Any guitarist serious about their craft that tells you their search for the Holy Grail, that is tone, has been completed is full of soup.
It really is an endless quest that has so many layers it is hard to quantify. The wide variety of guitars, their pickups, their strings, cabling, amplification, speakers, microphones, pick types, finger style, genre of music, on and on the list goes of every little thing that makes up the tone the listener hears. So quite honestly, this post is simply “my” quest over the years. It is far from over. But reflecting back on where I started to where I am now and what I have discovered over the years may be of interest to others… Maybe not…
When I first started playing guitar I used my uncles acoustic guitar. Not what I wanted. Not long after I got a Harmony guitar (my buddy and me called it “the stick”) from Grandpa Pidgeons (a local discount store) and a borrowed amp that, quite honestly, I have no recollection of. I did not care about tone then. It was an electric guitar and it was making electric guitar sounds. I eventually ended up with a Frankenstein guitar that I knew nothing about. It was horrible. But it made electric guitar sounds.
Then the (now) unthinkable happened.
At 18 I somehow managed to acquire an actual Gibson Les Paul and a small 10″ Crate amplifier. It was an absolutely beautiful guitar – wine red, nice binding, but I knew ZERO about Gibson Les Paul’s. I thought it was a grandpa guitar but played it a bit and decided I would trade it in (gasp) for another guitar that I though would be better for me. That guitar ended up being a piece of shit Kramer Striker, black, but because it had tremolo bar I thought it was better. It still makes me sick thinking of that trade to this day (even more sickening is that the music store in my town that was ok with gipping a kid out of a much more expensive guitar for a piece of shit guitar. I never did business with them again and to this day tell everyone to stay away from them).
I joined the Army not long after that and mostly just played whatever guitars were available to me at the rec center. However, during this time I did start to be conscious of how I sounded and what I could play. I began learning lead guitar parts instead of just rhythm guitar and in doing so, noticed the difference in sound that lead lines made up. When I got out of the Army I ended up purchasing and Ibanez guitar with a Peavey Classic 2×12 cabinet. Needless to say, with no real understanding of guitar or amp setups, it sounded brittle and lifeless. I just wanted to play guitar in bands and make money, I really didn’t put any effort into actually understanding the nuances of guitars and amplification.
Around 1991 I picked up a 1987 Fender American Stratocaster really cheap from some kid, who was like I was at 17, wanting something “spikey, modern and with a whammy bar”. The guitar had the neck sanded and had a nasty hot rail humbucker, making an already brittle sounding guitar, worse. I decided to replace the pickups with some Fender Tex Mex pickups and had a guy put them it. They helped. But not much. This was my first “real” guitar (other than the Les Paul) that I bought with my own money. I still had the Peavey Classic 2×12 amp and invested in a rack processor (the Digitech GSP21) and that was my system from 1991 until 2003.
Ten plus years of trying to make that setup sound good. It never really did. I played in a few bands over those years and my tone was just garbage. Oh, I’d get by mind you. And playing some of the dives we played at the drunk crowd could have cared less about my tone. But it bothered me. But here is a take away from that time period – your guitar matters how you sound. In 2003 I acquired a Fender MIM Fat Stratocaster. Same Peavey amp, but my sound improved with that guitar. Significantly. Was it great? No, but it was better. My first real guitar became a backup in case I broke a string at a gig, and pretty much from that day to the present never got played again. But, unfortunately, my tone was still not very good.
I decided to sell the Peavey and bought a solid state Marshall G100R head and an Avatar 2×12 (that had Celestion Vintage 30’s in it). But once again, this was done without much thought. My reasoning was that the head was a Marshall, it had to sound good and I had heard good things about the Celetion Vintage 30’s so I ordered that as well. It did sound good. And for heavy, blues/rock music it took my tone to different level. With the addition of a few pedals (a Boss DS-1, a Boss CH-1 Super Chorus and a Vox Wah) I thought I had a pretty nice gigging rig.
This setup of the Marshall/Avatar/MIM Strat was my rig for the next 8 years or so. In between I picked up a couple guitars (an Ibanez Artcore semi-hollowbody and an Agile AL-3000 (Les Paul copy). I played in a lot of bands and a lot of gigs with this setup. I experimented with a lot of different pedals over this time, but for the most part, this setup defined my tone. Near the beginning of 2011 I was getting severely burnt out playing live, we were moving soon and we needed the money, so I sold the Marshall/Avatar rig as well as the Agile Les Paul. (I had already sold off the Artcore because it just would not stay in tune) and took a couple years off playing live.
