Translating Guitar Tone Jargon | Glassy? Spongy? Woody?
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- Опубліковано 2 чер 2024
- Ever got the feeling that when someone is trying to describe a guitar tone that they might be simply throwing out buzz words? Or maybe you're confident they do know what they're talking about but the words and phrases used to describe the sound seem too abstract and confusing.
Language has its limits. Trying to describe the colours in a painting or the taste of a particular wine and in our case trying to describe very subtle detail in sound using only spoken language can lead you towards using some pretty ridiculous words and phrases. However it does serve an important purpose.
Even with youtube where thankfully you can hear the sounds and tones that people are describing, there is a limit. They will always be recorded sounds that have some level of processing, it’s never going to be quite the same as being in the room with that particular amp or speaker or whatever piece of gear that it is that you’re listening to. There’s been many times when I’ve recorded a guitar sound and then listened back to it and the recording sounds quite different to how I remember experiencing it when it was coming through the amp at a loud volume in the room.
And that is where some choice words and descriptions of how it is being heard by the person in the room really helps provide some context for the recordings we’re listening to. And if you ever read gear reviews or go on online forums where you can’t hear any recorded examples at all, it becomes even more important that we try to use language that is clear and that we all understand, and try to avoid lazily throwing around buzz words without really listening and thinking very hard about what it is we’re hearing in the sound.
Timecodes:
00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Terms for Basic EQ
04:18 - Terms for Dynamics
07:25 - More Unusual Terms
11:25 - Complimentary vs Derogatory Terms
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your videos are warm and transparent
😂😂
A calming tone. 👍
This is a cheat code for deciphering the rather excellent That Pedal Show. Greatly appreciated! Thanks.
Great way of putting it.
Jesus, you managed to prove these subjective terms may not be as subjective after all, every single one was exactly how I think about them. Great video
Holy cow mate, that segment of you playing What A Wonderful World!!! Absolute beauty!
Thank you kindly!
Overdrives get the silliest jargon buzz words. Organic? Makes me think of food. Give me your organic free range non-gmo overdrive tones
"nasal" (usually derogatory) and "vocal" (complimentary) are also both used to describe mid-focused frequencies--I feel like "nasal" usually means an overabundance of high-mids (which is how a person's voice sounds with a pinched nose, or if they're congested), and "vocal" usually refers to a pleasant hump in the mid-mids (where the human voice sits, more or less)
I love to describe glassy, spongy strat neck pickups as "bouncy". I have no idea if it makes sense to anyone else
I really really like this video. Keep up the good work mate. The views will come soon once people get on to this one.
Yes, as a sort of beginner this video is very helpful. I now know a lot of these terms, but 6 months ago it was overwhelming and I didn't understand it all. You did a great job explaining like always. Your the best communicator on youtube when it come to guitar gear and sounds. Thank you, I always look forward to you vids!
Your videos are consistently top notch. Thanks for your service my dude
All your ideas for explanations are really convincing!
My eq pedal is that one purchase I wasn't crazy about at first but it quickly became the one pedal I wouldn't want to be without, as for descriptive lingo, i've heard of an overdrive sound being " sticky" quite often
been teaching myself for about 4 years now and I never understood what many of these terms meant. thanks for teaching!
One of the best guitar channels homie
Great video! Also made me realize that a big part of why I connect to your videos is your ability to explain sometimes hard-to-describe concepts with simple and intuitive eloquence. My friend likes to describe some tones as something that roughly translates to "divey", but with a positive connotation, like it's shit but in a very good way 😄
The two terms I hear all the time are “muddy” and “creamy”. And I have no idea what they mean.
Imagine the sloshing sounds from slopping around in thick gooey mud vs cream. They both have high end roll off. Mud has more.
