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(Here's another, old post that I'm re-cycling from another forum. I think that the topic is ALWAYS valid for our music and seems to be able to generate interesting discussion ...)
A recent post made me wonder about my choice of guitars, amplifiers and the way that I adjust them to sound a certain way. Not for the first time I note that I am replicating a sound that was imprinted on me from my youth. Had I not listened to early guitarists for hours, would I still strive for that woody, bassy sound (some call it “dark”) that is so representative of the early era of electric guitars ?
Classical guitarists for generations established standards for tonal variations that were rich, powerful and interesting, if not particularly loud. But in America, as the guitar replaced the banjo in early jazz bands, an evolution began, first with the instrument and strings followed by technique and finally amplification.
Gut-strung classical guitars were replaced by sturdier flat-top instruments with steel strings, eventually evolving to arch-tops while technique changed from plucking with fingers and thumb to using a pick – all in order to give the guitar a greater voice among the more strident horns and drums of the typical jazz band.
Incremental improvements allowed more freedom of expression until finally everything came together: arch-top guitar, steel strings, pick + magnetic pickup and amplifier. OK, you can see where I’m heading with this: the evolution wasn’t really about tone, it was about volume !
When orchestral guitarists first started stepping out from the rhythm section to solo, they did so with relatively primitive equipment, at least from an electronic aspect. The first production pickups were blades, no adjustment was provided for individual string amplitude and the frequency response was quite limited, LOTS of midrange, appreciable bass but not much treble. (The pickups responded to the magnetic mass of the strings, so the bigger strings produced the loudest sounds.)
Oh yeah ... nobody really seemed to like the attack of the pick on the guitar strings, that “click” was very annoying. About the only thing one could do to reduce it - short of replacing the plastic pick with a cardboard matchbook – was to roll off the treble response of the guitar and amplifier.
Amplification was also low-fidelity, comprised of low-power vacuum tubes – easily compressed and distorted – driving small speakers that had little compliance by current standards. At best, these amplifiers had a distinct “honk” and it’s surprising how good some of the old recordings still sound !
Or do they ?
That’s what I’m asking myself now ... am I perpetuating a sound that came about purely by accident or is this “The Tone” that is most psychoaccoustically pleasing for our form of music ?
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11-14-2009 10:51 PM
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Now that's what I call posing a very intriguing question! You prompted me to go listen again to the second take of 'Solo Flight' - the one I originally wore out on vinyl - on Disk 4 of, "Charlie Christian, the Genius of the Electric Guitar." It was recorded 70 years ago, and his tone still sounds amazing! I guess that's why it was genre-defining to such a large extent! Umm, but no, I don't have an answer to your question!
Last edited by Tom Karol; 11-15-2009 at 11:00 AM. Reason: 70, not 60, years ago!
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Very intriguing question indeed that, of course, I also cannot answer. But one thing I'm pretty sure of. No matter if this tone developped by accident or purpose, they really loved it as we do today.
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tuning in to late Saturday night PBS just now, my wife and I enjoyed hearing Catherine Russell (jazz/blues vocalist) backed up by a quartet, dunno who they were.
Guitarist was playing an ES-125'ish instrument with Charlie Christian pickup. Couldn't see amplifier, and PBS is careful about NOT providing free advertising (by showing closeups of guitar headstock).
The sound of that guitar was classic ...
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The current issue of 'Guitar Player' magazine is a Les Paul tribute.
In it is an old quote from Paul complaining that modern jazzers
roll off too much of the treble and he can't hear if they're playing
'clean' (I think was his term.)
Les Paul was swell but no one quotes his tone that I can
immediately remember; am I wrong on this?
The darker guitar tones make jazz more horn-like to me.
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Rolling off treble conceals a multitude of sins, that's why we do it. Hides mis-pickings, string squeaks and picking unevenness. We may think it's horn-like, but the truth is most horn players play with far more dynamics than the narrow band gtr signal compressed through tubes and speakers. The most exciting guitarists have a dynamic technique, which of course, is much harder to achieve, especially the ones that dare to leave the treble up and use round wounds!
Last edited by princeplanet; 11-15-2009 at 10:10 AM.
