling your tone on acoustic then transfer those skills to electric where a pickup is even more sensitive to those adjustments.

+1

[jbucklin]

I haven't read the rest of the thread, but if someone hasn't said it practice on acoustic guitar where you are the tone generator. It will teach you a lot about picking, tone change basic on where you pick, pick attack, picking and fretting hands in sync. Get good on controlling your tone on acoustic then transfer those skills to electric where a pickup is even more sensitive to those adjustments.

This is interesting. I studied classical guitar for a few years in the 80s and my teacher spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about tone. I firmly believe after that experience, that in the end, we are the tone generators as No Reply has so eloquently stated.

I used to host a jam session at a local jazz club where I was playing my '65 ES-330 exclusively. There was a wonderful Brazilian guitar player who frequently attended and when he would play my 330 he got the "warmest" sound without ever adjusting either the amp or guitar's tone controls. I asked him about this and he replied that no matter what guitar or amp he used, even a Tele, he always got the same sound. It was truly something to marvel at.

Just as my classical teacher taught me, it's all about touch (goes without saying, really)---both right and left hands. Watch and listen to Jim Hall play. Perhaps he had learned the same lesson from the time he spent as a young man studying classical guitar. Watching him you will notice how the placement of the right hand plays such a big part of his tone. Likewise, the left hand---very graceful and relaxed. Also, choice of pick and of strings are of paramount importance. Jim did not have the speedy chops of his contemporaries, i.e. Jimmy Raney, Tal Farlow, Kenny Burrell, even Wes. I believe that in the beginning he made a conscious decision that if he had to sacrifice speed for tone, then so be it. Not that these other guitarists had bad, or "cold" sounds, it's just that Jim Hall, imho, played as though he had taken Segovia's words to heart: "If you don't love the sound of the guitar, and are not willing to work hard exploring its many different tonal shades and colors, then you probably shouldn't bother learning the instrument."* Tone should be the player of any instrument's number one priority.

*Heavily paraphrased since I don't remember Segovia's exact words

[AlsoRan]

I work with a singer who sometime says "give me some warmth" meaning that she wants her voice to sound more mellow on the PA. I usually can do that successfully by changing EQ. Depending on the room it might be more lows, more mids or less high's or a combination of the three.

This is a great comparison. A warm voice sounds, in my opinion, has that bass and "airy" sound. The opposite would be a voice that is cutting and screeching, to a certain extent, full of biting treble.

I would definitely transfer that analogy to guitar tone.