Gain is fun in all its forms, from overdrive to fuzz, but let’s talk about a great clean tone.
We’re all here for one thing. It’s the singular sound and magic of the stringed instrument called the guitar—and its various offshoots, including the bass. Okay, so maybe it’s more than one thing, but the sentiment remains. Even as I write this, my thoughts fan out and recognize how many incarnations of “guitar” there must be. It’s almost incomprehensible. Gut-string, nylon-string, steel-string, 12-string, 8-string, 10-string, flatwound, brown sound, fuzztone…. It’s almost impossible to catalog completely, so I’ll stop here and let you add your favorites. Still, there’s one thing that I keep coming back to: clean tone.
I’ve had the luck and good fortune to work in the studio with Robert Cray, and it was the first time I watched how a human being could split the atom with tone so pure that you could feel it in your blood, not just your gut. It’s a piercing voice like heaven’s glass harmonica. Now, I’ve had fellow musicians turn up their noses when Cray is mentioned, but that’s their problem. I love a saturated guitar—my Analog Man King of Tone cranked way up high in the clouds—but it’s a power trip. I know it’s scarier to get it right when down low and tight. Fearless Flyers tight.
It’s not that I don’t like distortion. I’ve chased saturated and singing sustain all my guitar life. I’ve experienced it all, from big amps with quads of Mullard bottles glowing brightly as they approached meltdown, to tweed combos turned up to a sagging and farting 12. There have been racks full of effects piled upon effects—hushing, squashing, squeezing, chorusing, echoing, and expanding my guitar’s output like some Lego sound transformer. The good, the bad, and the relatively unknown. I even tried building my own amp line with a friend when I was 17 years old just to get what I heard in my head. But when I’m honest with myself, the stinging clean sounds of guitar strings are what move me the most.
When I started playing guitar, clean was about all you could get. If an amp started to distort or feed back, we worried that the amp might burst into flames.
When I started playing guitar, clean was about all you could get. If an amp started to distort or feed back, we worried that the amp might burst into flames. I didn’t understand how it worked, but I learned fast. The instruments didn’t ignite, but the sound did. That buzzing, clipping tone hid all my bad finger technique, and I was on my way, squealing and spitting fire from the speakers. The neighbor lady complained to my parents, so, clearly, I was doing something right. It was the power I was looking for in my young life. Clean tone was a thing of the past; long live the square wave on the throne of 16 speakers piled high above the stage.
Many of us have clamored for that thick distorted sound we’ve heard on records and in concerts. Guitarists still curate their collections based upon the building blocks we all discovered during our formative years. It started on the early rock ’n’ roll recordings, when small combo amps got turned up loud to compete with the horns. Bluesmen dimed their amps on Chicago’s Maxwell Street to be heard down the block—good for business. The Brits cranked it up a notch and we players took notice. To some degree, clean was being pushed out. Then, in 1978, “Sultans of Swing” and “Roxanne” came clean. Alongside the slow burning rise of metal, the chiming clarity of the guitar returned to the fray. I’m not trying to build a definitive timeline history of popular guitar sounds here. I’m just merely acknowledging that they ebb and flow. But I always come back to clean.
Even the apex of thick, fat, beefy tone—the PAF humbucker—was and is built for bold hi-fi tone. Its shimmering, articulate clean highs are often lost on period recordings or lousy playback systems. If you doubt it, listen to Michael Bloomfield’s piercing tone on “Albert’s Shuffle” found on the Super Session album. His contemporary, Peter Green, also made extensive use of the clean tones available from his PAF-loaded axe on seminal Fleetwood Mac recordings. Humbuckers can play sweet and clear. It’s worth contemplating that some of the most revered guitar sounds ever committed to record were, in fact, cleaner than we remember. Don’t even get me started with country music.
