After a tone test between 3 models of guitars, I got thinking about how flawed my grand experiment was. Someone pointed out that there were 3 different brands of strings. One could argue the merits of going either way with that one.
Then there's the snippet. I chose a partial chord bit with some single notes, and made sure I got all the strings involved. My patch, though, may have disguissed some of the guitars' virtues. The patch uses a Pro Crunch pre amp (a fender knock off) with some gain, it uses an EQ and a Resonator on top of a Reverb and Compressor. Not exactly a clean patch, but very far from dirty. Would a plain patch using a tiny bit of gain and a smudge of reverb been better to decipher tones from one another?
And the snippet of music I sampled was actually an accoustic bit. a few bars of the opening of Wish You Were here.
The other end of the spectrum might be true as well. Why not take all the guitars, run them through cranked up overdrive pedals and choose a passage more suited to the over-driven world of tones. after all, a guitar does many things, :) they say bad playing can hide behind distortion, but good or bad tone can't hide anyware.
Just some food for thought.
Roy
"I wonder if a composer ever intentionally composed a piece that was physically impossible to play and stuck it away to be found years later after his death, knowing it would forever drive perfectionist musicians crazy." - George Carlin
I dunno, Roy.
A GUITAR tone test, to me, would be one consisting mainly of clean tones.
One that would showcase the guitar's acoustic properties (cos electric guitars are also acoustic guitars, but everyone forgets this)
If you start cranking things and adding distortion and other heavy effects, it becomes more of an Electric Tone showcase.
Showing off mainly the pedals, pups, amp and speakers.
Wont really matter if the guitar is a Strat, SG or a 30's waterfall cedar chest :wink:
It's the subtle nuances in THE GUITAR that we're looking for. Right?
Ken
"The man who has begun to live more seriously within
begins to live more simply without"
-Ernest Hemingway
"A genuine individual is an outright nuisance in a factory"
-Orson Welles
Yea I'd have to say I'm with Ken on this once you start adding dist, reverb, compression you've gotten pretty far from the true tone of the guitar.
Maybe this wouldn't be a true guitar tone test either but since the whole point is finding out which guitars sound best in each scenario or song why don't you find five or six short pieces of songs that have very different sonic requirements and then use all the guitrs/effects to see which one works best for that type of music. To me you won't really get a good picture of what tone you want until you listen to it in the context of the type of music you want to play. So maybe pick a country song that would use clean tones, a heavy metal song an alternative song etc. Most genres can be defined somewhat by the general sound and then you can try to match which guitar gets you closer to what you actually want.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
I can see doing a totally clean test for examining the guitars' nuances as Ken mentioned. Totally clean is not how many players play guitar, but it would serve to even out the common denominator.
Perhaps a "simple" patch or pedal that does only one thing could serve as an alternate test. find a reasonable set of settings for an overdrive pedal, or maybe even just use the dirty/gain channel of the amp and add some power chords to the test. Finding out what each guitar sounds like under these circumstances is a valid test. But to compare guitars for the sake of determining guitars' natural differences, I'd have to throw my hat in with you guys.
To analyze a guitar (or guitars) for purchase, running it through the hoops like in Chris's alternative method would surely be a thing to do. I'd never really given testing it with various pedals and amps and amp settings much thought before this past year of starting to play some heavier stuff.
Roy
"I wonder if a composer ever intentionally composed a piece that was physically impossible to play and stuck it away to be found years later after his death, knowing it would forever drive perfectionist musicians crazy." - George Carlin
Roy never tried it myself but thought it might be a decent way to at least nail down which guitar you like for which type song. You never know you may be suprised at what your results turn out to be. I dunno.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
