Tone Myths 101
Here’s a post to start things off:
Tonal confusion-
The guitars that made the vintage tones, weren’t vintage when they made them. The were made with the available methods and materials which were different then. They sounded different because they were made differently.
Early rockers and bluesmen and women used 12 to 16s with wound 3rd strings, you don’t. As bending became necessary, players made cheater sets of slinkies with banjo strings, and by tuning down the guitar a half or a whole step (like Hendrix and his greatest imitator SRV). Most players don’t do that either today and either would be a tone changer.
The vintage sound was also in part to huge iron rigs of 100 watts or more with stacks of 12in speakers that were used to compensate for small and inadequate PA systems. Who wants to haul around a 100 watt rig and then muffle the sound with an attenuator? There are too many light weight amps that give up the goods for that.
And finally to really press the point, the story of SRV getting set up at his first gig with his new Monster cables only to decline saying ‘they’re passing to much electricity, go to radio shack and get me all the grey 1/4 in. cable they have.’ In other words just changing that link in his tone chain was enough to put him off his sound. Tone is built as a chain with what you got available to you. I’m sure SRV could have built a tone using super low capacitance cables like Analysis or Evidence Audio cables, etc. but of course he needed to do a gig at that particular moment!
Considering these few things, artists clearly made use of whatever sounded good and had no guide to making vintage tone. And this is what we must do: make our own sounds to suit our own musical environments.
