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Another thoughtful Jim Lill video
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07-23-2023 02:03 PM
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I like this guy and think his vids are entertaining. I just wish he was playing tones that are more like what I'm going after. It's been my problem with his other vids, like the one about scale length. At the end of that one I was like... "so it doesn't matter to me since I don't play slab guitars and none of mine have a bridge pickup. He demonstrated a subtle difference, but I have no way to know how much what he did to his guitar translates to mine. Not only that, but in the bigger picture it's not enough to matter because of all the other influences... on tone."
And I felt the exact same way at the end of the one about tone woods in a solid body guitar. Doesn't matter much to me.
Seems like this vid is sorta the ultimate end of his tone quest. I don't perform anymore. I play in my basement and I have a guitar and amp that produce a tone that I really enjoy. And I know that if and when I go to somebody else's basement and play with other guys, what I hear will be different. I know this from a couple of decades of rehearsing, recording and performing.
Somewhere in there he was talking about how you have to learn to live with what you're hearing on stage isn't what the audience is hearing. You work on your sound in practice and rehearsal, and then you have to just kinda... trust things. And maybe ask a respected audience member how it sounds on a break.
I guess what I'm saying is that tone is important, but we tend to get overly obsessed with it at times. I know I do. And it's not just guitar players. I've worked with horn guys that spent hours and hours playing long notes to work on theirs.
Anyways... thanks for posting this Mark. It was a fun 15 and a good thing to keep in mind: what we hear from Wes for EG is his recorded tone and has been adjusted at some point. Very few know what he sounded like 'in the room', and it's so long ago for those that did hear him. Memory can't be trusted in us oldsters, but we continue to buy L5's nonetheless.
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With all due respect to varying opinions, this is completely and absolutely wrong.
Have you ever sat in the center.. say 10 rows back from the front.. and listened to an orchestra or a big band. The sound washes over you. It's an embrace that even an amazing stereo cannot reproduce. It is a combination of several senses.
An open back guitar cabinet does not sound like a closed back amp. Tubes and SS are not the same. And even a good quality studio monitor cannot make a good amp modeler and speaker IR sound like you're in the presence of the real thing. That's not to say modelers don't sound good. They do. But not the same. And while I rarely play one any more, I still prefer an open back tube amp to anything else.
Finally and to drone on about it.. an amazing flat top against your chest and in your ear leaning back on the couch isn't the same as a recording of that flat top. Tonewoods do matter. And a tele does not sound like an L5.
'In the room' is a thing. Don't overthink it. Just listen.
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I actually watched the entire video while eating. 18 minutes to say that every guitar sound is a chain beginning with the players head and hands, guitar, gear, amp, mic choice and placement, daw treatment, and final media (he disregards the room). ..
Besides that, I actually disagree with most things he says on the video. Room sound is very important, as the amp will sound, interact and record differently in different rooms and sound levels. Recording with headphones is a necessity and a compromise, not a choice for sound quality reasons. Also many times in club, bar and other small gigs, amp sound in the stage and room is a big part of the sound the audience hears. And if you work with good sound people, the house sound will be very close to the amp sound, with the final room sound being a mix of the two and a mix of close/far miking (or listening). And in most recordings I've been to they use some form of distant miking / capturing the room sound. Even a change in the gear the other players use can make or break your sound, both on stage and on a recording.
I really don't get that type of videos. He has another one where he has a string in the air and supposedly it's the perfect electric guitar..Last edited by Alter; 07-24-2023 at 01:41 AM.
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I'm not in complete agreement with this guy, but I don't think he's disputing that a telecaster sounds diff than a L5, that playing an acoustic guitar is a diff experience, that open back cabs sound different than closed, that round strings sound diff than flats etc etc.
What he's saying is that while he's spent a lot of time testing and trying to understand the above variables and more, in the end all the guitar sounds you hear recorded, and many of the ones you hear live have been brought to your ears by a mike and a mixing board. Most of your fave guitar tones have this in common. Unless your fave guitar sound happened at a small club with an un-miked combo that included a guitar.
I think the disconnect for us is that he's in a different world of sound, performance, and music type. Might be more true in his world than ours.
