American Guitar Institute™ - Columns - A Study on Guitar Tone, Time and Speed

A Study on Guitar Tone, Time and Speed:

Sinusoidal Motion, Temporal Anomalies and Esoteric Time Machines

By Krystel Becker

What a broad subject to cover... I don't know how I get myself into these things.... Ah, well... as in all of my everything I have a triad to cover. Sinusoidal motion, in simple terms a single and pure tone; temporal anomalies, time and the odd things that come from it; and esoteric time machines, the strange world of speeding electrons, decaying coils and thousand year old wood. A brief discussion of each, and a unified theory. Brace yourself......

Sinusoidal Motion What the heck is that? Bluntly, the motion of the soundwave released by something such as a vibrating tuning fork that is hit with even force. If you have worked at all with multifx processors, equalization, sound, physics, oscilloscopes, etc., you will be familiar with sine waves. Sinusoids are pure sine waves, there is an equal distance of time between each oscillation, and each wave is smooth. Ok, well, so what? Bassists, drummers, keyboard players all probably know where I am going with this... Dynamics. The control of tone through physical motion. When you hit a vibratable surface, such as a string, hard you distort the soundwave. When you hit it evenly and smoothly you have a sinusoidal, or smooth, soundwave. When you hit the string lightly you have a soundwave with a quick decay. To acheive a tone that is capable of keeping up with you and still sounding great you need to create a set of effects that will release a soundwave that is similar to the one you create with dynamics. For a few good examples of what a smooth and speedy tone sounds like listen to Steve Vai, Shawn Lane or Eric Johnson.

Temporal Anomalies The great debateable existence of time, the man-made creation that now governs all human logic. Time drives music. Time defines music. Music has perfected time. We speed time up to make room for everything we need to do. No one plays more than 64th notes, they simply play at different tempos. Poorly created tone can be an unfortunate limitation to this lack of time constraints, causing rather annoying side effects when it comes to playing fast. Frequency cancelation, unwanted distortion, feedback, sympathy tones, muted or drown-out tones, inconsistency of volume, of tone, of time, and a psychological reaction to slow down or lose notes. Not hearing notes we know we played has a nasty side effect of making ones fingers feel like drying epoxy, gooey and slower by the second. Having one effect or one instrument on which you can play fast and others where you can hardly play at all makes you wonder where the real problems are, and leaves you secretly terrified to play through anyone elses rig or instrument. The feeling of hitting your top speed with one lick that should be incredibly fast but sounds slow, and then playing another with ease that sounds and feels faster but isn't. Time can quickly become nothing but pressure.

Esoteric Time Machines From your pick to the room you are in, you are sending energy that first generated from the meal you had hours before all the way through an intricate system of natural and unnatural processes to the brain of anyone within ear shot. During that long but terribly quick journey the energy morphs, marathons, and outright dies in so many ways that by the time it becomes a sensory impulse the original form is almost completely unrecognizable. And every part of it, from the food you eat to the position of the ear that hears you, has such an immense affect on your tone that if you don't know about a majority of it your tone probably lets you down far too often. People that are in the know always seem to have great tone no matter what they are playing through. You stare at them frustratingly, marvel at their ability, go home and mess around with one setting or another and just assume that you are less of a musician. Later, when it is less obvious that you feel helpless, you ask "So, how do you set up your rig?" or "What gives you your tone?" trying to find something, anything that they do different that may be the cause of your frustration. There's usually the same answer, talk about small amounts of effects like delay and chorus, a little reverb every once in a while (which blows you away because that is where you get a majority of your tone) and a short but confusing discussion about avoiding the dangers of a room with, as Shawn Lane so beautifully states, atrocious acoustics. So you go home, add too much delay and some overdone chorus to your normal preamp settings, sound like a clock radio playing AM Elvis gospel in a concrete tube and decide that the guy was either a lunatic or did something you just couldn't do. What a fine mess....

An Electrons Path So, let's take a short look at the path the energy travels. Let's set up a rig for the sake of discussion. This rig is assuming that everything plugged up is working and in considerable condition, that ones tone does not suck because of a fried cable or blown speaker. We have a Dunlop Nylon Jazz III pick; a typical shred guitar with a double-locking Floyd Rose bridge, and pickups that have been set up to handle all frequencies evenly, generally nearer the treble than bass, and don't place the strings under enough magnetic force to pull them out of tune or make a sustained note warble; a slightly used but not crackling cable from our guitar to our multifx processor and two more slightly used but not damaged cables to our amplifiers which are bypassing the preamp; speakers that are of generally respectable quality in a cabinet that the maker took some time to think out; a room with four walls, a ceiling and floor, and objects of varying size, thickness, and absorption; and then you, with your guitar, and the ability to be mobile.

