I really love threads like this. When I was active in the local music community I didn't know much about tone beyond cranking everything except the mids (i know, lame). I've been tone chasing for a few years since getting back into playing and I think I've got the tone thing nailed. I'd like to get back into some lessons so I'm going to keep an eye on this thread to see the suggestions. I don't need the know-how as much as actually having a reason to sit down and practice.

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Originally posted by P220 Smudge:

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Originally posted by mark123:
This is truth. A good man with good knowledge.

Cheers, Mark! You've been on my mind lately, man. I haven't forgotten that book. That's still happening. Things have been kinda nutty this year.

Thanks for thinking of me. I know it's been a strange year so let me know if there's anything I can do for you.

Frayedends, several months ago I bought a new tube amp from my guy at Sweetwater and, after a little sorting out, I’m really happy with it. It’s the Sweetwater edition of the ‘65 Fender Princeton Reverb Reissue, done in tweed with a 12” Eminence Cannabis Rex rather than the 10” Jensen in the silverface. If you like Fender tones, it’s worth a look.

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Originally posted by TMats:
Frayedends, several months ago I bought a new tube amp from my guy at Sweetwater and, after a little sorting out, I’m really happy with it. It’s the Sweetwater edition of the ‘65 Fender Princeton Reverb Reissue, done in tweed with a 12” Eminence Cannabis Rex rather than the 10” Jensen in the silverface. If you like Fender tones, it’s worth a look.

Sounds awesome, is that a custom or configurable stocked item?

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Originally posted by frayedends:
Wow. Thanks for all this info. It’s a lot to digest.

Hopefully, some of it is helpful, and if you have any other questions, I'd like to help however I can. There really is a ton of information out there and I've drank really deeply at a few different wells in the dell, as it were. I just about wrote a book trying to hone in on a few things for you and decided to reign it in a bit.

You can spend a ton of money and not get to the sound you're seeking. You can also spend a fraction of that and get there. It really depends on you. I personally chased that sound for a while, and made it happen. Having "that" sound coming at you through a tube half stack feels pretty badass, especially when you've had a hand in assembling and/or customizing most or all of the signal chain. It really all comes down to how much you want to dig in.

That’s not to say I don’t have useful into and tips forthcoming with the questions you already asked, just that I need to do a bit of editing for clarity first. I went a bit ramble-tastic, lol.

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Originally posted by tigereye313:

quote:

Originally posted by TMats:
Frayedends, several months ago I bought a new tube amp from my guy at Sweetwater and, after a little sorting out, I’m really happy with it. It’s the Sweetwater edition of the ‘65 Fender Princeton Reverb Reissue, done in tweed with a 12” Eminence Cannabis Rex rather than the 10” Jensen in the silverface. If you like Fender tones, it’s worth a look.

Sounds awesome, is that a custom or configurable stocked item?

Special order for, and from, Sweetwater. It’s stocked right now. Clean tones—yep. Begs to be overdriven—oh yeah. Little or no hiss or hum. Nice amp.

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Originally posted by frayedends:
Wow. Thanks for all this info. It’s a lot to digest.

I'm happy to help however I can. I absolutely don't intend to overwelm with info, but yes, there's a lot to consider.

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Originally posted by frayedends:
As far as a guitar with pickups you described earlier I will have to do some research. Is it something I can find off the shelf or do I need to have work done. I think I may be in over my head and budget very quickly. It’s probabl more important for me to start practicing and learning more before I just move into huge money. I think I could soon put in about $1000 but maybe it’s better to wait and put in more money later than to blow some now and not get a good setup. In any case if there are specific guitars off the shelf you’d recommend I’d love a link. I’ve been looking on Sweetwater.

Well, to be fair, it's a very lofty goal. In spring 2014, all the staff headed down to NAMM and the shop was ahead of schedule. My production supervisor had a burr under his saddle for some reason and declared a "this is happening once, ever" half day and ordered us all into the barn. The barn had a wall with 40+ guitars hanging from it, and a few dozen brown and black Fender amps not newer than 1969. We got his personal master class on guitar tone for hours. How it worked, why it worked, and everything from there. He talked personal experiences, anecdotes he heard second hand, passed around original prototypes of PAF's and other stuff that ought to be in a museum, and then when bringing up the solo guitar tone from "Comfortably Numb" totally reverted to about 14 years of age and all he could manage was to close his eyes, shake his head, and say "just... fucking stop. You can stop right there. That's it, that's the perfect guitar tone." This man hates Stratocasters with a passion, and I won't even go into explaining the depths of my dilemma navigating this prejudice, but apparently so does a goodly portion of the pickup building industry, and for one or two fair reasons and a whole lot of bias. He brags about owning exactly one Strat, that he uses as a doorstop to his office. So to say there's some dichotomy there would be an understatement. But Pink Floyd got played in the shop a fair bit.

A lot of people want to sound like David Gilmour, but it's a type of guitar tone I think I can get you into the ballpark of within a fair budget.

I have an undying love for used guitars and rescue pets; to me they're nearly on par in terms of something sweet needing some love in a caring home. I would highly encourage you to look around at every Strat you can lay your hands on. Some will be turds, many will be ok, there just might be one that smacks you with a lightning bolt. Buzz and action and all that can be very adjustable with Fender pattern anything, but set the bottom of the guitar on your foot (so it's not on the floor which might agitate the seller) and, propping the neck up, sight down the strings so that the strings are vertical to the ground and there's no stress of gravity on the neck. If tuned, the strings will be at tension, and so will the neck. Thus, the strings will be straight. Look down both sides of the neck, from the nut to the neck joint, and use the strings to compare how straight the neck is. Perfectly straight is good, with a tiny bit of bow being desirable (middle of the neck "bows" away from the straight strings). Lots of bow (strings way off the fretboard), or a back-bow (bending the other way with a hump in the middle, somewhere around the 7-12 frets) is not good, but what you specifically want to avoid are humps or anything but a smooth line or curve to the profile of either side of the neck doing this test. A hump can often occur on one side and not the other, especially, for whatever reason, with bolt-on guitars, and this is called warpage. I recommend that if it's not a heel-adjust guitar (and thus a gigantic pain in the ass to get to for all but a percentage of guitars) and you can get to the truss rod, that they fit a wrench to it so you can verify that it isn't bottomed out in adjustment one way or the other, but often, we don't get that chance.

Find a Strat that plays well, and very importantly here, sounds nice and loud unplugged. There's guitars that look and feel great that cost thousands of dollars that are loaded with all kinds of boutique appointments that are tonally dead. There's cheap guitars that are beginner budget that are surprisingly vibrant and airy-sounding. The Squier I mentioned, I sold amps and pickup sets off of. Had more than a few customers jaw-drop when I showed them the headstock that read "Squier" following a squinted "what're you playing on, there?" Tap your knuckles around the body and listen to the resonance. What it sounds like plugged in is, believe it or not, less important than what it sounds like unplugged. I'll get to that later.

General features to look for on a Strat for good tone: You're going to want a bone nut. Bone. You don't want graphite (I don't care who says what about it), or plastic, or synthetic bone because it's uniform density and voidless, etc, on your guitar. Brass may sustain more in some cases, but you just want bone. You just do. You want resonance, and graphite kills resonance. Same thing with your saddles, you want stamped, not milled. You want a solid, milled tone block on your trem, not MSM or cast (where else have we heard that? ), and you want the trem for that reason, whether you choose to ever use it or not, and if you choose to use it, don't you ever set it up to float, I don't care who says what else about it. You want string trees to get proper angle over the nut for tuning reasons. I like the 50's disc style because it's 50's style. The updated D-profile bar type versions are better for tuning. You want Tonepros everything you can put on the guitar, period. It's what I've done with my personal Strat and Les Paul, and I could explain it, but just know it's what the techs in the industry do by default. You can get a Strat routed for whatever, from three singles to bathtub route, but really, if you don't have a single coil Strat pickup by the neck, you're losing the whole point of the guitar. Nothing else sounds like a sweet Strat neck pickup, and nothing else sounds like three Strat pickups wired in parallel, and nothing else sounds like the neck and the bridge wired in either parallel, or series. I saw Edmond linked an article where the guy suggested putting a P-90 in the bridge and I actually envisioned the Jackie Chan WTF, no reflection on Edmund. A HSS Strat is one thing, if you don't own another guitar with a bridge humbucker and don't know about wiring your Strat for seven sounds. If you have another guitar with a bridge humbucker, you want a push-push or push-pull pot and wire the thing for add neck to any position. Why add neck instead of add bridge? Because nobody cares about the bridge pickup on a Strat (getting into opinion there, but rolling with it). It's the neck pickup you want to add. Two cool new sounds you'll immediately recognize from odd places as you use them: all three at once, and bridge and neck only. You just want those.

Factory pickups suck. Fender and Gibson are great guitar companies. They make great guitars. They are not, and never have been pickup companies. They put into their guitars what was necessary to make them work. In terms of tone, sometimes it was wide of the mark, sometimes it was an unexpected perfect bull's eye. But never did Fender or Gibson put out a guitar that didn't have working pickups from the factory unless it was a lemon. That much can be said of them, and everyone else can be judged by that measure, I suppose. It was my opinion before I made boutique after market pickups, and now that I no longer make boutique after market pickups, it's still my opinion. If you want the most tone, you don't want factory pickups, unless it's an original '54 Strat, and well, I have handled a few dead ones that got cut apart and re-wound and you best leave that sort of holy unmolested unless it's to be resurrected and that's a just undertaking. I can say with all certainty that the workmanship in aftermarket pickups from certain modern American companies is way, way, waaaaaay beyond what they were cranking out in the 50's and 60's. There's guitar snobs that will tell you you will never get your magical sought-after tone without a 50's or 60's Fender or Gibson something-or other with whatever features, with pickups marked by one particular old Mexican lady who happened to scatter-wind her pickups a certain way for amazing tone. It's not true. I cut apart a set of 1967 Gibson factory P-90's that looked so rough, I wouldn't have turned them in, and I was THE fucking P-90 guy in the shop. I sat next to several rebuilds of early 50's Fender pickups, including a '54 Strat bridge pickup and a legit Nocaster bridge pickup. They were all slapped together and looked rough and shoddy. If you do it several hundred, or a thousand times a month, you can look at something someone else built and go "really? This is worth thousands? It looks like 'last one off the line on a Friday following four shitty days' and even has things that would get it rejected at this operation. Really?" Now, all that said, there was the day the big boss called us all out of the shop to have us A/B some guitars with humbuckers in the bridge and 9/10 guys liked "A" only to find out it's one of ours and the only difference is, it's got the polescrews, slugs and magnet from an original '59 PAF some dingbat took apart and ruined. Sounded smoother and rounder. Something to do with the metallurgy, I'm sure. Might just be enough metallurgy at this point rather than Mexican hand-wound voodoo, and given that we're less than 100 years into this art tells me the best is yet to come and that we've only scratched the surface at figuring out guitar tone.

Ok, so all that's to say, buy the less expensive used guitar that speaks to you and not to worry about the electronics hardly at all, why? Because the Fender Stratocaster is the AR of its world. It's absolutely that comparable. And you, the user, can absolutely turn it into a completely custom, fully-functioning, tuned piece. I helped a highschool girl do it for her senior project one Sunday, we shut the store down at the usual time and built her a Strat out of parts she ordered, and she did every step I felt was safe for her to do, which was all but a handful. I guided her on the final fitting and setup. I daresay it was as good as any Mexican Strat. Now she's got a guitar that she knows is solid that she can parts-swap to her heart's content, because we got a decent neck mounted correctly to a decent body and built from there. Started with cheapie crap pickups we had in the used bin, but it's 9 or 11 screws to get the pickguard off and two screws per pickup, two solder joints per pickup. If you've slapped together an AR, you can build a Fender pattern guitar. Start with one that sounds great unplugged, and plays well, and learn to do your part, the rest of it I can absolutely help try to guide you to with any strings I might be able to pull.