So to put it another way, if I like the sound of my amp in the basement recorded thru a close mike, I'm going to get the same thing in a different room, whether that's a large stage or a studio. Small clubs and acoustic combos are something different and not something this guy does a lot of, apparently.
I'm an 'in the room' believer. I always disliked recording with phones. I always wanted my amp beside me with one can off so I could work with what I was hearing in the room. Even if that room was an isolation booth. For me it's more of a feel thing than an ear thing. Call me Mr Natural.
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Originally Posted by ccroft
True.. and that's a good observation. If you only consider large scale sound stage, and mic/PA applications you get a different answer. Still disagree with him on recorded sound. A lot of work goes into capturing room sound in the studio.
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I guess he’s never been to a house concert or small venue. That’s where I’ve heard my favorite tones. Recorded music and sound systems can only approximate that experience.
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My experience is if you can't get a decent drum sound in 15 minutes and a decent guitar sound in 5 minutes the engineer doesn't know what the hell they are doing. I guess my follow up to that statement is most engineers don't know what the hell they are doing. Originally Posted by Spook410
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Well, you can't expect a Youtube influencer to advocate the "sound in the room", can you?
The way I see it the thing every influential (electric) guitar tone has in common is; a guitar speaker.
Recording techniques are important of course (especially if you're a Youtuber). Just remember that recorded tone is hi-fi tone and that the original purpose of a hi-fi recording is to capture and play back a live performance using hi-fi equipment typically designed for volume scaling (so that you can enjoy the sound of a symphonic orchestra, a swing band or a heavy metal band etc in your car or in your living room without disturbing your neighbours.
Obviously," the sound in the room" always matters (unless you use headphones all the time). The only question is what speakers you trust for this "sound in the room". You probably don't play back a hi-fi recording on a guitar speaker and you probably don't play guitar through a hi-fi speaker on stage volume. Lining out to PA is a different subject that typically still relies on a guitar speaker and a mic. If you for some reason don't plan to use a guitar speaker but go direct to mixer, then to re-capture any influential guitar tone you'll probably like to use some type of guitar speaker simulation device.
I for one trust my guitar speakers and don't want to confuse the experience of a live performance with processed hi-fi audio.
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His point about needing to hear things back to back is right on. I've also found that remembering what something sounded like a day ago or even 10 minutes ago just isn't very accurate.
Having said that, I wish I could get off the tone chasing wheel. It's a distraction from learning and practicing and playing. Electric guitar is so flexible that you can get millions of different tones, and it's easy to lose yourself in chasing a few of them.Last edited by One_Note; 07-24-2023 at 10:17 AM.
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There's the rub: orchestras are not electric guitar run through amps and mic'ed. Big bands may have a guitar but there's a good chance most of the audience doesn't hear it at all. (That's how it was with Freddie Green in Basie's band.) Originally Posted by Spook410
Apples and oranges.
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It seems to me that the video makes two distinct points:
- chasing tones heard on recordings by buying guitars, amps, and effects is largely a waste because recordings are a signal chain that you can’t replicate
- That the sound in room matters due to interaction between the instrument and the sound waves is a myth.
The first point really depends on what sounds you’re talking about. I mean a mic with a distinct color, plugged into a compressor at extreme settings, a highly colored mic pre, eq, and saturating analog audio tape is not the sound you hear in the room. But a much less processed and colored signal chain is close enough. There are tons of recordings where duplicating the guitar rig will yield basically the same sound. Whether it’s worth chasing that is personal matter (for me, no, it’s not). So there’s something to his point, but less than he tries to make it seem (which is the way all his videos have struck me).
The second point strikes me as a straw man. I don’t think people really claim that (apart from feedback) there’s coupling between guitar and amp. However what you hear, and how you hear it (i.e. the acoustic environment) affect how you play.
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I like both his videos that I've seen. He's trying to pin some things down with experiments. These things are complex and you can argue about his approach, but he's trying to figure things out while the viewer can look over his shoulder.
But, it's one thing to say that the room doesn't matter to the recorded sound. It's another thing to say that your gear will sound the same to you no matter what room you're in.
He proved the point, more or less, when he compared the room mic to the speaker mic.