We'll start with the manipulation of energy you have in your hand when playing single notes of generally typical speed, say a single repeated tone such as middle c in 16th notes in 4/4 time at an adagio tempo of 72 bpm. We are transferring the energy from our arm and hand into the tip of our Dunlop Nylon Jazz III. The tip of the pick then transfers this condensed energy to the string we are hitting. We shorten the length of the vibration by fretting the 3rd fret of the A string, which causes the frequency of the vibration of the A string to go up to 261.6, thus sounding middle c. These 261.6 vibrations per second resonate through the wood of the entire guitar, adding to the tone and slightly modifying the soundwave of the vibrating string, giving you the sound you hear when you play an electric guitar unplugged. The magnetic poles of your pickups pick up the vibrations from the string, and send it down the magnetic coiled wire, which fluctuates polarity to turn the vibration into an electrical current with a matching frequency. That is sent to your potentiometers (volume knobs, tone knobs, etc.) which cuts off or gates the current. It is then sent to the output jack. When it gets here there is a transfer, from the wires from your pots to the metal plates in the output jack and then from there to metal plates in the cable, and then back into the wires of the cable. The same thing happens when the electrons reach the other end of the cable, only in reverse.

When the signal hits the plates in a multifx processor the total signal is sent through a number of avenues; power amps, more pots, effects, gates, etc. They are sent through wires, plates, tubes, circuts, etc., where the acoustic composition of the wave received by the input plate is morphed, amplified, stretched, sped up, reversed, or whatever else your sick mind can come up with. In our rig we also split the signal at some point (generally after the power amp and before digital effects), creating a left and a right where before there wasn't one. This does nothing to the actual wave itself, all that changes is the left signal and the right signal each have half the amplitude as the the signal did as a whole. Different things can be done to these signals, maybe adding certain effects only to the right signal and not the left, or both can be treated the same. After it has been amplified, gated, oscillated, delayed, etc., the left signal is sent to the left output and the right is sent to the right (unless the right isn't connected, which causes both signals to be sent through the left channel, creating a mono signal.) Here there is another plate to wire to plate to wire transfer where it reaches your amp. If you have your processor hooked up through the normal inputs you are sending it through another preamp, which will reamplify the tone, we don't want to do this, so we bypass the preamp and send the signal straight to the power amp where the signal is prepared to be fed to the speakers.

The power amp will do nothing to modify the signal in any major way at this point, all it does is send the signal it is fed to the speakers along with a current to power the speakers themselves. There is enough change to the signal however to make it obvious whether you are using a tube or solid state power amp, mostly because of the way these two types create the amplification itself. There is another plate-wire transfer to the speakers. The beginning of a speaker is similar to a pickup as there is a magnetic wire coiled around a magnetic pole, which changes polarity to match the frequency of the signal. This is sent to the paper cone of the speaker, which in turn moves to the same frequency as the the signal, turning the electrical signal back into an acoustic one. From there the soundwaves move outward, reverberating and decaying and bouncing and cancelling and doing all the things waves do. Finally the soundwave reaches your ear where cones send the signal in to liquids, membranes, hairs and other icky things which vibrate at the same frequency and send the data to your brain where it is analyzed. Unless your ear is directly facing the speaker (which is why high quality headphones have a better tone than the best amps or cabs, and why you should never create effects or mix down cd's with them), you hear the signal as a collection of the room acoustics. Move to different areas of the room and you will hear changes in the tone; warmer, brighter, muted, thicker, louder, etc. That is the path of musical energy. Now, let's have a look at what messes it up.

Killing Your Tone So, what can kill your tone? Aside from the obvious (bad technique, old strings, worn cables, blown speakers, etc.) you have quite a few obstacles to contend with. Room acoustics, guitar quality and design, wire conditions, cable length, solar flares, humidity, extreme cold, your personal chemistry and electrical charge and how you set up your effects. Some of these are easily eliminated; check cables often by hooking them up to different equipment and checking for tone changes, check the wires from your pickups or any other wires you can easily reach for signs of decay or age, don't buy a guitar until you've played it (guitars that are mass produced still have individuality, different characteristics and tone that come from the precise piece of wood used down to the tempurature when the finish is applied, don't assume that since the model is the same that all the guitars will sound the same), sheild your electronics with reflective paper to protect from solar flares (what? did you think I was being sarcastic? I wasn't....), keep your equipment at a constant and comfortable tempurature (never leave it where you wouldn't want to be.) If you take care of everything like you should, all you have left is room acoustics and how you set up your effects. There is nothing you can do about room acoustics other than when you are building a recording studio, so you'll have to compensate with your effects. The main cause of death for a guitars tone is actually the guitarist trying to create tone to begin with.

