Have you noticed that guitar forums all generate the same endless, unresolved debates over and over again?

“It’s wood! No, it’s electronics!”

“It’s the gear! No, “tone” is in the hands!”

You may have also noticed that all these debates are populated by the same anecdotal claims. “You can’t sound good without good gear… well, what about rock star X and his POS Sears guitar with 3 strings into a Pignose?” “It’s all about the density / non-density of the body wood, fingerboard wood, etc…. but what about Joe Soandso, who makes his Strat sound just like a 335??”

And so on. These arguments have been going on among guitar players for decades, and nobody is any closer to solving them. Drag them into a laboratory, and measurements confound what our ears tell us is true. Put them to a real world test, and they dissolve in your hands. What the heck is the deal?

A wise friend of mine and I had a series of long conversations on the subject, and I believe we found a root cause of “tone” that clears this up… a sort of Unified Theory. The reason you can’t pin these questions down is simple: everything in the signal chain… the player, the pickups, the amp, the wood, the strings, the effects, the speaker… all of it is affected by a larger force, one that is sculpting not only the individual components of the signal chain, but the entire system as a whole.

My friend and I have decided to call this force “intent.”

As a guitar player, you pick up an electric guitar with the intent of making a sound you hear in your head. You play the guitar and amp. As you listen, you make adjustments… with your hands, first and foremost, but also with tone controls, volume controls, etc… until the the sound that comes out of the amp is more or less, the sound you like. It becomes more and more the sound you “intend” to create.

This happens every single time you play an instrument, and the process is automatic and transparent. It’s the one part of the chain you never think about or even have to think about, and it is the overriding force that directs all the others,

This is why, like the six blindmen and the elephant, we all have such differing views on the source of tone. For one player, the acoustic response of the solid body guitar is very important to their tactile feedback, and therefore to their intent. To another player, not so much… he’s looking for a kind of flat response that allows him to sculpt tone in a different way. The first guy thinks it’s all about body wood, the next guy about razor-flat pickups.

This also explain the common “My rig sounded better when he played it” phenom, or the “when Clapton plugs into anything, he sounds like Clapton” legends. In both examples, you’re hearing a player whose intent has been finely sharpened over the years. With highly focused intention, you can make virtually any rig “sound like you.”

So, in the end, the arguments are endless because they’re meaningless. Nothing in the signal chain is more important the player’s intent, and this is the true source of the sound that comes out of the amp.

How’s that for tone philosophy?

Well. I've been waiting expectantly for this thread and am now confounded by what you've written.

I was expecting a biting deconstruction of the nonsense we all talk all day long on this subject - and instead you give us an interesting new slant on it.

You never cease to surprise me, SlapChop!

A thought provoking post: I'll go away and think about it for a while.

Keep up the good work, man!

Cheers - C

Ceri, my man... I bite because I care.

I don't have a bad attitude... I LOVE music. I take it all pretty seriously, so I get a bit snarky or impatient when I feel misinformation is being spread as gospel with cheese....

This theory also explains both the wide variety and the sometimes overly narrow "vintage" oriented range of gear preferences. If you pick up a given guitar, if it doesn't serve your intent, then it's junk, no matter how great it may be in laboratory terms. For my money, it's really hard to beat a Parker Fly, and the new Adrian Belew model is arguably the state-of-the-art in guitar design and production. But if part of your intent is to look like Keith Richards, then that guitar just isn't going to do.

Now that is a noble stance to take sir. If anything lets have truth above all else. We've been subject to advertizing hype for long enough.

I agree entirely with your theory on intent. Its much the same as 'its what you do with it that counts' or 'a good workman doesnt blame his tools'.

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No no and no

Exactly, sir ninja. It is the underlying reason for the most common truisms about guitar tone: "it's in the hands," "it's not the arrow, it's the archer," etc. In the standard debates, those points always get refuted by "Yeah, well, let's hear Eddie Van Halen make that sound on a Roland Jazz Chorus," which gets refuted by, "Oh, yeah, well let's hear YOU sound like Eddie on his exact rig!" Both refutations are accurate. Eddie can't do that on a Jazz CHorus, although he could probbaly come close with some pedals... and you can't sound like Eddie even if you had his stuff. You choose your gear AND the way you use it to fit your intent.

And there is no "ultimate tone" to be achieved (the idea that always rides sidecar to these tone discussions). David Byrne of Talking Heads said he believed that the thin, racket-y tone he got was "the true voice of the electric guitar." Stevie Ray would beg to differ. They're both right.

I'm certain of it!

And "biting deconstruction" is in no way to be thought a bad thing...

However. You've frustrated me somewhat with your post: by foreseeing and short circuiting the whorey old "Clapton plugs into trash gear and sounds great" story I would no doubt otherwise have recylced here!

- C

PS Still churning over the serious point you're making...

No short circuit at all! I totally believe that Eric Clapton CAN plug into trash gear and sound great... I won't say he'll sound "better," but he'll certainly work more easily on his own gear. But one thing about a really good guitar player - take David Lindlay and his collection of junk Teiscos as an example - is the ability to size up a rig and adjust what he's doing to fit what the rig is capable of. Still just a matter of the player's intent, the "autopilot" that guides us to making good sounds with a guitar.

What this does short circuit is discussions about gear as a path to optimal tone. Which is "better," maple or rosewood? Neither. A good player achieves his intent regardless of which fingerboard wood he's using.

While I agree there is some measure of merit in your intent theory I do not believe it effectively answers the original question, being what is the source of tone. What you call intent is what I call ear. Each person hears tone differently and that is one of the three greatest factors in the tone debate. Perception and interpretation (ear) comprise about one third of the battle. Another full third is in the hands and the last third is in the combination of gear selection. This theory answers the original question more effectively and explains why good gear sounds better, why good players sound better regardless of gear selection and also why people argue about what constitutes "better".

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

I don't see any difference but a semantic one in your explanation, sir. What you call "ear" is individual perception. Of course we all have one. But the thing that drives your USE of that perception is what you are trying to achieve.

You and perceive I certainly high end differently. But let's assume that we don't, and also say it is my intent to create a biting sound that will cut glass, and yours is to do something opposite. We would approach our gear in two different ways, even if our perceptions of the sound were identical. In this way, the intent of the musician is still the prime mover.

A better weapon makes for more accurate intent. Any cheap gun can hit the target but a high quality accurate one will do it more consistantly and is less likely to let you down.

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The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

Well, of course it does, cv.

But what chooses "better" other than one's own intent?

For David Lindlay, a $30 pawn-shop junk-a-junk is "better" for much of what he does than a highly-tuned rocket.... Steve Vai thinks his JEM is better than your Strat, SRV thought his clapped out #1 was better than Adrian Belew's signature Fly, Belew says his Fly is the best guitar of all time.

SlapChop,

You have said more clearly what I always mean when I say "it's in the fingers". Which I think was your intent. How ever archaic it my be, I still think also that our tone is a combination of all those factors you mentioned but more greatly influenced by "intent". A thought just occurred to me that we don't talk as much about tone when discussing the bass. How many bass players can we identify immediately just by their tone? With guitar players, I can always tell if it's Clapton, or Brian May, or Gilmore, or many other guitarists. But I can't immediately tell if it's Nathan East or some other bass player. Do bass players have a more narrow intent? Or is my ability to discern difference in bass tones lacking? I like this explanation you have come up with. Well done!

Tone is in the ear of the beholder.

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Being able to play and enjoy music is a gift that's often taken for granted.

Don't leave home without it!