Muddy normally means too much mids and lows (way too dark tone), so there is harder distintion between notes and chords (like a Big Muff on a Les Paul comes to mind, or a Seymour Duncan Invader on a Les Paul too)
Creamy is trickier, normally means a smooth mid focused tone and without too much gain, I have heard the best example of this tone is the Fulltone OCD and sometimes the Boss SD1
Thank you for making this so accessible. Easy to be unsure and intimidated by a new set of vocabulary. I went through a whole thing when I was trying to pick my amp, and I was trying to find a way to describe the sound of the music whose tone most excited me, and then find amps that could deliver it.
really good video! (btw, I want your Jag, that color is awesome)
For ridiculous, "Crystal Lattice" is hard to beat.
Excellent video mate 👍
Best guitar terms video ever! Congratulations Michael!
Thank you!
Nice video. I've thought about putting together a dictionary of guitar tone related words. LOL Chewy .. annoys me. Creamy .. makes me feel violated.
Creamy definitely should not be used. 😂
I think it actually refers to Clapton's tones in Cream. Cranked Marshall JTM45/100 with sweet sounding KT66 tubes, Middle knob up and Treble way down. It coincidently reminds us of the sloshing sounds cream makes while mixing. Clapton's tone may be why they called the band Cream. He started out with a "Bluesbreaker" amp-- JTM45 w/Tremelo circuit.
Lovely video, thanks.
Nice! Really useful video. ❤
Thanks for this. I’m familiar with a lot of the terms and what they are used to mean, but what I liked about the video is that you explained HOW to achieve the sounds and demonstrated some really simple ways to experiment with cutting/ boosting frequencies to make significant - and useful in practical contexts - changes to the core tone and feel.
Thank you. Glad you liked it!
excellent video!
The first person I’ve ever seen able to give me the right way to explain “loose” and “tight” low end 😂
You tackled a tricky subject well. I like food comparisons: chewy mids is a favourite one, I know that when I hear it. And it works the other way too, you often hear top notes on Masterchef
Great video
Big fan of the spongy sounding speakers. Utah speakers made some of the best. Sadly they were not loved by the majority who prefered the jensen alternative. Great video. Play it before you buy it!
Hi, Once read an interview where Brian May referred to the sound of Gibson SGs as spoony, I can only imagine he meant scooped
That's a good one!
I also use “spongey” to describe the sound of a Strat compared to hardtail guitars. Because of the floating trem, there is a natural sponginess to the attack when you strike the strings, because when Strat strings are vibrating, they are not just doing the normal transverse waves, but they’re also doing longitudinal waves as the trem moves with their vibration. You could put the same pickup in a Strat and in a Tele, and you would hear the Strat would have a spongey compression, and the Tele would have a hard attack.
I remember many years ago I was discussing tones with a friend and I said to him that his Strat tone was "round and clear" but everytime he engaged two pedals (I don't remember which ones, I think an overdrive and a compressor) it became more "square and dry" and after 5 seconds we burst out laughing because the tone jargon can be surreal sometimes lol
Very nice video. I would love to see the words written on the screen with a nice maching typography for each word. It would be amazing.
One of my favorites is chewy which I've heard used a lot for both modulations and fuzzes - especially phasers and UVibe type sounds, and for fuzzes it's less common but I still hear people describe the chewiness of a fuzz I think mostly aiming at how it can dive or cave in a bit or "sag" is a strong word I guess for that- and that is where I call things more spongey but I understand the texture or sagging effect while a fuzz is unfolding or blooming. Now I dont know what chewy means again. I think sheer complexity in the sound is part of why people go to that word. Some guitar tones can be brittle or thin and crispy, and I would say chewy stuff is usually a bit "warmer" and less sibilant, more toned down but rich and unharsh.
The tightness or looseness of the low E on a guitar and how that is reacting into a drive or fuzz is an important thing to find as a player, I bit of sag is comfortable to play and too much is frustration.
Yes, chewy is one I struggle with too. I get a sense of what people are talking about when it's used to describe the sound of modulation and fuzz, particularly octavia fuzz, but it could mean so many different things to me that I find I more or less ignore the term completely...
@@MichaelBanfieldGuitar that makes sense, I don't blame you. There is a song called kool aide I think by Ry Cooder but I could be misremembering - I know they had it featured on Dead Wax, greatest guitar tones - and that is something I could call chewy, it's a mix of fuzzy drive and phasey vibe stuff that just sounds like a thick churning tone that could taste like cookie dough if one were to grab it out of the air.