The Unified Theory of Reliable Guitar Tone Each piece that we have discussed so far can be customized to help you create your own unique tone, everything has an affect on how you sound. But before you get picky about the age of your cables, or the voltage your batteries spew out, you first need to look at your preamps, multifx, pedals, etc., to make sure they aren't what makes you want to overhaul your tone. This is where you will get tone problems with speed as well, since none of what we have talked about so far has an affect on problems with tone while playing fast. Let's have a quick look.

The Preamp Wherever your preamp is, in your amp or your processor, you have generally the same thing, distortion and eq. If you have compression, noise gates, or wah these would be considered a part of the preamp as well, since it is changing the volume of the signal and not the exact construction of the wave itself. This alone is a big source of problems and frustration when it comes to tone. The biggest problem with preamp tone comes from not knowing how to adjust the equalization. Equalization does exactly that, equalizes. But what is it equalizing? The volume of the frequencies you are pushing through the eq. When all frequencies are given the same volume some will drown out others. When you adjust eq you are raising or cutting the volumes of ranges of frequencies so that they are either not drown out, or are louder than other frequencies, depending on what you are looking for. EQ should be adjusted in conjunction with the height of spring-loaded pickups, meaning before you raise the eq for treble frequencies make sure the treble ends of your pickups aren't too low to pick the frequencies up. The best way to adjust eq is to adjust it with numerous guitars. Not only does this eliminate problems stemming from an improperly set up guitar, but it also assures that you can emphasize each guitars own unique tone without making one guitar more powerful than another. Try to make all of your guitars and all of your clean and distorted effects have volumes that work with eachother. It will probably never be just perfect, but making an effort to have all of your possible tones under control and uniform will not only help when you are setting up in different rooms, but it will also help you learn enough about your tone to make any piece of equipment sound just right. Most people don't have much of a problem setting their distortion. If you can't get your distortion to sound the way you want it, you are simply running the wrong type of distortion for the tone you are looking for. Try getting a pedal or something if you struggle with finding the right distortion. Not getting the distortion you are looking for has virtually nothing to do with the cab you are running through, and is almost always the effect itself.

The Ever Hated Noise Gate Most people try desperately to avoid these. By some miraculous twist of fate I actually figured out how to set a noise gate in a way that makes it effective. Alright, so I learned enough about physics for it to make sense, but most people would still be in awe because the noise gate is probably the most frustrating thing you can work with when you don't know a lot about physics. And it's not because it is complicated or that there are a lot of things to set, because they are fairly simple, it's just that it's hard to understand exactly what you are doing to what when you don't have a good grasp on the basics. I'll try to make this fairly basic. First you need to set where the gate is. It should be after, I repeat, after your preamp. The noise gate is opening at a certain decible and closing at a certain decible. Since your preamp is changing the frequencies strength, which changes the decible, you need to place the noise gate after it. You want to set the gate threshold (when it opens) fairly low, but not all the way down. You can fine tune this by listening to the decay of the note after the rest of the preamp and gate is set (don't set your noise gate when there are effects in the chain, since effects can change the decay.) You also want the cut to the signal to be low, I set it as low as possible. The length of time the gate takes to open should also be set as low as it will go. The length of time it takes the gate to close should be all the way up. Since you are setting the gate to cut out unwanted noise, the last thing you want to do it apply cut to the signal that gets through. This is the main thing people mess up with noise gates, they don't cut enough of the unwanted tones by setting their threshold too high and then chop their sustain off completely by setting their release time too low. The great thing about noise gates, though, as soon as you figure it out not only can you use it the same way on every effect, but you can look at anyone elses gate and fix it in a few seconds.

