Confession time: I’m feeling a little like a junky this week, and it’s getting harder and harder to slip that monkey off my back. To put it mildly, I’m hooked, and I’m having trouble just maintaining any kind of ordinary life without constantly crawling back for another fix. I’m having trouble working, I find it difficult to concentrate on what friends and family are saying, I lie awake for long hours most nights unable to shake the desire to get up and get some.
Tone is the drug, and the guitar is the vehicle, and man, I’m jonesing bad. And given the company I’m addressing here, I have a feeling I’m not alone.
I’ve been contemplating the subject of tone a lot lately, and I feel it warrants some discussion. “Tone” is a severely over-used word in guitar circles, admittedly, and one that’s often difficult to pin down. It can be used to refer to anything from one specific sound achieved on a specific recording, to the broad concept and quality of sound in general. In this case, I mean something more like the latter, but with the definite presupposition of good tone being applied to it. Excellent, textural, stimulating tone, in other words, and while we guitarists generally discuss tone as applied to a musical form, this tone I’m chasing can almost be devoid of anything we consider traditional music—other than as conceived by the modernist, perhaps, the avant-garde.
The crux of the matter is this: we know that listening to good music is pleasurable, but I would propose that just hearing truly good guitar tone—in whatever raw, unstructured form—can also trigger the pleasure mechanisms in the brain. It has been tickling mine lately, that’s for sure.
This isn’t a new subject for me to be chewing over, but it has come to the forefront of my thinking over the past couple weeks for pretty obvious reasons. For one of my other gigs, reviewing gear for a prominent guitar magazine, I was recently sent three Danocaster Singlecut guitars (a cool, aged reproduction T-style) and told to “play all three a while, and pick the one you prefer most for the review.” At about the same time, a U.S. dealer of high-end guitars sent me two of Johan Gustavsson Futuremasters so that I could try them out and let him know which I preferred. (Yeah, it’s a hard life.) But to be honest, both exercises have kind of doing my head in. Having begun with lengthy rambles on each of the guitars individually, playing in a range of styles, mainly vamping on some favorite riffs or parts from my own bands’ songs, the process gradually boiled itself down to something far more clinical. Eventually, I found myself simply playing one guitar after the other, in cyclical succession, over and over and over again: Play some major-scale bends and hit an open-G chord on this one, then unplug quickly and swap for the next, and do it again; now play some quick overdriven minor-scale lead riffs up high, swap, and repeat. Ad infinitum. It’s the kind of sonic testing I do a lot of, only intensified, observed on a far more granular level. And… it’s severely addicting. I’ve gotten a lot less writing done this past week, and a lot more disappearing down the rabbit hole of microscopic tonal analysis.
The thing is, the process is slowly separating my concept of auditory pleasure from the constraints of making actual music. For example, I can just hit a low E minor chord, or a high unison bend with a little overdrive applied to a good tube amp—to get that beating, slightly dissonant clash as the note on the G string bends its way up to meet the octave held on the high-E, for example—and the neurons start firing. There’s an immediate pleasure response, a reward, and as a result, an imprinting of the desire to get more of it whenever possible. I’m willing to wager, too, that the pleasure correlates directly with the quality of the tone, as determined by its depth, its harmonic-overtone content, its perceived multi-dimensionality, its purity of timbre, and so on.
Not that my fix demands a $7,000 guitar through a $3,500 amplifier, by any means. But I’m pretty sure a poorly set-up instrument made from inferior tonewoods and mediocre pickups all played through a cheap, harsh transistor amp wouldn’t get me there. (I’m willing to accept that the latter might just happen to work great on the right track for the right recording on some occasions, although I would also argue that the concept of “great tone” is not purely subjective, but that might be a subject for another outing…)
RELATED ARTICLE
Make no mistake that sound—or more commonly, we might say, music—does affect changes in the pleasure centers within the brain. It’s not simply that “we like” music; it truly does something to us. In a study intended to measure how pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion, Anne J. Blood and Rovert J. Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, reported:
“Cerebral blood flow changes were measured in response to subject-selected music that elicited the highly pleasurable experience of ‘shivers-down-the-spine’ or ‘chills.’ Subjective reports of chills were accompanied by changes in heart rate, electromyogram, and respiration. As intensity of these chills increased, cerebral blood flow increases and decreases were observed in brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal…” (published in PNAS—Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—vol 98, no. 20, September 2001)
Put another way: yes, we like music, it sounds good to us, but when we really like it, it gets the blood flowing. It stimulates a genuine sense of pleasure.
From experiences I’ve had over the years as a contemplative tone hound, I’d say that the rawest, most basic injection of excellent tone can do the same. What do you think? I’m also willing to posit that the phenomenon might partly be what’s behind this endless quest for new and better tone that many (perhaps too many) of us seem to be slaves to. Is it a bad thing? Perhaps not. On one hand, it’s an outwardly harmless pursuit of natural sensory pleasure. On the other, I do harbor the lingering feeling that I should get back to making some music, and that the best use of this mystical, invisible auditory pleasure comes in applying it to create something emotional and social and artistic in the presence of others. But hold that thought: Across the studio from my desk there’s a sultry double-bound Inca Silver T-style guitar leaning provocatively against a hand-wired JTM45-style amp, and I can no longer resist their call.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dave Hunter
Dave Hunter is a writer and musician who has worked extensively in the USA and the UK. He is the author of The Guitar Amp Handbook, Guitar Effects Pedals, Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies, The Gibson Les Paul and several other books. Dave is also a regular contributor to Guitar Player and Vintage Guitar magazines.
The Updated And Expanded Edition of Dave Hunter’s The Guitar Amp Handbok: Understanding Tube Amplifiers And Getting Great Sounds is now available from Backbeat Books.