It Might Get Loud, So Watch Your Tone

As I write this, my wife Leslie Brooke is driving us down the most boring stretch of highway east of the Mississippi, I-16 between Savannah and Macon, with Pearl Jam’s new album Backslider cranked up.  Two things are going through my mind as I listen to it:

1. This is certainly not the same Pearl Jam that I heard on Ten when the album dropped in August of 1991.  The song writing has matured with less angst and bitterness.  The guitar tone is more mellow and warm, less in your face and jarring.

2. Turning 33 today, I’m not the same Jay that I was in August of 1991.  I’ve matured and have less angst and bitterness.  My guitar tone is more mellow and warm, less in your face and jarring.

It would be a beautiful thing if I could tell you that I started playing guitar 19 years ago and committed to sounding good in the mix from the start.  It wouldn’t be true.  My early sound was obnoxious and sick.  Thin and brittle.  I ran a first edition Fender SRV Stratocaster into a Marshall JTM 45 cranked up to ear bleeding volume and ran every Boss and Ibanez stomp box I could afford.  I wanted to sound like Hendrix with Band of Gypsy’s.  Think “Machine Gun.”  I really sounded like a 55 gallon drum full of empty soup cans being dumped down an 18 floor stairwell.  With a herd of cats.  I probably hurt more ears than I impressed.

My early experience with rock guitar was more shock and awe than balance and compliment.  I wanted to be loud.  I wanted to be the center of attention.  I wanted to be heard.

When my fingers first hit the fretboard, you had few options in Christian contemporary music to choose from.  Either rebel and keep learning Guns ‘n Roses, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam licks, or obey your folks and break out the Petra, White Heart, and Kings X.  I chose to walk the fine line and balance my musical intake, dipping heavily into grunge, like Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, and pop rock, like U2, Depeche Mode and REM. Strangely enough, my parents weren’t as polarizing as my friends were.  Classic rock was all the rage in our house, so I was fed heavy doses of Led Zeppelin, Molly Hatchet, AC/DC, Van Halen, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band.  Hanging with my church youth musician buddies, I’d be “corrupting” them with whatever riff I could pick up.  Yes, I did loan some “mix tapes” out that never came back.  Some probably found a fiery death.

Life is less polar for me now and I would be less inclined to burn my Beatles albums like my parents and grand parents did in the 1960′s deep south bible belt culture.  I’m pretty sure that which the Enemy might have intended for evil has been redeemed.  I’m no “guitar god” by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel that my approach to strumming, picking, lead, rhythm and, most important of all, tone, has been shaped by my influences from the days of my youth.  It is certainly possible nowadays for a musician to gain all the skills they need to perform in such as way as to glorify God by listening only to the latest recordings of contemporary worship teams and bands distributed by Christian record companies, but that wasn’t the case with this musician.

One can imagine that a guitarist like Lincoln Brewster picked up his chops listening to Christian great Phil Keaggy or maybe Ty Tabor from King’s X.  However,  I’d guess he owns just a few albums from Journey, Def Leppard and Bon Jovi, too.  When I hear Mark Lee playing with Third Day, I picture him spinning some Black Crowes or Rolling Stones looking for inspiration.

I’m not ashamed of my influences.  In fact, I’d love to have the opportunity to sit down with Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin and pick his brain about life, guitar, and see how he’s matured since he started playing the guitar in the ’60′s.  Last weekend, I traveled to Jacksonville, FL to watch a movie that was such a setup.  It Might Get Loud puts you in the room with Page, The Edge (U2) and Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather).  It was like you are given the opportunity to sit on the couch next them and hear about their influences and what caused them to do the things they have done and continue to do.

What was most profound for me was to realize that each of these guitar greats plays the same instrument but has a vastly different approach to how to make it sound like what they hear in their head.  Though inspired by some of the same classic blues records, relative newcomer White avoids effects racks and pedals with the same passion that The Edge seeks them out.  Page appears to be indifferent, perhaps since, when he started, he didn’t have all the options we have now.  What they all have in common is the ability to be unique without being cliche´or redundant.

Our approach to guitar in a worship setting is not so different from theirs.  We want our contribution to count.  We want to sound good and be appreciated for what we do.  However, unlike my approach to playing guitar in my youth, I now understand what is means to be part of a team that is more focused on creating an environment where the audience can join in with us in putting the focus upward towards the Creator, not towards His creation on stage.  Being a showboat can create such a distraction that the worshiper’s attention is drawn to our ability.  “Hey, look at me!  I’m a lead guitar player rockin’ it for Jesus!!!”  At the same time, not being prepared can detract from the worshiper’s experience.