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I don't think that the evolution of the jazz tone was driven by volume alone. Surely these pioneers of music were concerned about the quality as well as the "quantity" of sound.
Originally Posted by randyc
Evolution manfiests as small, often accidental changes that survive because they best fit the environment. Back in the days when jazz was popular music, the audience was the driving force that decided what would survive and what would die. Originally Posted by randyc
IMO, the tone that we associate with Jazz guitar today is the accumulated sum of accidental changes that survived. I'm sure there were many poor attempts that died on the bandstand.
Music is a living thing and evolution is good way of explaining how it changes. Tone is one aspect of music that continues to evolve with technology and the listener's palette. Only the good ones will flourish.
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I've often wondered if the average listener cares about 'tone'. Is it really the melody,phrasing,the emotion conveyed by the artist etc that really sticks in one's mind? A song reaches at you from the distant past and touches you,except that this time around it's a different interpretation,maybe on another instrument.
Maybe it's just us aspiring musicians sweating it about the 'tone' and in a never ending search for that 'perfect tone'!
Anand.
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Very good thread. I like to keep some treble on--not wide open by any means. I think too much jazz guitar sounds the same, tone-wise, precisely because cats like to dial in that sound by rolling off all the treble.
Another issue: flat wounds. I've pretty much said no more to flats. I'd like to hear some semblance of a bright frequency, and also have the notes sustain more. I personally don't mind the fret noise that comes with dynamic/round wound strings. So, for me, dynamic wounds, 12 or 13 seem to be another factor in deviating from "that tone". In a good way.
The over-arching thing to me is a basic clean tone where you hear the constituent voicings---ok, if you're playing rock--R, P5, P8 all night, you can over drive the sound, use fuzz boxes, et al. and it contributes nicely to the musical proceedings.
Playing jazz often necessitates more complex and more frequent changes. And these will sound like mush if you ramp up the gain, use distortion.
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Like so many folks, I always lusted after that dark, woody tone, and to some extent I still do. But I'm learning not to be scared of a bit of treble. I find it makes it a lot easier to express subtle chord changes, and (as I spend a lot of my time backing singers in trios or quartets), it also helps to provide clarity at lower volumes. Just as I went to a lot of trouble to train myself to like ale, I trained myself to play without all the treble rolled off!
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Liking Ale took training? Sheesh, I thought it was in your blood over there! Originally Posted by philbert
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Yeah. But you have to start somewhere, dont'cha? Mind you, the cigarettes and women were more difficult...
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well, for me, rolling off treble (about halfway) isn't a choice of "covering sins"--it's simply a tone that the complex chords i'm playing sound better with. too many high frequencies can really make a close intervaled or altered chord sound very dissonant, when in context, they're really quite beautiful.
and i also think there's a lot of myth and misinformation about these "dark jazz tones." outside of jim hall and pat martino most of the big names playing in jazz have plenty of high end in their sound.
i honestly always thought the traditional jazz sound was simply the sound of the guitar itself, generally unadorned. the playing should speak for itself then.
after all, we're not playing telecasters here. oh, wait...
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I have participated in a similar discussion at talkbass.com and, there, I concluded that the electric bass sound I favor is due partly to its ability to carve out its own space in the mix (understand, of course, that the electric bass is necessarily an ensemble instrument, unlike guitar), but also, partly (and maybe even mostly) due to my expectations, based on a lifetime of hearing recorded basses that sound a certain way. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
well, for me, rolling off treble (about halfway) isn't a choice of "covering sins"--it's simply a tone that the complex chords i'm playing sound better with. too many high frequencies can really make a close intervaled or altered chord sound very dissonant, when in context, they're really quite beautiful.
and i also think there's a lot of myth and misinformation about these "dark jazz tones." outside of jim hall and pat martino most of the big names playing in jazz have plenty of high end in their sound.
i honestly always thought the traditional jazz sound was simply the sound of the guitar itself, generally unadorned. the playing should speak for itself then.
after all, we're not playing telecasters here. oh, wait...
There is literature concerning the subject of listeners preferring music with which they are familiar (note that, many now-popular "classical" pieces opened to riots and dissent, back in the day). Our generation has grown up in an era in which formerly "revolutionary," not to say "dissonant" and
"un-melodic" works are appreciated as "classical," sonant and melodic -- by the simple mechanism of having heard them from an early age, and (in our modern age of recorded sound) as often as we like.
