The Gig Behind the Gig: Tone Is a Decision

Most of the time, nothing happens. But every once in a great while, one of us strums a few cowboy chords, stops, and looks at the other one like we’ve just found the Ark of the Covenant.

I can count those times on one hand. A 1977 Les Paul Deluxe in wine red, played through a TopHat combo in Hollywood, in 1999. A 1955 J-50 at Norman’s Rare Guitars in Tarzana, in 2007. A 1975 Gibson J-200 Artist at Rumble Seat Music in Nashville, just last year. Each time, the same words came out of our mouths: “It sounds like a record.”

That's a personal opinion, of course, and you could argue it. But the point stands. Those instruments were special. I’ve come across guitars like this and didn’t buy them, either for lack of funds or some foolish belief that another would come along. I’ve regretted it every single time. Because just like finding a great friend, certain instruments simply feel like home.

So I’m not here to tell you gear doesn't matter. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time and money proving that it does.

But here’s the strange part. Those guitars sounded like a record to us. And that distinction is the whole thing, because I once watched a man spend a fortune trying to ignore it.

When I was touring with Poison, C.C. DeVille told me a story I’ve retold a hundred times since.

Back when the band first hit and the real money started rolling in, C.C. did what a lot of players did in the 1980s. He called Bob Bradshaw. If you were a professional guitarist in Los Angeles in that era, Bradshaw was the man, the one who built the custom rigs, the switching systems, the racks that looked like they belonged on the Space Shuttle. Most famously, he built the rig for Eddie Van Halen, who was C.C.’s idol, as he was for every guitarist at the time.

“The tone he was chasing was never in Eddie’s rig. It was in Eddie’s hands.”

So C.C. went to Bradshaw with a simple, expensive request. He wanted Eddie’s rig. Not something like it. The exact thing. The same amps, the same pedals, the same switching system, every cable and component, identical down to the last detail. Bradshaw warned him it would cost a fortune. C.C. didn’t care.

Months went by. Finally Bradshaw called to say the rig was ready. Come down and play it.

C.C. showed up with his guitar, plugged into this gleaming monument to Eddie Van Halen, and played for about 30 seconds. Then, in that unmistakable cartoon-character voice of his, he screamed in horror:

“What the hell? It still sounds like me!”

He’d spent three months’ pay to discover the one thing the gear could never give him. He thought identical equipment would hand him Eddie’s sound. What it handed him, faithfully and without mercy, was C.C. DeVille. Because that’s whose hands were on the guitar.

He meant it as a complaint. But it’s actually the answer to the question every guitarist spends money trying to solve. The tone he was chasing was never in Eddie’s rig. It was in Eddie’s hands.

Now flip it around.

A few years ago, Keith Richards was on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Not as the musical guest, just sitting in the chair, talking. At some point he picked up a small parlor-sized acoustic. Nothing special, the kind of guitar you’d find in the corner of a shop with a modest price tag on it. And he started playing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

It sounded enormous. It sounded electric. It sounded like a Telecaster cranked through an amp, except it was a little acoustic guitar in a man’s lap on a talk show. Fallon practically fell out of his chair. “How do you do that?”

The answer is that Keith Richards sounds like Keith Richards, no matter what you hand him. Give him a cheap parlor acoustic and he’ll make it roar. The tone isn’t in the guitar. It’s in the way he attacks the strings, the way he lets them ring, the rhythmic personality that lives in his right hand, and nowhere else on earth.

Two guitarists. One spent a fortune trying to buy a sound and got his own instead. The other picked up a guitar that cost almost nothing and sounded exactly, unmistakably like himself. Same lesson, opposite directions.

So how do I square that with me and Brad losing our minds over a wine-red Les Paul Deluxe? The right instrument is real, and worth hunting for, because it inspires you and meets you halfway. It responds. It feels like home, and a guitar that feels like home pulls something better out of you. That’s not nothing. That’s worth every store we ever walked into.

Your tone is the sum of a thousand tiny decisions you don’t even know you’re making. It’s the fingerprint of every hour you’ve ever spent playing, and it can’t be purchased, downloaded, or cloned.

Which is good news, when you think about it. It means the most important piece of gear you own is already attached to the ends of your arms. The work was never about finding the right pedal. It’s about becoming someone worth listening to, so that whatever you plug into ends up sounding like you.