A Question About Getting Good Fingerstyle Tone On Electric

[fep]

It's not fingerstyle, but here is jazz on a strat in all its chimey glory. This is from fellow forum member Pete Skarloff. Keep listening all the way thru, he does chords as part of his improv about 3/4 thru. Strat clean = a lot of clarity, much more so than an old-school hollow body jazz tone. For me, I prefer the strat for jazz.

[Herbie]

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Doesn't the Strat sound thin by design ? hasn't that been one of Leo's goals on his quest to fight disortion ?

Whatever Leo aimed those days we have to remember that the guitars string gauges in mid '50s were different than today. Some .012 set was the thinnest one. Then later Chet Atkins and others started to use thinner banjo strings as an E-string.

[Jim Soloway]

Jim Soloway is your man for this question in my opinion! Check out his audio clips here in the forums.

I'm not sure many people want to do it the way I do. I play with insanely low tension levels, very light strings a very light touch and a lot of unused volume on my amp and then just use my attack to keep it all under control and it ends up sound like this: