Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Mar. 21 2005, 14:30 |
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I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with trying to get something in the same ballpark. Learning how other people's sounds are created can be a good way of learning things about playing an instrument (and in the case of things like guitar effects units and synthesisers, programming it, something which can become almost as important as playing technique, and indeed, can become linked to it).
I would say that your problem may be something more fundamental than an equipment matter. To get that high screaming sound, you really just need to play up on the top frets, preferably with the bridge pickup selected, and using an overdrive sound (preferably a fairly smooth sounding one - really buzzy sounds won't really work for it). That's the simple part...the hard part is exactly how you play up there.
I think the high end is a particularly unforgiving part of a guitar's range, it's very easy to create painful sounds when playing up there! Distortion/overdrive makes that worse, I feel - though the classic received wisdom is that distortion hides inaccuracy in playing, I find that it amplifies a lot of inadequacies in playing too. Unless you have a very finely controlled touch, distorted guitar solos can be very hard on the ears, especially if played up at the high end.
How to make it sound good is something that's very hard to teach (especially here, where we're relying on written words, rather than being able to see and hear what each of us is doing). Much of it is a case of developing your musical ear to the extent that you can hear when a note is sounding 'sour', and correct that. A lot of that has to do with using vibrato to shape the sound, and knowing the effects of fretting hand pressure (sometimes the notes really need to be 'gripped' hard, at others, they need to be approached gently, so your hands are almost floating over the frets...but I don't mean that too literally - if you don't hold them down with a certain pressure, they'll just buzz, as I'm sure you'll know already!). The fretting hand grip is crucial, I think - if you're trying to hang on to the neck of the guitar as if you're trying to stop it escaping from you, it'll stop you from getting a fully expressive sound. Again, you need to know the right kind of pressure to apply, and when. You can apply far less pressure when soloing than when holding chords (especially barre chords, which can need quite a bit of thumb pressure on the back of the neck to get to sound clear). I apply barely any pressure at all from the thumb during some solo passages - you could take my thumb away from the neck completely and it would make no difference. At other times, I'd apply more, but it's always a case of allowing the notes to come out in the right way - gripping too hard just ends up clamping your hand to the fretboard so you're not free to move and not free to get the right kind of vibrato and transitions between notes, which are both crucial things in getting those high solos to really sing. Knowing how to pick the notes is also important - for screaming sounds, you really need to pick quite hard, but if you do it in the wrong way, you'll just pull the notes out of tune (leading to that 'sour' sound). I think that's something that can only be developed through experience, really. After a while, you'll be able to feel what's right and what isn't.
My main advice would be to keep trying, and keep taking note of what changes can be made in the sound through different variations in how you handle the guitar. Also experiment with effects units and other pieces of equipment (like amplifiers, for example), and really get to know what each control does, then listen to sounds you like and try to think in terms of which of those controls to use to get closest to that sound.
It's also good to think of the electric guitar, effects and amplifier as a system, rather than separate items. You can then begin thinking of how to use them together to best effect, rather than struggling trying to use one thing in isolation, without considering how making changes on that thing will effect all the other parts in the system (and then finding that it doesn't work so well when they're all put together!). For example, a guitar with the tone control rolled all the way off might sound a bit muddy on its own, but when played through a heavy distortion, it'll gain brightness, as the distortion adds new harmonics. A heavily distorted sound with lots of high end harmonics might sound too buzzy on its own, but when it's played through a guitar amplifier, the buzzy highs can be rolled off, removing the buzziness, but keeping the added harmonics in the midrange. That midrange is the secret to Mike's sound, and combined with the right use of your strat's tone controls (an interesting one is to roll off the tone for the middle pickup, leaving the bridge tone fully open, then selecting bridge and middle together) and your amplifier (or amp simulator, or whatever it is you have at the end of the chain...and if you don't have anything coming after the effects, try putting something there), you can start getting to interesting places...
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also MusicallyInspired is great when it comes to guitar ... korgscrew is fantastic... 