When I decided to get back into playing live I went though a lot of different amps. I had a Line6 Spider, a VOX AC15, a Fender Princeton Chorus, and a Blackstar ID:Core. None of them measured up to the Marshall, but that Marshall sound was not what I was after. I needed something different. My style has, as I said early on, a blues/rock feel, but I wanted to really dial in a killer blues sound while still having the ability to play some rock stuff or some country stuff. A Marshall was just not going to do that for me (or at least how I perceived it). in 2016 for my 50th birthday, my wife bought me a new Agile AL-2500 Les Paul that was identical to the one I had sold. I didn’t play it much because I really (even at this stage of the game) knew little about guitar setups and wasn’t overly happy with how it sounded or played.
It was now 2019. I had been playing guitar for well over 30 years, closing in on 40, and I was still searching for that elusive tone. A musician friend of mine on Facebook, who I knew had KILLER tone told me that I should check out the Quilter 101 Mini head. He used one and told me I would be hard pressed to find a better sounding head. Well, unlike that kid who sold his Les Paul (moron) I did my research. Luckily now with the internet finding reviews, demos and more makes checking things out ahead of time easy. There were practically no bad reviews of this head and one of the big benefits of it was that it had a lot of headroom for using pedals with it. I still don’t use a lot of pedals, but began understanding the association of overdrive pedals with amplifiers (things such as the clean headroom, how the gain stages can be pushed by an external overdrive, stacking overdrives, actual effect chain order [yeah, it took me over 20 years to realize that], using effects loops and so much more). More research lead me to believe that once again, a Celestion Vintage 30 was the right speaker for me in combination with this head. It would give me the clean, blues sound I was looking for along with a ballsy, blues crunch if I needed it. So, I bought the Quilter 101 Mini head (original, no reverb).
The single best guitar equipment purchase I have ever made. Period.
Overnight my tone from back in the 90’s seemed even more anemic than it did back then. This head was so full sounding, beefy, powerful, and loud (50 watt head but with the headroom is much louder) combined with my Randal Diavlo 1×12 cabinet (the V30 speaker) and I was a new guitarist! My band mates all just dropped their jaws and said they could not believe the difference in the way I sounded. I have experimented with a lot of different pedals since I bought this head (all of them sound great with it) and I had a tone that I honestly thought “I’m there, my search is over.”
Yeah, probably not….
Flash forward to the present. four years of playing a LOT of shows with that rig also included four years of really starting to dig in and understand the minute details of guitars, amplification, effects, and honestly, all things guitar. I’ve learned a lot, discovered things that I should have discovered as a young adult, found missing pieces of the puzzle to my understanding of sound, theory and more. One of them was the benefits of having a guitar properly setup up and, if needed, how much difference a good neck/fret dressing matters. I took my agile Les Paul to a local guy who knows more in his pinky that I’ll ever know about guitars that builds and repairs guitars. He took my Agile Les Paul and for very little money turned that guitar into my favorite guitar I own. Another guitar lesson learned.
Things being what they are, I decided I would learn about and enter the digital world. I purchased an Hotone Ampero amp and effects modeling unit. This is a whole other story for another post (I’ve posted a couple already) but needless to say in my research of this new technology as well as my understanding and search for tone is still very much alive. I sold my beloved Quilter 101 and replaced it with a Quilter Superblock US (there is a post about that unit, give it a read, it is incredible as is all things Quilter makes) in an effort to streamline and lighten my load-in at gigs. The Quilter Superblock was meant to be a backup for the Ampero but right now, while I am still figuring out the huge amount of options and settings in the Ampero, the SBUS is my main board. Both systems, however, plug directly into the FOH system, making setup easy and saving me from carrying an extra cabinet.
Now I have discovered “IR” (impulse response) technology and that is taking my tone quest down yet another rabbit hole.
So, like I started off saying, the quest is more than likely never ending for me, especially as long as technology continues to evolve and bring new and exciting things to the world we guitarists live in. I discover new things everyday. I love talking with my other guitar friends about things related to guitars, amplification, sound, gigging, etc and just keep on absorbing new things, even if they are things I should have learned years ago. The quest for tone is a personal choice, a desire to improve. The quest for knowledge is also a person one. But armed with knowledge and armed with the desire to always improve, the limits are never ending. For some, finding the Holy Grail is the ultimate fulfillment. For others, it is the search that is the ultimate fulfillment. I personally don’t think I will ever find that Holy Grail of tone, but believe the second option of finding that the journey is equally rewarding is what satisfies my soul.