Gods of Timbre

[Xurtio]

If we consider a guitarist and a pianist hitting the same exact pitch on their instrument for the same duration, we will immediately notice differences between the two despite them producing the same pitch. In short, that difference is the timbre. Melodic phrasing says nothing without a timbre to convey the tone of those melodic phrases.

The discussion surrounding music theory has always emphasized timing and pitch. The rest of music, that we often don't explicitly discuss, comes down to timbre. Often people refer to the "feeling" or the "passion" with which an artist plays, and a lot of this comes down to timbre - if we can tie the dynamic intensity of attacks or techniques like bends or stops to the dynamics of emotional intensity, we can communicate those emotions.

There is not a neatly unifying theory for timbre like there is for concepts like pitch (including harmony) and rhythm. Timbre can be analyzed through wave forms and the waveforms themselves have properties like attack, decay, sustain, and harmonics. The first three are analysis of timing, the last is a pitch. Consider the following waveform:



A pure tone would just be a sine wave of that tone's frequency. Real acoustic instruments also generate harmonics - higher order ratios of the fundamental frequency, or tone that you identify it's pitch as. Most of the above waveform has a consistent pattern that that slowly decays to nothing. But in the beginning of the waveform you see the signal is a bit more compact. When you first strike a guitar string, for instance, it's not really ringing at a single frequency. Rather, it is unstable, starting at a frequency sharper than the note you are tuned to and falling quickly to that epected note - but this happens so quickly, the ear interprets it more of a stylistic flourish on the note. As you control the force with which you hit the string, you control how much energy you give the string. Together with the material properties of the string, this generates the attack and decay pattern above.

So, without further ado, my first submission will be a big influence of mine, David Gilmour. Gilmour is well known for his unique tone - and most of it is in his fingers.

One of Gilmour's premiere techniques is that he bends up to the note he wants, and he often does it very quickly. This is interesting from a timbre point of view because he has somehow replaced his attack with a rising tone instead of a falling tone that a typical attack brings.

The Song
Pink Floyd: Animals: Dogs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDH6dcbRtuU

The Technique
First off, the timbre of the acoustic guitar goes really well the 9th 13th, sustain /whatever jazzy chords that are being played here, but we're going to focus on Gilmour's solos. An additional note on the tone here. This was done with a splitter patch going to two amps, one of them a revolving leslie speaker (which gives the leads a very prominent howl)

You can see how the main solo is done here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYDrSnCE6RQ

Notice how he bends right up to the note. The bends are being used more as an attack than what we think of as a bend. What's more, Gilmour often does the traditional bend on top of these, so he'll bend up two half steps as an alternate attack, then do a traditional half step bend from there.

Another trick Gilmour employs for timbre mastery is mixed strings. He will mix different gauges of strings so that his highs are better for bending and his lows are better for those gutteral chugga chuggas.

Hope you enjoyed this first entry!