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Post by funkykikuchiyo on Mar 3, 2022 19:12:53 GMT -5
A thought has been in the back of my head lately.
I have a Chopin CD (Maurizio Pollini) where if you listen with good headphones, you can hear everything in the piano. You can hear the dampers pressing against the strings, you can hear all of the pedaling, sometimes the hammers moving. It isn't a bad thing. It enhances the experience. I have some John Coltrane recordings where you can hear the nuances and buzzes on the reed, you can hear that suction-y click of the pads, sometimes the keys clicking around. It also enhances the experience. If you listen to a violinist live, you can hear a bit grittier of a tone as the bow saws away.
In this context, think of all of the things that a guitar does. A little bit of white noise, some clank on a bass, a bit of fret buzz if you hit the guitar really hard, even on an instrument with immaculate fret work... yet people still get annoyed. Guitars do so many of those things. Barrel saddles on Teles always have some buzz, threaded barrel saddles on any guitar have a funny sound, 12-strings always sound a bit odd, and it is part of the instrument.
We have many tools in the toolbox to improve on this - cleaning string surfaces, leveling and crowning frets, precise adjustments, and so on. But, ultimately they are still physical instruments that make all of these extra sounds.
Some players know to just play through it, and accept it as part of the tone. They only worry when it becomes an impediment to the sound. If you listen to old recordings, there is all kinds of clank, fret buzz, and other weird things going on. The players knew to just play through it and let the band mix do its thing. Others hyper fixate on it, and get really upset when their tone can't be cleansed of ALL sounds that aren't the actual pitch. But, piano, saxophone and violin all have background sounds that are completely acceptable. We understand that these instruments are very physical machines that make sounds other than their pitches. At what point did guitar players (or at least a segment of them) expect their instruments to sound like a synthesizer with a "guitar" setting?
Is it because too many people spend years drooling over guitars in catalogs or online and imagine their dream tone, and are frustrated when the reality hits them that even with a high price tag, rules of physics still apply? Or, are they listening to too many recordings in compressed digital form through tiny speakers and never hear all of the extraneous sounds on their favorite songs, even though it is all there? (I always heard more of that stuff on vinyl for some reason... not sure why) Is there some other reason?
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Post by Auf Kiltre on Mar 3, 2022 21:49:00 GMT -5
It's an interesting discussion. The examples you put forth like pianos, saxophones and violins are often virtuosos in classical or jazz music. Their skills as musicians prevail over the incidental noise. Those of us who dig old blues listen with forgiving ears to the tuning and intonation issues. Its gristle in the delicious bbq. You chew and spit out the inedible without a second thought. Django's Selmer always sounded like he needed more relief on the neck and maybe a new bridge. But that was THE sound he created and our ears acclimated to it. His marvelous skills rendered that irrelevant.
The tone quest of the electric guitarist is very often obsessive IMO. It's interesting that many times the heroes and the innovators were probably the least obsessive about their gear.
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Post by ninworks on Mar 4, 2022 4:37:35 GMT -5
I agree with the aforementioned sentiments. Another one that recording engineers AND singers stress over is breath noise on a vocal track. A good singer will minimize that in the way that they take breaths between notes and phrases. A bad singer, or one that has little recording experience can sound like a steam locomotive when breathing. Freddie Mercury is considered by many to be one of the best rock singers that ever lived yet, he used breathing and breath noise to help emote his performance. Many recording engineers and producers will remove every singe breath noise between notes. Not me. Using a lot of compression on a vocal track will accentuate the breath noise but it's a part of the performance AFAIC.
Listening to recordings of The Beatles showcases all kinds of incidental noises going on in the background of their recordings. To me, that gives it more humanity and adds to the emotional experience. Extraneous noises can be a nuisance but when those noises are made in the spirit of the song then they can most certainly be beneficial to the experience.
With guitars, the one thing that gets to me the most is excessive squeaking string noise from sliding around on the strings between notes. To me, it screams of a player who doesn't care enough about their performance and technique to make an effort to eliminate it. It's more of a technique thing than setup. It makes me think they are lazy and don't want to put in the practice to mitigate the noise. A little is okay but a lot bothers me.
I think Joe Walsh once said that a little fret and bridge buzz on a Tele is a crucial part of the character of the sound of that guitar.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 4, 2022 9:15:42 GMT -5
I tend to believe there's so much obsession over noise-to-signal issues because most guitar players play at home. They hear their guitar tone along with every litttle goofy noise, and that is not how Duane, or Stevie, or Eric, or [pick a geetar hero] sounds on record.
The reason is these desciples have never heard their messiah sitting at home on the couch, noodling on their guitar. Hero worship and emulation is huge among guitar players because nostalgia is such a powerful drug.
In a band situation, most all of this is a non-issue because you generally roll of the guitar's volume between songs. When a band is cookin' right along, the signal-to noise ratio is high. At home, it's the other way around.
I'm used to it. In fact, I prefer all the little beeps and squeaks associated with operating the guitar, because there's no processing or noise reduction. It's not artificial, it's real. It's creating a composition right now, in the moment.
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Post by funkykikuchiyo on Mar 4, 2022 10:30:29 GMT -5
I tend to believe there's so much obsession over noise-to-signal issues because most guitar players play at home. They hear their guitar tone along with every litttle goofy noise, and that is not how Duane, or Stevie, or Eric, or [pick a geetar hero] sounds on record. That is a great point. I often think of it in terms of guitar design, too. Modding a stompbox to sound "warmer" will be great if you're in your bedroom, but will get lost in the mix when you sit with the band. Building an acoustic to shimmer with a few lightly strummed open chords in a padded room will make the sales guys happy, but get that thing out there and try singing with it or playing with friends, and it gets lost very quickly. Leo Fender made prototypes and sent them out with working musicians to try in the field. But, you're talking about other performance issues - maybe the mirror image.