Getting back to guitar, I find that I favor a much more midrangey (not necessarily "darker") tone than I did when I was younger. I suspect this results partly from my own evolving taste, but also an increment is due to the superior gear I have available to play these days, as opposed to my hardscrabble beginning years.
I don't rely on memory for this, but, since I have been recording almost from when I first picked up guitar, from recorded evidence. Thinking back, my settings have migrated north from bridge pickup/tone all the way up to both pickups/tone setting variable (but mostly more treble than not) to my current preferred sound, using the neck pickup exclusively and rolling off some treble. It is interesting when younger players pick up my guitar: the first thing they do is turn the treble up, switch to bridge pickup, and turn the volume all the way up.
Yesterday afternoon, as noted in another thread, my friend and I went to watch his drummer son and his band perform at a local venue. The "singer" screamed the lyrics into an SM58, resulting in white noise and unintelligible words (of course, the equally young crowd thought it was great) and both guitarists were playing through solid body electrics (the lead player with a Dean flying vee, rhythm on an Epi LP Custom) and modeling amps set to "cartoon" (no, I'm making that part up -- I don't know how they were set). The lead player had some melodic ideas, but articulation was washed away in a flood of "crunch" and distortion and other artifacts that would have led me to toss the amp into the land fill. Ah -- to never be eighteen again!
Through all the noise, some virtues were discernible: tight playing, imaginative progressions (disclaimer: I don't follow the music of that age group, so it may all have been borrowed from popular hits) and an unmistakable musicality.
Each of the guitar players is forming (or has already formed) his conception of "tone," and it includes elements that we prefer not to: aggression, loudness, and the obligatory quality of annoyance to older persons like myself.
What will their tastes be like when they are my age? -- assuming they are not stone deaf! I think they may have rather different ideas of good tone from mine.
This is a peek into the alternate universe, where players did not grow up listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford, and Mundell Lowe, and Barney Kessel, and you and I can name many more. Are we a dying breed? If our preferences are informed by familiarity, AND the music with which we are familiar is no longer popular (or even played), that may be the case.
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Certainly, here in UK, it's a toss up whose hair is whitest - jazz audiences or jazzmen. Since I retired to play 'full time' (ha, ha, if only...) I've been struck by the fact that at 63 I'm normally the youngest man in the band.
On the other hand I go to the occasional Musicians Union event and find that I'm the oldest guy and the only jazzer.
But I'm glad to say that there are a few younger men and women emerging from music colleges who genueinely want to play jazz, though most of them are horn and keyboard players.
Sadly, in UK, the majority of jazz club audiences still think it's not proper jazz unless there's a banjo in the band. That's why I always play banjo at funeral gigs!
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When visiting Britain, I usually request "half-and-half" at the pub, I suppose that's a giveaway to our British Cousins (as if my accent weren't). As an analog to the current conversation, does that translate to something like "moderation" or "acceptable blend" when considering tone or would it be more like "wimpy" ?
With reference to some of the above comments - more than I expected, BTW - my personal opinion closely follows princeplanet's. For many years, I've tried to resist the temptation to twist the tone control too far CCW.
Jazzaluk took issue with my statement that the instrument's amplified evolution was more about volume than tone. Fair enough, I thought that I'd supported that assertion but I didn't do a good job. Here's the way that I saw things:
1. Banjo was dominant rythm instrument - guitar wasn't loud enough to cut through the horns.
2. Did the banjo have "the tone" ? (I'm guessing not or Charlie Christian would have worn finger/thumb picks.)
3. Steel strings on a stronger top gave the guitar more volume, not better tone - classical guitars (at least to me) have far more richness, variation and subtleties than a flat-top guitar is capable of producing.
4. Enter Lloyd Loar who had the "revolutionary" (not really - he just copied orchestral stringed instrument configuration) idea of arching the top of the guitar. This allowed the compound curve to enhance the strength of the top and permitted removing structural bracing that was restraining the ability to vibrate. Result ? Guitars got louder, although still not in the same stadium as orchestral arch-tops.