Effects We're going to take a look at what is used to create a general tone, nothing weird or intricate, those are easy after you have a working understanding of tone. First of all, if you are working with a multifx processor, invest some cash in a book or two about the science of music. I recommend a book titled Science and Music by Sir James Jean, which you can get through Dover Publications (the best publishing house for science in my opinion.) The original copyright of this book is 1937 with the unabridged update in 1968, and it's in English circa England 1930 (to-day instead of today, and shews instead of shows, you get used to it... sort of), but this is by far invaluable to understanding everything that is going on within effects, even with the old copyright. Nothing really changes when it comes to this sort of thing, just new technology with old science. But this book seriously rocks, and I highly recommend it to anyone even remotely serious about tone. Another book that I have that I consider incredibly valuable is Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics by Arthur H. Benade, also by Dover Publications. Believe me, diving into physics, especially of the quantum variety, is an immense help when it comes to this sort of thing.

Back to effects. You have your main four; reverb, chorus, delay and my personal least favorite.... wah. Anyone who is using effects is always using atleast one of these four. You also have flange (almost chorus, but not quite), pitch shifters, detuners, samplers with and without reversers, panners, rotary cab emulators, etc. These are mostly freak effects and are used more for strange effects, although some people use these with grace on their main effects without too many problems, a majority of the people stick to combinations of the main four.

Reverb is probably the most popular effect for the tone-novice. Most people think that a majority of tone comes from reverb, which is why it is everywhere and on every combo amp. It's popular because it is simple for everyone to use. When people start getting into more advanced tone, though, they have a hard time letting go of a really heavy reverb. It's a shame because a majority of the really thick, full tone that they are always looking for actually comes from delay, not reverb! Reverb is fun to mess around with though, because real world reverberation is so intricate the effects can get really complicated, and nothing makes me happier. I always use reverb, although I am using less and less of it.

Reverb is an emulation of natural reverberation, which is the bouncing and cancelling of soundwaves in a natural environment. It's pretty hard to get reverb wrong, but it is also very hard to get it just right. Unless it's on an amp, then you just turn a single knob... On my RP21D my full reverb, called Room Echo, has 22 parameters including sections for four seperate multi-tap delays and a feedback loop, it's true stereo with total stereo field control including primary and secondary reverb left and right outputs. I never use it at all (especially since it takes up an entire algorithm, so I can't use anything else) but it is a lot of fun to play with when I'm bored. Regardless of the amount of control you have over your main reverb, it should serve one purpose, controling the decay of the tone. You basically should use reverb to shape the sound your tone has while it goes from full volume to nothing. If you are using it to make your tone thicker, you should try messing around with your eq first, and then try adding incredibly small amounts of delay (as in less than 13 milliseconds, we'll get to that in a minute.)

Chorus is... interesting.... and you use it to.... er..... ok, I haven't messed with chorus much. And I have no idea why because chorus uses one of the most basic principles of the theory of waves. Chorus uses LFO's, or Low Frequency Oscillators. A lot of other effects use these too, whenever you see anything about waveforms or sine for example. They are also used for a lot of other things, like fading. Low Frequency Oscillation is basically a fading between two points, like sinusoidal waves that we were talking about earlier where, for example the crest could represent full amplification and the trough would then represent silence. A Low Frequency Oscillator has two main parameters, frequency and amplitude. They can be called different things by different companies, but basically the frequency is, well, the same as it always is, which is the speed at which the wave is moving (how close or far each crest and trough is from neighboring crests and troughs.) Amplitude is the same as well, it sets the maximum boundary for the wave or in other words it sets the maximum intensity. So, how are LFO's used in chorus? The original soundwave is sent into the chorus and is split into two identical waves. One goes through the effect without being changed. The second is sent to the LFO, which modulates the wave to your settings. The frequency of the second wave is changed to a waveform that you specify (if you can't choose a waveform, it's probably a sine wave, which is short for singular, and it's motion is called sinusoidal motion, which we've talked about a few times already.) As I was saying... The frequency of the soundwave is changed, which changes the pitch (think about speeding up and slowing down a recording, the pitch goes up when it goes faster and down when it goes slower.) You also have a delay, which obviously is used to set when the second wave and the first are reintegrated, or in other terms, how long you hear the first wave before the second wave hits. There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the gist.

So, what the hell does all that do? Well, I'm not quite sure what the practical use is because I haven't messed around with it much. But it should, in theory and in context of good tone, create a slight delay whose pitch is moving slightly in and out of tune. Placed in the hands of a psycho it can also be used to create insane effects that make you get motion sickness.... It should also be said, before I move on that it is completely impossible for two instruments to be in perfect tune with eachother. If you are trying to create effects that sound like there is more than one instrument playing, in theory if you add chorus it should sound more realistic. Since it can be delayed ever so slightly (two humans are never in total time with eachother either, I might add...) and be taken out of pitch slightly it would emulate rather nicely the imperfection of two instruments. (Note - To date ..August 29 2005.. I've found only one purpose for chorus, and it's basically what I was talking about here, I'm now constantly using and seeing chorus used to thicken up rhythm tone for metal.)