The rooms I'm talking about are not anechoic chambers of a standard size. Rather, they're the restaurants, clubs, halls, rehearsal spaces and so forth that people commonly play in. You don't, or at least I don't, always have much choice about where my amp is in relationship to my ears, or how much sound absorbing surface area (including people) there is, or where the other instruments are coming from.
I'm not saying that my gear would sound different to a close-in mic. I'm saying I think it would sound different to stereo mics inside a pair of headphones -- measuring what my ears are actually exposed to with different bands in different spaces. I don't know if that's what he was driving at or not.
His points about psychology and memory are entirely appropriate. Many times I've plugged in at the start of a gig and hated my sound. Then, by the second set I like it. The room does change when it fills up with people, but I think this may be simply getting accustomed to the sound after a set or so.
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My point was that sound doesn't have to be so directional. Also that it is felt in addition to being heard. Part of what makes up 'in the room' is all those reflections. Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
I often move my speaker off axis from me to get a less 2 dimensional sound from my modeler/IR setup.
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Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Just one element of this of course, but I have found that I like the 'sounds like it's recorded' tone from my modeler/IR much better once it becomes part of a mix rather than solo.
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And a whole lot of work goes into designing and building the room for sound before anyone make a serious noise in there. Originally Posted by Spook410
According to a friend in the biz he gets a lot of work because he has one of the few good live rooms left in his town. In today's world a lot of projects don't need that, but them that need it need a place like his.
There is that part in the vid where he talks to the guy that did the guitar on Pretty Woman and several other classics. According to the guy that was there it was all close miked. And our boy loves those sounds!
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And then there are those who: a) like to turn the "close" mike off axis from the center of the cone of the speaker (I like this), b) add a second mike anywhere - sometimes (?) at the rear of an open back cab.
These two variations can and will change what the tape heads hear. Lazy engineers will just stick a "57" into the cone and move on. I know this and didn't have the option to tune my amp to the mike and room.. I always wonder what some of our favorite tones had a clever engineer "move" the mike?
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I am going to hear Tedeschi Trucks tonight at an outdoor venue. The sound quality when i saw them perform in a medium-sized auditorium was excellent, and I am hoping for the same tonight.
I predict that 98% of Derek’s tone will be in his fingers.
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Watched the whole thing. Just seems like the typical YouTube guitarist today: i.e. a total amateur pretending to be some sort of expert just so they can make “educational” videos that appeal to the masses. Reminds me of all those guys: Rhett shull, Darrell braun, Paul Davids (had to look them up to remember their names but each has millions of views and nothing insightful to say).
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Most studios are some random house, empty storefront, or warehouse building. The fancy rooms are nice but ultimately not critical in any way to getting a good sound in the studio. Sun studios was a storage facility for a time. Muscle shoals most famous recordings were in a tobacco warehouse. I've been to a high dollar studio with racks and racks of top gear where the grammy nominated engineer had a could-give-a-shit attitude and the recording results exactly reflected his attitude. I was left with a bad taste especially after what it cost and so I went to a studio arranged in a modest residential home. with some similar gear but with an engineer with a really good reputation and work ethic who was all about the project I was working on and the results reflected his professionalism and enthusiasm. At this point for me it's all about the engineer. The gear he may have is just icing on the cake. Originally Posted by ccroft
Everything is digital now so expensive mics and preamps are what? La dee frickin da. It's easy to get blindsided by stuff that is essentially extraneous. The days of the multi million dollar facilities are basically a thing of the past in my mind. Go to one and you generally find yourself being treated as another boring day on the job unless you are that big name artist and then it's a brown nosing session and yes sir, no sir. Gimme someone real who is motivated more by the music than the money.
This time we bought our own gear and are tracking an album in a double wide and since we have the additional time to play with the sound the results are coming out even more to my liking. I will never spend another day in someone else's studio unless someone not named dawgbone is paying for all of it. Should've just DIY'ed 25 years ago to be quite honest. Better drum sound achieved. Better guitar sound achieved. I would've already spent 3-4x as much getting half the album tracked.
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Originally Posted by omphalopsychos
I disagree with almost everything you say here. Let's dispense with "total amateur". If you make money playing music, most people consider that being a pro, but it's not something I wish to argue about. (And I'm not talking about getting money for YouTube videos but being paid as part of bands that performs live.)
