GuitarBizarre

Post # 1 - Progress for it's own sake.

To begin with, I should address that this blog is my personal opinion, and, as in any creative or subjective space, there is room for interpretation and differences of opinion.Regardless of that, I do think, that even if a manufacturer or musician should disagree with my assertions, there are a number of issues relating to the tonal elements of the creative process, that they should have probably considered (Not necessarily agreed with me on, but considered) before doing so.

With that said, I will begin. It is, as with any instrument, true that the sound created naturally, influences the player's process. A competent guitar player given a Fender Twin Reverb set to clean and a Peavey 5150 set to the lead channel, will play differently through both amplifiers. What sounds good to that player on one will not sound so pleasing on the other and vice versa. The same applies to guitars themselves, a Fender Stratocaster lends itself far more readily to some styles and modes of creative expression than a Gibson Les Paul or an Ibanez RG does. One step further, and we delve into the individual components of the guitar and begin to discuss things like vintage bridges, Floyd Rose, Set neck, through neck, pickups, piezo etc.

The sheer array of tonal options available to us in present-day 2014 is massive. The technology for digital modelling has bloomed and come of age and so have many other manufacturing techniques and new materials that we can leverage to make instruments or parts of instruments, such as Graphite, Carbon Fiber, Neodymium, optical circuits and so on. Companies like Fishman and Q-Tuners are continuing traditions of innovation and advancement started decades before by companies like Steinberger and Moses Graphite, by using exotic materials and clever manufacturing techniques to do things that simply weren't possible back in the 50s and 60s. And, paradoxically for a set of musicians who, by and large, jaded by the traditions of the 50's and 60's as they are in the present day, are looking for the new and interesting, this might actually be a problem.

Now, I don't mean that we have a problem in any sense of business – any company is welcome to bring any product to market and we the paying customer will decide if it is worth paying for. The problem is that a great number of companies are bringing product to market, that simply doesn't solve a problem anyone actually has. The aforementioned Q-Tuners are a relatively good example, among many other new and interestingly designed pickups since the 80's. Q-Tuners aim, according to their own marketing, is to provide “a sound that’s ultra-transparent, dynamic and articulate. They let your technique and rig to shine with a smooth and punchy articulation that’s been elusive until now." This is, to cut through the jargon and buzzwords, a lovely, fancy way of saying that these pickups intend to produce a sound that is more "Hi-Fi", more accurate to the "original" sound of the string, with less colouration, a more even frequency response across a wider range and with greater sensitivity to volume changes and the actions of the player. Sounds good, right? Not necessarily.

The great issue with this approach to electric guitar pickup design (and all electric-guitar-equipment design) is simple, but often, it seems, overlooked - the sounds and nuances we associate with a truly great electric guitar performance, be it perfect cleans from the 50's, courtesy of Les Paul himself, saturated distortion from the 60s, courtesy of Hendrix, right the way through to the present day, ultra-distorted, ultra-tight djent rhythm sounds of bands too numerous to mention(and some would say too similar to differentiate), all stem from one very basic thing - The original electric guitars, even those based on acoustic instruments modified by pioneers like Charlie Christian and Lloyd Loar, to later efforts like Les Paul's famous "Log", and right through to the first mass production instruments courtesy of Rickenbacker, Fender and Gibson - all of these iconic and timeless instruments and sounds... sound nothing like the unamplified strings of whatever design of instrument they happened to be attached to.

Leaving aside less common (but equally idiosyncratic) designs of guitar pickup such as piezo and transducer, the magnetic pickup, iconic, replicated and nuanced though it is, is far from a perfect representation of the sound of any guitar string. It's astonishingly sensitive in a very narrow midrange band, and comparatively weak in output towards both ends of the frequency spectrum. To get enough output to drive an amp, a great deal of copper winding must be used, which means capacitance and a falling off of high frequency response. Even vintage pickups or reproductions thereof, which are very bright compared to some of the ultra-high-output metal monster pickups available today, have a frequency response which is well short of the upper range of our hearing, and is uneven and peaky throughout. Some manufacturers of traditional or near-traditional pickups, such as Lace, actually quote their pickup's peak frequencies in order to tell the player whether the pickup is bright or more deep and rounded.

And you know what? That's a good thing. Those "altered" and "less-than-true" tones gave birth to everything we know about the electric instrument. They created Hendrix's screaming overdrive, they're responsible for Andy Summer's beautiful cleans and Steve Vai's piercing leads. In comparison the fact is, the electric guitar unamplified...save for some specific effects, simply doesn't appeal aesthetically to the majority of people.

So what do we achieve by creating a pickup which provides that "accurate" representation of a sound we don't like in the first place? Far less, I would offer, than we gain by taking the best aspects of something that, though a comparative failure in its original purpose, ultimately became its own beast, and defined not one but many generations of guitar players by its sheer ubiquity and wonderful flaws, and then trying to improve on that directly.

This isn't a new thing, of course. We deal with overdrive pedals, thousands of traditional magnetic pickups on the market by hundreds of manufacturers, large and small, in a bewildering array of designs, sizes, colours, winds and magnet types, we deal with amps that have more gain, less gain, no gain, we deal with speakers from "vintage" 30s, to modern day 100 Watt monsters with metal cones, and yet, when it comes to these thousands of designs, I can't personally think of an example of one that tries to be more "Hi-Fi", or "accurate" to the original sound of an unplugged electric guitar. They all start with the glorious base that is the electric guitar, improve upon it, address a direct, aesthetic flaw in a competing product or set of products, and subsequently market themselves based on their strengths.

The sound of the electric guitar wasn't born of a need for accuracy. Everything we know about the instrument today is the result of those original "flaws", where acoustic guitars amplified would feed back, or where old fender amps would distort at volume, taken for the good they, mostly unintentionally, brought us.

If you're an equipment manufacturer, by all means make the guitar you want. Interesting designs like Novax's fanned frets, or Rick Toone's patented neck profiles, or Titanium cored necks, or Moses Graphite necks, or EMG's active pickup designs, or the active EQ systems common on bass, all of these things are fantastic and the world of music would be a less rich place without them...but none of these things, for all they look crazy, or seem to be reinventing the wheel... none of these fantastic designs were born out of the idea that the electric guitar should try to strive for an ideal that nobody wants to hear on its own. They were all born out of a deep love for the electric guitar as it's own instrument, and a desire to improve only on that about it which needs improving.

Traditionalist though it may seem to argue this, it's not a matter of discouraging innovation. If a manufacturer tomorrow made a guitar that sounded utterly alien to me, yet was in its own right beautiful to hear, I would be in full support of that. I'd only ask that what they had created, would first be something that people actually wanted to hear for its own sake, rather than a perfect imitation of something that nobody has ever desired to hear imitated perfectly.

And for me, aiming to perfectly replicate the ugly sounds an unplugged electric guitar makes? I'm sorry, but that's just not what makes sense to me.

__________________