Teach me the ways of tone

[eicca]

This question encompasses both amps and effects so I decided to put it in the Water Cooler... If it needs to go somewhere else, my apologies.

Anyway. My question is on the way amps/pedals clip the frequency spectrum of the guitar string. I have two songs by Alter Bridge, both in drop B-flat tuning.

In Come To Life, it sounds to me like the entire spectrum of the string is being overdriven. The clipping envelops the entire tone. The Rockman modules are another example of this. Everything going in gets distorted and the core sound of the guitar is almost completely overpowered.


In Farther Than The Sun, though the tones are very similar, it sounds to me like much more of the natural resonance or "twang" of the string is making it through the clipping stage unaltered, as if the clipping is only happening on 1khz and above. It sound much more natural. "Transparent" maybe?


Does this make any sense the way I'm describing it? What principle of tone am I investigating here? I'd like to construct a tone that operates more like the second example, leaving the pure resonance of the string recognizable while adding bite to the upper frequencies. What are the buzz words to look for in my equipment choices?

[MattFireblade]

I'm not sure on guitar if there are any current 'single box' pedals that do this, but for bass my go-to distortion is a Darkglass Microtubes X which has both a sweepable Low and High Pass Filter applied to the distortion circuit as well as a crossover so that your distorted tone is mixed with the clean tone. It makes sure, especially on bass, that you don't lose the low-end 'thump' when you start cranking up the gain, and also sounds really solid in the mix.

So really, they're probably mixing a wet/dry signal in that second song, wet being distorted and dry being clean. Ideally, you'd probably want a crossover pedal like the X-Otic X-Blender, and then potentially a low/high pass filter pedal too so you can filter what frequencies are hitting the drive pedal in the blender.

[nomadh]

Conceptually I agree. So Something like [mention]MattFireblade[/mention]. I've been wanting to experiment more with this concept as now I'm doing more high gain work and I'm having a hard time keeping my tone from getting crapped up. I was considering a splitter to keep one amp high gain and one moree warm and clean. But mostly I don't know anything and I'm hoping others have good ideas.

[eicca]

Hmmmmmm I betchya running one Rockman on drive and the other on clean and blending the two could yield some interesting results. I'll have to experiment with that.

[MattFireblade]

If you’re going to bi-amp, I’d still try to find a low and high pass filter to play with on the dirty amp

[eicca]

If you’re going to bi-amp, I’d still try to find a low and high pass filter to play with on the dirty amp

I’ve got a graphic EQ both before and after the dirty channel, should do the trick.

[LightWingStudios]

Alas, there are no short cuts Grasshopper.

This is a long, winding and lonely road each of us must decide to take, enduring the trials, tribulations, failures and glories yet to be experienced...

if you have the balls.