5. Gibson devised a magnetic pickup (amplifier already existed). The pickup was a sketchy affair, non-adjustable with very limited frequency response. It was justified because the amplifiers and speakers of the day ALSO had very limited frequency response. (A superior responding pickup wouldn't have been heard through an inferior responding amplifier/speaker combination.)
6. To this day, the guitar is still capable of reproducing only the frequencies between about 80 to 1500 Hz (plus harmonics). It's one of the most limited instruments in frequency spectrum.
7. The current batch of pickups are still not optimum, they are mid-rangey and far from having a flat response. Nobody worries about it because they produce the sounds that we're accustomed to hearing. Many people, starting with Les Paul and followed by Alembic, have made wideband pickups - the market made a determination of their value.
8. Modern amplifier/speaker combinations have capabilities that Gibson, back in the thirties and forties, couldn't even dream of. But still, we adjust our tone circuits to produce tones like those of Charlie Christian.
From these points, I concluded that, from around 1910 or so onward, guitarists were trying to be "heard" more than they were trying to be appreciated for subtleties of their instrument tone.
Once it was possible to achieve more than the traditional "honk", did we take advantage of the highly flexible EQ circuits given us ? Well, we know the answer don't we
cheers, appreciate your participation in an interesting topic,
Randy
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You have got to be kidding me. Seriously? I find this very hard to believe. Somebody turn the Way Back Machine to like 1922 or something? Originally Posted by philbert
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I know what you mean. I lived in Manchester for five years, starting in 1987. I would have described my jazz tastes then as being conservative, meaning that I loved 60's style jazz: Coltrane and Ornette. Then, I moved and saw what conservative really meant! While I did catch Ornette playing in Manchester, I actually took those 5 years to get back into classical music instead of jazz. The University of Manchester has an excellent music college so there were more opportunities to hear classical music. The Lindsay String Quartet was in residence, for example...
So I know what you mean by conservative tastes. I found the people who listened to "modern" classical music were more open to "modern" jazz than the died-in-the-wool jazz audience.
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Nope, NSJ. British small band jazz still attracts the audience it attracted back in the 50's and 60's, when a bloke called Ken Colyer brought back from New Orleans a particularly strict interpretation of what New Orleans jazz meant. Many UK jazz audiences still believe in this most miserablist version of the music. (Don't get me wrong, I love and play, the classic stuff).
It's not all bad news. I'm lucky to be in the resident rhythm section of one of the few UK jazz clubs focussed on small band swing, and we regularly get 80-100 people in who genuinely dont want to see a banjo in the band. Before I get too smug about it, though, I have to keep reminding myself that I'm playing the music of the 1930s and 40's!!
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B: Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
well, for me, rolling off treble (about halfway) isn't a choice of "covering sins"--it's simply a tone that the complex chords i'm playing sound better with. too many high frequencies can really make a close intervaled or altered chord sound very dissonant, when in context, they're really quite beautiful.
and i also think there's a lot of myth and misinformation about these "dark jazz tones." outside of jim hall and pat martino most of the big names playing in jazz have plenty of high end in their sound.
i honestly always thought the traditional jazz sound was simply the sound of the guitar itself, generally unadorned. the playing should speak for itself then.
after all, we're not playing telecasters here. oh, wait...
I agree with the fact that some guitars require more EQ than others, but the reasons for that are relatively simple - the correction of "deficiencies" within the instrument and the amplifier. Those dissonances that you are hearing are very real and mostly unacknowledged. (They are called "third order products" and that needs to be further discussed.)
The simplest way of describing what "adjustments" are made with a Telecaster (assuming jazz tone is the point) is that the tone control is used to suppress some of the products of non-linearity produced by guitar/amplifier/speaker and to roll off excessive high frequency response. (I don't want to carry this any further NOW because it is DEFINiTELY worth spending some time and writing a separate topic.)
Regarding the "plenty of high end" used by big name guitarists, that's partly true but a more accurate (and nerdish) statement might be something like "plenty of selectively filtered high end". If the amplifier were adjusted to produce a flat spectrum, especially at the high end, the clicking and clacking of the pick would make us all crazy (Sometimes the string squeaks do an effective job of making ME crazy - fortunately most guitarists adjust tone controls to filter out THAT stuff, too.)