To the vocals, I wonder if a part of the problem is that a totally dry recording of a vocal track is almost unheard of now. A lot of modern/indie/hipster music is just drenched in reverb. They probably have to because a moody, whispery cutesey thing is sort of the norm, and it would suck if it was dry. Right now I'm listening to a Dick Haymes recording, and you can tell it is just him right on top of an old ribbon microphone. His voice is very clean, but you still hear everything. I wonder if a modern engineer would mess with that... compress it, get rid of the boominess when he moves in close, get a gate in there to get rid of the odd sounds at the end of a phrase.
I'm all for perfecting the guitar, getting the intonation better, the fretwork better... but as a professional repair person, some people will always pick up a perfectly guitar guitar, and hear ANY clank or extraneous noise and think something is wrong. I remember one woman complaining about an "after sizzle"... it was a particularly bright sounding Taylor, and they can be a bit thin on the decay. Sure, being a bit better built or designed differently might change it, you can experiment with string brands... but it is just what a lot of acoustic guitars sound like. She had it in her head that there was something horribly wrong with her guitar, she spent a lot of money on it and shouldn't it sound better, etc. etc. etc.... but, it just sounded... well... like a guitar. Maybe the compressors, noise gates and band filters in the studios yanked all of that out, and she's left with a weird, sterile idea of what a guitar is supposed to sound like.
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Post by funkykikuchiyo on Mar 4, 2022 10:50:45 GMT -5
With guitars, the one thing that gets to me the most is excessive squeaking string noise from sliding around on the strings between notes. To me, it screams of a player who doesn't care enough about their performance and technique to make an effort to eliminate it. It's more of a technique thing than setup. It makes me think they are lazy and don't want to put in the practice to mitigate the noise. A little is okay but a lot bothers me. Yeah, the technique thing is a real issue.
My coworker will have someone play a guitar and hit it super hard, maybe not even in playing position, annoyed that it is still buzzing or making some other odd noise. My coworker will just quietly ask "is that how you usually play?" to which they usually sheepishly say "well, no..." then they try playing it normally to find it plays okay... or they'll say "yes!" and we do a truly bizarre setup for a truly bizarre player.
I often think of the old joke "Doctor, it hurts when I do this...." "well, don't do that!"
It would be great if there was as much talk about learning to play to minimize fret buzz as there was about how to fix your guitar to not buzz. I've played with the idea of a larger social media presence on guitar stuff in the past, and a video series about things players can do to improve their guitars only through playing without fussing with setup, specs or anything else was one big thing I wanted to try.
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Post by rickyguitar on Mar 12, 2022 22:26:09 GMT -5
Many good points. For me, I like a guitar how I like it. At that point I just try to play the song. I have some skills, techniques and when I am on it can be real sweet. I know I am not the only player like this. I think maybe part of being a player is having the tools...chops and gear. Chops 1st tho.
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Wrnchbndr
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Posts: 353
Formerly Known As: WRNCHBNDR
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Post by Wrnchbndr on Mar 14, 2022 13:42:24 GMT -5
Some noises are wrong and have a solution but some noises are just the nature of the guitar. A rule for every tech is to never stop thinking out of the box. If you think that you’ve seen everything there is to see you are wrong. I’ve had a strat where it was necessary to install foam cores in the trem springs to prevent amplifier feedback anytime a b-flat or to a less degree, any harmonic of a B-flat under high gain. Fret buzz when honestly there wasn’t any reason for it. And a brand new instrument cable that caused the tone controls to appear inoperative. When a client brings you a guitar, you need to give them an initial benefit of a doubt that what they are complaining about is real. But there are instruments out there with issues that cannot be fixed due to a conspiracy of faulty mojo. Many years ago I encountered an MIM red strat that fret buzz from the 5th to the 14th fret. I performed a precision fret level on a tensioning jig, recrowned and polished the frets and it still had the same fret buzz. You could hear it both acoustically and through the amplifier. The only way I could eliminate the fret buzz was to put the action terribly high. It tried everything and put many hours into this. It became an obsession to win this battle. I even removed the pickups, shimmed the neck with a piece of card stock and all sorts of shots in the dark to figure it out. I put the neck onto another strat body and the problem went away and I was able to set it up perfectly. I installed another neck onto the original body and it set up very well also. But when I reassembled the guitar as it originally came from the factory the fret buzz returned. I finally gave up and gave the guitar back to the client with the phone number of my competition. I even gave my competition a call to give them a heads up of what I had done. The same guitar returned to my shop three years later with a new owner and I politely turned it away. I’ve since had a similar encounter with a Tom Anderson Tele and a Yamaha 335 copy. These things happen. Every guitar is different. Some drip with mojo while others less so. In my shop, I had the latitude to spend time with a lot people and on many occasions was able to let them demonstrate the issue. Sometimes it was totally they players technique and ignorance and sometimes it wasn’t. You just need to keep an open mind, aggressively listen to what they are saying and do your best to fix either the guitar or the client.
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mroulier
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Chemo'd and Radiated!
Posts: 155
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Post by mroulier on Mar 16, 2022 10:32:14 GMT -5
There is a Derek Sherinian song (Ex-Dream Theater keyboardist) where Yngwie is the guest guitarist. ("Sons of Anu" is the song if you wanna look it up on Youtube.) He has this sorta free time solo where he hits a little riff, and uses an echo to let the riff "breathe" and just lets the notes fade out. The 'problem' is that there is no noise gate in his signal, so the note fades down and it turns into the buzz from his amplifier. On the recording!! Happens at least 3 times!! And I LOVE the fact that it's there and they didn't go back to fix it!!!
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