Guitar Tone

It's All In The Hands

GHS Strings & Eric Johnson

There’s more truth to that than you might think! While your choices of guitars, amps, effects, strings, and even picks help shape your overall guitar tone, those wriggly things on the ends of your arms have a lot to do with it, as well. This is not really quite as evident in a situation where the guitarist uses heavily-effected setups, which leads me to believe that some people actually hide their weak playing technique behind walls of distortion and chorus, etc. That can be effective in certain songs, I suppose, but if it’s not being played cleanly and precisely, it’ll show itself eventually.

But to hear someone play through nothing more than a cable between his guitar and his amp, and still produce incredible guitar tones, is nothing short of amazing. And much of that comes literally right out of their fingertips.

Leslie West, Les Paul Jr. and Marshall (only)

I remember seeing Leslie West play live, back in the 70’s, with nothing more than a Les Paul Junior and a big ol’ Marshall stack... well, two Marshall stacks, actually... with no pedals on the floor, and nothing but wire in between them. His hand techniques could wring more different voices out of that single-pickup guitar than some people can with two different guitars and a couple of different amps. Amazing! If you’ve ever heard much of his playing, you’ll have to give him the crown for the best vibrato ever, for one thing. And he created his ultimate guitar tone by making that thing scream, or cry, or sing, or moan, all by only changing the way he picked, muted, or fingered each note... in short, by his hand techniques alone.

Eric Clapton - Slow Hand

Eric Clapton is another of those with the gifted hands. He uses very little in the way of effects, and those only subtly. Yet, he can produce startlingly different sounds from the same guitar and amplifier. Eric Clapton uses his "Slow Hands" to create his ultimate guitar tone!

Eddie Van Halen - Innovator

OK, so you’re thinking, “This is just some old guy writing about his olden-days guitar heroes here”. True enough; I’ll grant you that. So let’s talk Eddie Van Halen, then. He uses, what, a phaser and a chorus, maybe? He relies heavily on his amplification to produce the famous ‘brown sound’, but all the same, he can conjure up some very different sounds from one guitar and rig. He’s fine-tuned his equipment setup so that subtle differences in hand techniques will produce marked changes in the tone he’s achieving at any given moment in a song.

John Mayer - Just Watch His Hands

I can’t really comment much on the current herd of guitar heroes, as I don’t listen to Korn, or Smashing Pumpkins, or Limp Bizkit, etc. But there are still players out there who can play. Some of you young guitar-slingers are going to cringe when I drop the name ‘John Mayer’, but have you really, really listened to him just play guitar? Put the cheesy pop lyrics of his ballads out of your heads for now, and get hold of some video of him playing live. Yes, he has a board full of little boxes that he steps on now & then, and he swaps guitars during a show like rock-stars swap wives. But just watch his hands. Pay close attention to his picking hand, and how the different things he’s doing there completely alter what’s coming out of his amplifier. This boy can play!

I guarantee that he’s watched and studied the hands and listened to the guitar tone of all the guitar greats who’ve come before him, and incorporated the basic elements of their techniques into his own unique style. He’s learned to rely not only on the electronics for his ultimate guitar tones, but upon his hands as well.

Summarize - If You Can

I said all the above to say this; don’t get caught up in all the latest guitar gadgets to help you make the sounds you’re after. They’ll get you some of the way there, true, but you have to carry it the rest of the way with what you’re doing on the fingerboard and the picking hand. Could you play a Van Halen song properly without learning how to do what Eddie Van Halen does with his hands? Nope! You can get the same general timbre, maybe, from your amps, pickups, and effects, but if you can’t tap those notes out of the fingerboard the way he does, you’ll never sound like he does. Sure, he’s an innovator on electric guitar, and has truly revolutionized the way a lot of people play. But I’m certain that if you ask him, he’ll tell you that a lot of what he does sprang out of what someone else has done in the past. He’s just taken it a step further. OK, a giant leap further! Anyway, what I’m getting at is that you shouldn’t think that you can get to be another Eddie Van Halen by using the same guitar, amp, or effects that he does. If you use all that same gear, you’re still going to sound just like... you... that is, until you learn to do what he does with his hands.

Guitar Tone - It's All In Your Hands

Now, I don’t even pretend to be a guitar master... far, far, from it! But I’ve learned to find my own best quality as a player, and develop that as far as I can. I’m not fast or flashy, nor ever will be. I can’t run a Mixolydian scale up and down the neck in 1/124 notes. But I do my level best to create my ultimate guitar tone by making every single note that comes out of the amp sound as good and mean as much as it possibly can, given the gear I’m playing at any time. And that, my friends, is all in the hands.

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