I'm not sure that traditional jazz tones of most players are those of the guitar itself. With rare exception (e.g. Joe Pass, Charlie Byrd), musicians prefer the amplified to the unamplified sound of their instrument. I think that those who play well with their fingers, as opposed to using a pick, are by far the proponents of playing accoustically because of superior tone control.
That irritating clickety-clack of the pick can be all but eliminated by cranking down the treble response. And fingers - as classical guitarists have always known - can produce subtleties of tone that are impossible for a plectrum to achieve. Unhappily, most of us simply don't have the training to effectively use our fingers. Ditto for the big name guitarists, generally speaking.
No offense, Mr B, it's all about opinion, after all (except for those dissonances, that's a significant point and needs to be explored further).
Randy
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Conservative UK Jazz tastes:
I hope it didn't sound like I was dumping on the UK. There have been some great British guitar players. Martin Taylor is one of my favourite finger-style players.
Also John McLaughlin, Allan Holdsworth and Jeff Beck (Beck is more jazz influenced than really straight jazz). Hmmm ... did they use Fusion to do an end-around the banjo... Then again, I have the album John McLaughlin Electric guitarist and he does play the banjo it, but not flailing, heh heh...Last edited by BigDaddyLoveHandles; 11-15-2009 at 01:20 PM.
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certainly none taken, and I agree with much of what you're saying. Originally Posted by randyc
but to further explain what i was getting at--i'm talking trad. jazz tones--40's into the 60's era. barney kessel and jimmy raney and yes, charlie christian.
i just don't hink these cats obsessed over tone like we do because there literally wasn't the technology to obsess over it with! What you hear on, say, a 50's raney recording is a gibson ES-150 plugged into a tube amp that maybe had two knobs--voume and tone. That was the tone he played with. A lot of these jazz tones from this era are quite bright compared to the stereotype of the modern jazz tone.
Jim Hall, it seems, was one of the first cats who made a concious effort to truly remove high end from his sound. I'd love to talk with him and ask what made him decide to do it--you hear it very early on, even with his recordings with chico hamilton. Jim certainly had a very advanced chordal vocabulary (compared to some of his contemporaries) and I wonder if this led to a effort to remove said high frequesncies that our ears percieve as dissonances in those complex harmonies...
It's funny, but i think a lot of the technology marketed to jazz guitarists is about delivering this simple tone, which is probably best arrived at simply.
As for the tele thing, I won't post the link to my recordings again, because I'm sure you and most folks here who'd care have already listened. But here, I'm arriving at my "jazz tone" by cutting a little treble on the guitar and leaving the amp (a polytone) essentially flat in the EQ section. Now a solid body guitar relies on a lot to produce any sound, so when i say the "natural" sound of the guitar, what I'm getting at is the tone of the guitar with a minimum of steps in the signal chain before the amp and a minimum of post production EQ, reverb, etc. On a recording like "Darn That Dream" on my site, that's what you're hearing--guitar into amp in a big uncarpeted room. So that's what I'm getting at as describing the "natural" sound of the guitar--perhaps a better word or phrase would be the "unadorned" sound of the guitar.
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I don't know about the other guys but Wes did obsess over tone, and apparently never thought it was just right (ironically, since his tone was so good and so many try to shoot for his sound). Then again he is on the later side of the 40sto 60s range.
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well, yes, he did. but in support of my argument, i beleive i've read somewhere that the reason wes could never find an amp he liked was that he could never find one that could "accurately represent the guitar" or something like that...i gotta research that.
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B: Yeah, I didn't take your meaning the way that you just explained it. There's really nothing that we disagree about ... one of my favorite tube amps, btw, has only one tone knob and has never been a problem for any kind of music ('61 Ampeg Reverberocket). And the only effect ever used with this amplifier was a compressor (with a Strat for country music).
I've read some stuff about Wes, as well. Apparently the solid state Standel was even preferred over a Super (or Twin) but that may have been due to the amount of traveling he was doing at the time ... He's also supposed to have originated the "guitar+amp=single instrument" theory that is apparently embraced by rock guitarists.
cheers -
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