We give the performing arts a disservice when we used church sign phrases like “God doesn’t ask for ability, He asks for availability.”  As a leader assembling a team, I find myself having to lower my expectations when those serving with me don’t possess the same enthusiasm for what is being done.  Performances by Jesus Culture, David Crowder Band, and the Passion team can appear effortless by the team, but we have to understand the time and effort put in by each member to pull it off.  We are each in process with the development of our talent which is why joining with musicians of differing levels of ability can be such a struggle sometimes.  With the nature of volunteer music ministry being in great flux, it can be just as annoying to the listener when the lead guitar player overplays as when the bass player overplays.  Ideally, those with less experience are able to glean from those with more.  We must be patient with each other and recognize what the common vision is, wherever it may come from, and stick to creating an environment where God can be glorified and worshiped, not us.

Ever notice that even the best gear can sound bad?  The problem isn’t that we don’t know what sound we want to achieve, it’s that we have too many choices of how to get there.  Fifty years ago it was common to hear chimey clean because everyone was running a Strat into a Fender Bassman or Deluxe.  When things got really hot, you’d see a Gibson Les Paul run into a Marshall.  The pioneers of rock guitar certainly experimented with the tonal palette once the technology improved, but now your typical new guitar player can buy a modeling amp or pedal without having any idea what each amp sounds like in the real world on stage.  Given so many choices, you could create something that sounds very unique or something that sounds totally unrealistic.  Sure, you can experiment with any sound that you want but you may never find a tone that’s truly yours.  Don’t let the tool become a gimmick.

I spent an hour talking to a young guitarist in Atlanta last night and found that he shares the struggle some of us face.  He owns an Orange amp, a high watt Marshall, has had Matchless and Tophat amps, borrowed a Bogner and Goodsell amp for some gigs, and has had enough guitar and effects to fill a swimming pool.  Yet, he is still unsatisfied with his tone.  His hobby is becoming a ridiculously expensive one.  His situation begs the question, is there any such thing as a “tone therapist?”  When we try so hard to impress people with our gear and gadgets do we lose sight of what drew us to music in the first place?

What we tend to spend less time thinking about is where tone really starts:  in your hands.  About ten years ago, I went to a local pawn shop ready to dump my rig on them because I couldn’t stand to listen to it.  I was running a Peavey Predator Strat copy into a Peavey Classic 30, with a slew of pedals in between.  An amazing local guitarist named Jim Mason grabbed my guitar, plugged it straight into the amp and tweaked a few settings.  What came out of the speaker that day made a few things clear to me:  I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was and I used effects pedals to cover that up.

Here’s a good test for you.  If you plug your guitar straight into your amp do you like what you hear, or are you always dependent upon effects to color your sound?  If you don’t start with a good clean tone you’ll typically have a tough time getting consistently good tone layering on delay, overdrive, fuzz, distortion, etc.  If you do depend on effects, have you mastered where they belong in the chain or the song?  For example, do you know the difference between delaying your overdrive and overdriving your delay?  Does your overuse of chorus make your listeners seasick?  Do you have an unused channel on your amp that’s longing to sing?

Tuesday night, as I led worship for Elevate,  the young adult group at St. Simons Community Church, I played a ES-335 into a Line 6 Pocket Pod that Travis Paulding, our church’s lead sound tech,  helped me A/B match against my real life Vox AC30.  The untrained non-guitar playing ear would find it difficult to tell the difference between my amp and my modeler in the mains.  I know that the modeler sounds too good, lacking the touch response that the AC30 has.  On the flip side, it’s quieter when not being played.   Either way, I’m satisfied with my clean tone and kick in the Rhythm channel on a Seymour Duncan Twin Tube Classic for overdrive and go to the lead channel to boost the gain.   Even when I play through the amp, I keep the Line 6 available as a backup if the amp blows a tube or transformer.  It happens.  Cheap insurance for $139.99, I’d say.  For this gig, I chose to use the Line 6 rather than heft around the heavy amp.

I could spend some time talking about the various effects pedals I’ve fallen in love with, especially delay, but I’ll leave that subject for another day or invite someone with more experience and technical expertise share their thoughts.   Plus, I’m trying to limit the word count here to less than the year of my birth!  Whether you’re a guitar hero or newbie, one thing is for sure:  it might get loud, so you better watch your tone.

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