A lot can be said about practicing guitar with a frighteningly clean sound. Strip away the fuzz and echo and bask in the glory of that stringy, popping, slicing tone that will reward your progress but punish your carelessness. Even after all these years, I’m a sloppy player. But getting it right when all the distortion is put back in the toy box is a scintillating high you can be proud of. It’s just a different addiction. The best part is that when you dial up the dirt again, it feels like flying.
Fig. 1 — This schematic illustrates a stomp with soft- and hard-clipping characteristics.
The cold, hard truth for guitar players like myself is that playing dynamics are first found in the hands. We might hope to find an instrument, effect box, or amplifier that can recast our ham-fisted guitar approach into something more nuanced, but for better or worse, there's nothing that's going to change our poor Johnny Ramone impressions into “Sultans of Swing."
Let's assume for the moment that you've developed the technique and taste required to have a dynamic playing style. You've moved beyond just hitting the notes and have endeavored to imbue each one with a particular attitude. How do we preserve that hard-fought dynamism and keep it from being obliterated by our stompbox designs?
Touch-sensitivity has become a bit of a buzzword in the effects marketplace. It means many things to many different people, but it might be easiest to describe by what it isn't. A piece of gear with limited touch-sensitivity offers little to no variation in output when a dynamic input is applied. A Townshend windmilled 6-string barre chord produces a shotgun blast of sound. A slight tickling of the strings? A similar scatter shot. This insensitivity isn't necessarily bad (i.e. the Guess Who's “American Woman"), but if you can play a single note 100 different ways, in some circumstances you might want a device that produces just as varied an output.
To make a pedal dynamic, responsive, and touch-sensitive is a bit of a black art. Effect circuits don't have to be complicated, but even the most elementary of circuits can produce sonic complications that belie the simplicity of their schematics. Since there's no closed-form solution for what sounds good, and pedal designers typically use components in ways that make electronic datasheet authors despondent, it's good to try to develop some conceptual rules of thumb and then refine them in real-world applications after the fact. Let's take a simplified look at op-amp clipping and dynamics.
In Fig. 1, you can see an operational-amplifier-based gain circuit with both soft clipping and hard clipping. These two types of clipping have been covered in these pages before, but I'll sum them up here. In soft clipping, the two diodes are in the feedback loop of the op amp, and once a certain threshold is reached, those diodes begin conducting and reduce the gain of the op amp in a limiting action. For higher gain settings, this abrupt reduction in gain can be a relatively hard limit, but at lower gains, the transition into limiting is comparatively gentle in onset. The hard-clipping diodes are capable of a more brick-wall characteristic. At a certain threshold, the diodes become an effective short-to-ground and, depending on the surrounding components, can truncate the input wave very aggressively. As you increase the input signal past the clipping threshold, you get very little change in output.
Ibanez Tube Screamers famously use soft-clipping (although this has led some forumites to mistakenly call anything with a similar setup a Screamer derivative). Pro Co RATs use hard clipping to good results. Some pedals like the Nobels ODR-1 use both clipping styles in the same circuit. So can either scheme make a dynamic effect?
The answer depends on a host of specifics, but here are some general rules of thumb. At lower gain settings, the soft-clipper circuit might feel more dynamic as the limiting characteristic isn't as aggressive. This is where a tube-like voicing can be found. The hard-clipper setup does live up to its name, but, counterintuitively, can still feel dynamic under higher gain. I believe this is due to the fact that it's somewhat easier to play “under" the hard-limiting action. While the soft-knee function of the soft clippers begins compressing and limiting sooner, the hard clippers stay open longer and then abruptly close. So light playing can sneak through unlimited, but once the circuit begins distorting significantly, more gain and more input doesn't add a great deal of dynamic difference. I've watched players like Tom Bukovac play a hard-clipping RAT and really manipulate their signal right around that threshold, staying shy of it when needed and launching over it deftly.
Disciplined hands and well-trained ears can coax dynamic range from almost anything, but pedals can certainly help or hinder the process. Don't buy pedals based on their schematics but listen and consider how those schemes might influence your playing and approach to your instrument's sound.