If you are decent using a computer and do not mind a lot of trial and error, a Fender Mustang amp might be right for you. You can get a huge variety of sounds from one, mostly from using user made models from the better creators. Stock ones aside from clean Fender models are so-so.

You get a lot of versatility in one of those that can make your guitar budget go a long way.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:

Ok, so all that's to say, buy the less expensive used guitar that speaks to you and not to worry about the electronics hardly at all, why? Because the Fender Stratocaster is the AR of its world. It's absolutely that comparable. And you, the user, can absolutely turn it into a completely custom, fully-functioning, tuned piece.

You've made a lot of good points here, and I think this is another great one. The electronic bits are easy to swap out on pretty much any guitar, and so is a lot of the hardware.

When I first started playing, I had a Peavey guitar made out of something like MDF that sounded terrible.

When I got a little older and more serious, I bought an American strat in a finish I liked that sounded good unplugged and pretty good plugged in (it was an HSS configuration with moderately high output single coils and a moderate output humbucker.

Fast forward many years later and I really wanted a Les Paul kind of sound but don't like playing Les Pauls. I found a used Anderson Cobra (which is Telecaster-shaped, but uses the same wood configuration, scale length, and pickup configuration as a Les Paul), promptly took out the complicated high-output splittable/parallelable/whatever humbuckers and put in some high-end vintage reproduction humbuckers (ThroBak). Tone bliss.

But then having an HSS strat seemed silly. So I put together an all-singlecoil pickguard with some aftermarket pickups. Not quite there yet, bought some different single coils (Lollar). Strat tone bliss.

As long as the wood and construction is good, the hardware and electronics are easy to change.

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Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:
If you are decent using a computer and do not mind a lot of trial and error, a Fender Mustang amp might be right for you. You can get a huge variety of sounds from one, mostly from using user made models from the better creators. Stock ones aside from clean Fender models are so-so.

You get a lot of versatility in one of those that can make your guitar budget go a long way.

I have one of the best modeling amps out there (Kemper Profiler), and it sounds really good - and gets better every time they put out a software update for it - but to me it can't quite match a real tube amp. Even, or maybe especially, something simple like a tweed Deluxe.

quote:

originally posted by P220 Smudge:
I'm happy to help however I can. I absolutely don't intend to overwelm with info, but yes, there's a lot to consider...

...Start with one that sounds great unplugged, and plays well, and learn to do your part, the rest of it I can absolutely help try to guide you to with any strings I might be able to pull.

Really enjoyed reading your post. Been thinking about changing out the tone block, your post encourages me to do so. Hadn’t considered changing out the nut for bone. Better do that too. Much appreciated

Wow again. Thanks for all this info. P220 Smudge I am going to read your post in depth when I’m home from vacation later this week. It’s a ton of really good info. I’m intrigued actually. I need my computer to really delve into all you have told me. I think my first step will be to look for the guitar and not be in a rush. You’ve given me some awesome info to get started. I’ll deal with what I have now until I find the right guitar. I’ll deal with a good tube amp after that I think I’ll need more cash for that. Back in the 80s I had a Mesa boogie 50 cal head with a half stack cab. That was killer. I miss it but I’m sure my neighbors are glad I don’t still own that.

I’ll use my mustang amp for now I don’t have the software for it. I’ll have to download and figure out that tech stuff. I think I’m gonna be busy.

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Originally posted by maladat:

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Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:
If you are decent using a computer and do not mind a lot of trial and error, a Fender Mustang amp might be right for you. You can get a huge variety of sounds from one, mostly from using user made models from the better creators. Stock ones aside from clean Fender models are so-so.

You get a lot of versatility in one of those that can make your guitar budget go a long way.

I have one of the best modeling amps out there (Kemper Profiler), and it sounds really good - and gets better every time they put out a software update for it - but to me it can't quite match a real tube amp. Even, or maybe especially, something simple like a tweed Deluxe.

No, but I was going with his guitar budget as a guide. You can get a lot for several hundred but it's too easy to get into a couple thousand range.