He doesn't pretend to be an expert. He is curious and industrious. A guy who builds his own amp cabinets to compare how speakers sound in one and then the other is the very definition of "showing his homework," rather than asking you to take his word for it.
I think many people responding to this video overlook the word "influential" in the title. You (or I or anyone else) may hear a killer tone in a small club and think "that's it!" But few others heard that same tone (-how many people were even there? did it sound the same to people in other parts of the room? how many have a clear memory of the tone? how many are able to reproduce it for others who weren't there to hear?). That tone is not going to be influential.
The most influential guitar tones come from studio and live recording. None of us heard Charlie Christian play live---all we have is the recordings. None of us heard Django play live either. Most of us never heard Wes in a small club (though I suspect more than a handful of people here did). A player's tone may change over time. BB King is a great example because he recorded from 1949 ("Miss Martha King") to 2008 ("One Kind Favour"). Not only did his tone change, but different releases of the same recordings are plentiful, and one can hear differences in the guitar tone due to vagaries of re-issued
recordings.
Even when studio engineers want to emphasize the sound in the room, a listener to the resulting recording has no way to isolate the sound in the room from the sound of a mic'ed amp.
An interesting thing to ponder is the sound of drums on old recordings where the drums mere not mic'ed. All you can hear is "the room sound" but upon reflection, it's a mistake to think "THAT'S HOW THEY SOUNDED IN THE ROOM." No, that's how they sound because they are far from the nearest mic. Itis a working assumption of us all that drums on old recordings do NOT sound like they sounded in the room. They sound faint and the cymbals tend to be splashy. We wish we had better recordings of those old drummers, which is to say, we wish their drums were mic'ed!
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I have So Much Guitar and Day In The Life, both on vinyl. The guitar tone isn't the same.
I heard Wes live, once, in that arena in Central Park that had the summer festivals. As far as I recall, he sounded like Day In The Life -- the classic Wes sound.
I've heard one player sound exactly like him. It was, unsurprisingly, an L5. The amp was a small one and newer. Not one Wes used. I think that his tone was in his touch and the L5. FWIW.
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I also did an experiment, but you could almost say it's the complete opposite of what Jim Lill did.
I picked two guitarists that I like a lot, that I know very well, and that I would basically recognize from within 2 notes, whether I've heard the recording before or not. They are John Scofield and Carlos Santana.
What I've done now is that I created a Reaper project for each of them and put together a wild (musically completely incoherent) potpourri of their music from the most diverse eras of the last decades.
Result?
There is practically no similarity in the sound of the guitars in that recordings. Viewed objectively, the two guitarists sound fundamentally different in every single piece. From a technical point of view. You think, yeah, it's him, but compare "Europa" with "Samba pa ti" .... worlds apart.... same for Sco!
So musically I must say, they're always themselves. My conclusion is, what's the point of looking for the technical parameters of how they made these recordings? According to my observations, completely different parameters are decisive.
It's just the way of playing, musical intentions and many other things in this direction, but not any technical or electronic parameters that Jim Lill emphasizes so much.
Well, just my 2c
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I like the examples of Carlos and Sco because I have heard them both a lot. (Haven't seen Sco live, though; have seen Santana.) Originally Posted by DonEsteban
I think there is something to say for the "tone is (mainly) in the hands" school of thought. However, when we acknowledge that Carlos and Sco, who I would stipulate always have the same hands, have different tones at times, then tone is not ALL in the hands. Carlos started out--on records, anyway, playing Gibson SG Specials, later switched to Les Pauls and now plays PRS guitars. His tone has changed but his hands have not. Ergo... (And not only has the tone changed, but he has also brought that about through changing instruments, so it seems clear that HE thinks tone comes at least in part from the instrument. And then there are amps...
As for what Lill is doing, yes, he focuses on the mechanical side of things. I grew up around guys like him who were that way about cars---they loved to take things apart, put them back together, modify them, experiment with them, and see what makes 'em go (and how they might be made to go better, or faster, or louder.) It's not what I do but I respect the craft, industry, and imagination of it.
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Carlos' tone, at least for a time, was heavily impacted by the Mesa Boogie lead circuit. My guess is that any solid guitar with a humbucker can get in the right ballpark with that amp. Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
When I last saw him live, many years ago, he also had a huge pedalboard.
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