Forget amps, pedals, and EQs – this is what you should do when you first plug in…
For guitar players, tone is everything. With the right approach to your gear, you can sculpt your sound to perfection. Taking the wrong approach, though, can blight all your skill and imagination.
Revered session guitarist and close friend of Paul Reed Smith, Tim Pierce, has linked up with Rick Beato for an insight into crafting the perfect guitar tones. While their conversation looked at the role different guitars, amps, pedals, and even microphones, play in shaping and influencing tone.
But one comment stood out above the rest.
Time is of the essence
Pierce, who has played on records by Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Meat Loaf, and Miley Cyrus across a tireless 50-year career, emphasized the importance of knowing your way around gear in the session world.
“You don't have five seconds to do something,” he says. “If people ask, you have to do it within three seconds. 'Make it dirtier, tune the delay' it has to happen now. You can't scroll through menus.”
So, while he'd typically take six to eight amps to each session to ensure he had a banquet of flavours at his disposal, he kept his pedalboard simple. In the video, he uses a Universal Audio UAFX Del-Verb delay/reverb, a Nobles ODR-1 overdrive, and a tuner.
However, it's his limited time scales that have made him so sensitive to what he’s hearing and helped him get the most out of his recording sessions.
Reactionary magic
When plugged into a Park P45/100 amp head, and after engaging the Del-Verb, he says: "The effect is pushing me to play a different way."
Reacting to all the artifacts that alter the guitar's signal, he found himself lightening his touch and slowing down the pace. Notably, Pierce hasn't dialled in either the amp or the pedal, he's reacting to the sounds he hears. His first port of call is to change his approach to the instrument, rather than reaching for anything external.
“Every amp instantly shapes what you go after,” he professes. For Pierce, it’s not about the amp or the pedals, but how you respond to what they offer. You wouldn’t approach a Fender Twin Reverb with the balls-out aggression you can get away with on a Dual Rectifier.
When playing through what he describes as a “healthy” 1971 Marshall JMP head, he finds it cleans up well using just the volume knob of the guitar alone.
“That's the record,” he says. “You could do a whole album with this.”
Feeling it out
Responding to a 1979 Orange Overdrive II, he immediately pulls a stank face as he hears the bark and growl of an amp that has "teeth". With so much power to it, he naturally wants to dig in and use what the amp does best to his advantage.
Lastly, for the heads was a Sovtek MIG-100H, an amp descriebd by Beato as a “hidden gem”.
“The first thing I notice is that it has this nice sag in the transformer like old Marshalls have,” Pierce finds. “It's kinda like an uncultured, raw Marshall.”
Interestingly, he says the amp “would make me less of a polished player, which would be really useful in certain situations.” His playing here leans into the fact that the amp packs a nasty, rough-around-the-edges tonality. You wouldn't want it for a delicate folk song, but on a grungier record where the guitars need to be more animalistic, he says it would serve him well.
For the combos, Beato serves up a Fender Deluxe Reverb with a blackface mod and 6L6 tubes. This time, Pierce does reach for the amp's EQ, to remove the reverb and hear the amp by itself. With clarity but punch, he plays snappily, finding it “pleasing” that “the bottom end splays out a little bit”. It’s an amp that offers nowhere to hide, so it will force you to play more cleanly.
The lowdown
Of course, players will do well to pick gear that reflects what they want from their sound – you won’t see a tech death guitarist rocking up to a gig with a Five-watt Fender combo, just as much as you’d get glared at for bringing an EVH 5150 to a campfire strum-along.
More importantly, you need to listen to what your gear is doing to your tone and respond accordingly. That way, you’ll get the best out of your gear because you’re playing to its strengths. Don’t force it to be something it isn’t and you’ll find your tone will shine.
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