Eureka (or Idiot!) Tone Moments

tolm

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May 8, 2012
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I had a great 'tone moment' this morning (no, that's not a euphemism ...) with my new Paul's Guitar which I thought I'd share - and was also wondering if other members have had similar occurences when something just 'clicks' suddenly.

I had a 408 previously so am pretty used to the whole 408 pickup switching system. This morning I was just jamming before work - hitting some riffs that I pretty much always play when I only have 10 minutes - and I found myself playing some Rolling Stones (Brown Sugar - as it happens) with both pickups split - which is what I always used on my 408 when my band played it. Sounded good but - as it always did - not 100% bang on.

I started flipping switches and hit a config I never normally use: Neck HB + Bridge SC. It sounded great. No, it sounded RIGHT. I often run the pickups the other way (Neck SC + Bridge HB) to mellow out the bridge pickup a little but this way round was new: and it had just the right balance of 'snap' from the bridge SC plus the warmth from the neck HB. Bigger - yet somehow brighter - than both coils split.

Then it hit me: what does Keef famously play? A Tele with a humbucker in the neck ... *doh*

So - 'Eureka' or 'Idiot' moment: any other similar stories of tone discovery?
 
Yep! Mine's from back in the Dark Ages--1967, to be exact. I was just 17--hey, there's a song there!--and I'd just gotten rid of my Vox Phantom 12-string and had managed to score a Gibson SG Standard, and I already had a Fender Bandmaster amp. The other guys in my band were trying to get me to play like Mike Bloomfield--I was trying to play like Eric Clapton, and I couldn't do either style on the 12-string, so the SG was a step in the right direction. But something was missing--tone! The guy at the music store when I got the Bandmaster told me never to run the volume on the amp any higher than 5 or 6 (!) to avoid blowing up the amp (!), I think more for my parents' benefit than mine! Since I didn't want to blow up the amp, I took him at his word and kept the volume at about halfway up. It was still loud enough for the gigs I was doing--school auditoriums, gyms, Masonic halls--but real clean, which worked fine with the Vox 12, but I was trying to get some drive out of the SG, and I couldn't afford a fuzzbox anyway. So one afternoon I was practicing in the basement, and I happened to bump that volume knob--and I had the guitar wide-open on the neck pickup with the tone control all the way down, and there it was--something kind of like Clapton's Disraeli Gears-era tone. I darn near fell over--"So that's how he does it!", I thought. The band still wasn't letting me take many solos--I was still the 12-string guy in their minds--but one night on a gig, our lead singer let me take a solo on a slow blues--and it was like that line from Paul Simon's "Late in the Evening"--"I turned my amp up loud and I began to play, and it was late in the evening, and I blew that room away!" That was me that night! They all said, "Why didn't you tell us you could play like that?" "You didn't ask," I replied. The truth was that I couldn't have done it a month earlier--it took finding that tone, and then lots of practice on those licks. There just wasn't much information available in those pre-Internet days!
 
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Well, I hate to post something that has nothing to do with PRS, but here it is. I have always tried to craft my own tone.

My eureka moment came in 1999. At the time I had a Marshall 800 combo running into an upright 2x12 cab. This was back when you could get a 1980s JCM800 for $300. It was painfully bright. I had all the highs rolled off. Turns out if I'd just been playing a less bright guitar (Jazzmaster at the time) I could have better been able to use the amp, but anyway... I wanted a new amp.

The Internet back then was not what it is today, and the discussion boards were known as newsgroups. I would read and post on Alt.Guitar.Amps. Someone mentioned Egnater by Rocktron, back before Bruce's current company formed, the one everyone knows now for the relatively inexpensive Chinese made amps they produce. These were far better USA made amps. As I have complained about many times before, the dealers in Phoenix all basically suck, but I managed to find one small dealer way the heck away from me that stocked one Egnater TOL50 combo. Literally one chord later, I hadn't even adjusted a knob or anything, I heard a sound that made my hair stand up and took my breath away. I couldn't believe it.

Nor could I afford it. The head I wanted cost $1100. I had maybe $400 to my name. I worked part time for Fedex and went to school and lived in a pretty crappy apartment with my girlfriend (now my wife). About a month after I tried out the amp, word came down that Rocktron was bankrupt, Bruce Egnater had left the company and there would be no more of these amps made. I friggin panicked!! I took every penny I could muster and ordered the amp, and then came extremely close to taking my '91 Toyota pickup down to the Cash for Auto Title pawn shark place to pay the remaining balance once the amp came in. Luckily my girlfriend loaned me the money I needed. I managed to get one of the last ones ever made, and the certificate of authenticity isn't even signed by Bruce Egnater. Here it is 15 years later... still rocking that amp.

(Sorry PRS. I still love your guitars.)
 
That's one of the great things about the 408 - all of the sound options. The Neck HB + Bridge SC is one of the settings built into the Custom 24s and 22s as well (pos 4). Those are the flagships for a reason, but I do like being able to get the extra sounds out of the 408 - e.g. Neck SC + Bridge SC, Bridge SC only, and Neck SC only.
 
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