Edit- kool aid is great. But the chewy sound I was trying to reference is actually from Foxwarren fall into a dream around 2:00 into the song
These subjective terms mean different things to people, but I think chewy is like spongy, or juicy. Reminds players of the sound our mouth makes when chewing gum, or anything...chewy.
I always found chewy was the best term I could come up with to describe the sound of Electro Harmonix’s Small Stone phaser. It has a “chewy” quality that I don’t hear so much in an MXR Phase90.
btw I always associate the term Woody with a good neck pickup of a standard telecaster and with some neck sound of jazz guitars
Wow, didn't realize I could get the Celestion V-type in the dsl 40cr close to a V-30 with my GE-7. Cool, thanks!!! 👍
Meh...the V30 upper midrange is a bit different and it has the larger 50oz magnet, which makes it tighter with a faster response.
There's this thing about a good single coil neck pickup into an overdriven amp that I love. It has a sort of 'hollowness' to it, I don't know. It took me a long time to find out exactly what I was looking for, because no one has a term for it. It's really hard to communicate with other people about tone, we should have dictionaries.
Strat neck pickup was the first electric guitar tone I fell in love with, for exactly that hollowness you describe. Also certain Brian May tones when he used that pickup on his Red. Very “round” and “hollow” sounding.
Very good descriptions. I ask you to please answer a question. The term "glassy" means a clean and bright sound but not harsh?, or glassy means a bright sound with a little excess high frequencies?. In short, is glassy a pleasant sound?. Thank you very much for answering.
Most times I hear the term glassy being used it's in a complementary way to describe the sound in a pleasant way. Hope that helps
@@MichaelBanfieldGuitarThank you.
I don't agree with "air" being related to the bright switch on a Fender. Air is indeed a legit in upper treble range, but well past all the regular tonal artifacts of a guitar.
Most guitar speakers cut hard at 5k - so without specific measurement I'm going to suggest air is probably found above 5k.
What about "stiff"? I heard it both in positive and negative context.
Sorta milky, grainy and with a touch of jalapeño... crusty, buzzy and sorta bouncy. I'll let myself out 😮
What model is that red gibson hollowbody with the p90s?
That one is an es-330, good for Grant Green impressions amongst other things
@@MichaelBanfieldGuitar es-330 or es-335? You know the metal covers on those P90's further reduce the high end. The late Bill Lawrence made a 0.5H L600 for Grant Greene at some point. It was a mini-HB with AlNiCo III poles. P90s are typically in the 6~7H range so the high-end rolls off at ~2kHz with an average guitar cable, while Grant's L600 could easily get highs above 10kHz. Rolling the tone knob down a bit with a low capacitance cable would produce a virtually flat response across the audible spectrum with a natural attack and warmth of the AIII poles.
MICHAEL BANDFIELD< make a lesson about using the fender Bright Switch turned ON while using various fuzz pedals because they don't work well with the fender bright switch turned ON. Clapton CREAM Era and Hendrix would roll down the tone pot at the same time as rolling down the volume pot to 6 to 7 which their amplifiers bass would be set at ZERO to get these old blues record tones which you should make a YT lesson about this.
I don't think Hendrix rolled his guitar tone knob down much, but he did use the Volume knob a lot. Clapton used a Treble Booster instead of Fuzz pedal, but they both originally had very lo-Z Ge input transistors that rolled off the high end above ~1kHz when the V knob was up, and let it back up when the V knob was rolled down a bit. Clapton rolled his tone knob down for the "Woman" tone. Sounds like a Kazoo.
@@GCKelloch yes hendrix did roll his tone knob down to get those old blues tones. Clapton did use the dallas rangemaster in 1966 but not sure if he used it in CREAM for the woman tone.
Edge of breakup... I feel like I've been hearing that a lot lately, and it makes me cringe every time. I enjoyed the video, thanks!
Why cringe?
haha, yeah, I'm not sure why. For some reason I just find it a funny way to describe tone (even though my favorite amp setting is indeed at the edge break up...)@@GCKelloch