Some Thoughts about Classic Guitar Tone.
Plugging your guitar straight into your amp without covering the floor with a huge array of pedals is a lost art nowadays.
It seems that if you’ll “pull out the plug” on these “tone enhancers” everybody will go cold turkey.
The classic blues and rock players of the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s used mainly the sound of the guitar and the amp as the basis of their tone.
Sure, you had tremolo and reverb effects, natural overdrive from a cranked amp, the shrieking tone of the glorious fuzz and my personal favorite-the original Echoplex, but these were used from time to time, and the original characteristics of the guitar and the amp were kept untouched and uncorrupted.
Nowadays when someone wants to “create” a classic tone, he usually covers the entire floor with “Tone Enhancers” and hides forever behind the wall of artificially flavored tone.
It seems that everything nowadays is corrupted with this artificial dense distortion and delay.
You can plug the nearest broomstick to someone’s pedalboard, and it will sound the same. No more character and the original tone of the guitar doesn’t matter anymore.
It all changes when you finally hear a great guitar plugged straight into a great amp.
That is the reason when we came create our custom guitars- the hollow body lightweight thunder Child guitar and our Spirit of the Wind custom guitar; we wanted to recreate the classic tones of the electric guitar.
A guitar that one can plug straight into an amp and realize that all those modern “tonal enhancements” are unnecessary. If you want to recreate classic guitar tone you have to play it old school. Don’t be afraid-keep it simple and use one guitar and one amp.
This short video featured our super lightweight handmade Thunder Child Guitar with our favorite little monster, our Deacy amp on steroids -the 9 Volts of Glory Amp.
It’s part of a track I wrote called “Nicotine Blues” dedicated to the Reef meister, Mr. Keith Richards. Recorded with Shure SM 57, dry amp, no EQ, No enhancements.