And now for delay. This is the most important effect you can use. Most people have the opinion that using delay is cheating, these are the people that have no idea how to set delay gracefully. Using delay is something that I have just gotten into recently. However, I have known about it's use by some of the fastest guitar players for a while. I've hung out with Shawn Lane quite a few times over the last four years, and I also own his video Power Licks. In the video and every time anyone asked him about tone (which is every time a stranger was anywhere near him... or whenever his conversations just happened to wander that way... which happens to be every time I have ever been around him...) he would always say pretty much the same thing, "Some delay and then maybe a little chorus or reverb." Out of all the times I have heard the man say "... and then I used a little bit of delay..." I had never really messed around with it enough to figure it out. Delay the way I set it always sounded so... tubular... like playing in a concrete tube or something... just really round and echoish, I can't think of a word to describe that sound, but I hate it more than anything. But I've been messing around with delay a lot lately and, although I always end up hearing that obscene concrete tube, there is a very very small place within it where it goes from horrid to perfect. It's really hard to hit, though. At first I wasn't setting anything above 13 milliseconds, and I still won't. But when I use delay the correct way for speed, which is as a thickening agent for tone, I can't stand anything over 5 milliseconds, and I usually use a degradation from 4 milliseconds to about 0.5 milliseconds. I also have a very quick decay, which makes it so there isn't a repeat of the note more than the one time (it's the constant repeating of the note at a high volume that is "cheating", since it sounds like you are playing more notes than you really are, however, any time delay is audible on any song with a fast part the speed nazi's claim you're cheating.)

The use of delay in small amounts does tend to help you play faster than normal, not sound faster, but actually play faster. It compensates for a lot of tonal weakness that comes from playing fast through amplification and you tend to hear more of what you are actually playing. There are less lost notes, which is probably one of the most frustrating parts about learning to play fast, when you are playing fast but your effects cut out a lot of the notes you know you are playing. Delay set in this fashion not only brings out every note you play, but it makes your tone seem thicker and more encompassing. Delay can also compensate for weak acoustics.

.......I wasn't even going to talk about wah, but when Jimmy read this he said, "You said you hated wah, but you forgot to talk about it!" and I said, "No, I didn't, I just don't want to talk about it." So, now I have to talk about wah.... I don't like it in the least bit and I will never use it. It has been killed so many times by so many people that I get ill when I hear it. There are a lot of people that use(d) it with grace, Steve Vai and Jimi Hendrix for example. But I just can't bring myself to use it. It's annoyed me too many times. If you use it with grace, you are worthy of respect. If you wear it like a sequin jumpsuit, shame on you :)

A Word About Cabinet Emulators I use them. A lot. Because I don't own amplifiers that I like. I use it more as a quick fix when I like how everything is set, but I need just a little more brightness, or a little more thickness. When I have amps, though, and I set up my tone with them I will try to get rid of emulators and just fine tune my effects to make up for what I used to use them for. Right now though, I have no interest in fine tuning effects, since I know I will have to change them when I finally have amps. (Not that you have to change effects for every amp that you have, but that I don't want to really define my tone until it's really my tone.) (I've ditched the Digitech, by the way, and the emulators went with it. My POD XT Live has an output mode system that detects what I am running through and gives me options to maximize the tonal output, which I love.)

In Closing And just when you thought I would go on forever.... The inner workings of guitar tone is very scientific and extremely sensitive. It is based completely on the theories and laws of acoustics, which are precariously intertwined within the logical but messy world of quantum physics, and that is a strange and scary place, I assure you. I think that is why multifx processors are all but dead. I'm not sure which generation lost it, but somehow we've become a society that expects the fine details of quantum physics to be easily changed at the push of a button. If you really want to get in to creating tone from start to finish, you have to at the least understand acoustics and the laws of waves. If you have no interest at all, go buy a Marshall and a Les Paul.......

Krystel Becker 07.24.03

A Study on Guitar Tone, Time and Speed:

Sinusoidal Motion, Temporal Anomalies and Esoteric Time Machines

Contact Us

Material contained within this website ©2004 - 2006 American Guitar Institute™ unless otherwise noted.