Electric guitars in Musesounds

After viewing https://youtu.be/6EedmYjfCjw?si=0SMXA29bs8lur8mV about electric guitars in Musesounds, I responded to David McCoy that a division between Les Pauls and Stratocasters is not a good starting point for making characteristic guitar-sounds. Presumably this was done to differentiate between humbucker pickups and single coil models, but even that distinction will not work. I suspect that you can only reach a believable character if you take into the account the major components in the sound-chain: nails or picks, strings, pickups and amps plus speakers. That is a very global approach: much deeper differences can be looked at, but these are the major players.

Nails or picks

The sound of any guitar starts when a nail (or a pick) hits a string. This triggers a mechanical vibration. The device that hits the string brings its own character. Flatpicks, fingerpicks, nails (with or without flesh), they each sound unique. The ways they get the string to vibrate, also vary wildly. A twelve pedal steelguitar will differ a lot from an old steelstring that is nailpicked and then bent to reach the desired tone. The overall important factor is that a guitar sounds like a guitar because hands touch strings, but there are many variations. Brian May uses modified sixpences, some players ebony picks, Marc Knopfler uses his fingernails as did Steve Howe. Strength of attack is important. The list of variables is long and it leads to the phenomenon that some players always sound like themselves. Jimi, Stevie Ray, Chuck… A good starting point seems to be to make a distinction between fingerpicked without pick, with pick, flatpicked.

Strings

Next the string starts to do the hard graft. Very important are the materials the string is made of: nylon, steel, silk, brass, gut. Any jazzplayer can tell you that you will only get the smooth sound you need when you are using flatwound strings. Think Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel and many more.
Then the size of the string. Billy Gibbons has high E-strings that are only 0.006” in diameter, Stevie Ray used more than double that size. Another major factor is the amount of sustain the guitar allows the string to have. The common believe has always been that Les Pauls and other massive and heavy models stole less energy from the string, while the Strats and Teles had a shorter tone life. There are however many more factors, especially the amount of feedback the guitar picks up from the speaker. Ask any bass player with a hollowbody.

Construction of the guitar

Hollowbody’s, like for example many jazz guitars and Epiphone Casino’s, sound radically different from semi-hollowbodies (ES 335 etc, thinline models, Starcasters etc.) . They usually produce an acoustic sound and that is energy that doesn’t build up the electric sound. Although through feedback that still can happen. There are two kinds of feedback: the sound from the speaker can make the strings vibrate, that will be picked up and amped again. That is the only kind of feedback on really massive guitars. Or the sound from the speaker will reverberate in the body of the guitar and that will make the strings vibrate again. Different and much more powerful then the first one. So any guitar with some acoustic properties other then directly from the strings, will have its own feedback. And that also influences the sustain.

Pickups

Strings that contain a large amount of iron can be ‘seen’ moving by an electromagnetic pickup. There we come to the difference between the humbuckers (full sound, less hum) and singlecoils (clear sound, more expression but prone to hum, hiss etc. But the variation is much larger and much more interesting. Peter Green is believed to have wired in one of the pickups of his LP Goldtop the wrong way around, so it was out of faze with the other one and a major part of his sound was born. But he played Need Your Love So Bad on a Strat and still sounded like Peter Green. Brian May built switches into his Red, to reverse the polarity of each pickup is he so desired. But he will sound like himself. Stevie Ray had his pickups specially wound with a thicker coil wire, to increase the beefiness of his Stratocaster.
So heavy tends to be more humbuckeresque, and clear more singlecoily. But there are a lot of interesting in-betweens: especially the P90’s that Gibson developed and used on the first Les Pauls and that are regaining popularity because of their clarity. The Epiphone Casino is still built with these pickups and George Harrison loved these guitars. Fender also tried to capitalize on the success of the competitors with the Wide Range humbuckers. They have a interesting variety, soundwise: the CuNiFe elements, with a very own ring. The name means that the metal plate at the bottom of the magnets is made from an alloy of copper, nickel and iron.
The material of the magnets also plays an important part. Any design will act more aggressive with alnico magnets, for example.

Amps and headroom

The final piece of the chain is the amp. FX are not part of this article. There are two important types: tube and solid state. To begin with the tube-models: that is where the quest for heavy sounds began. An amp-tube performs well (clean) between two tresholds. The signal that is fed to it, must be strong enough to get the amp going, but not so strong that the amplified signal starts changing shape. That is called breaking up. Guitars are dynamic beasts, that means the strength of the signal can vary a lot. So tubes are tuned, biased in techspeak, to process the signal from the lowest to the highest peak. That high peak should normally not lead to breaking up, but keep cranking it up and that is unavoidable. The room between a normal clean strong level and a level that starts breaking up is called the headroom. And managing the headroom is the same as looking for distortion. That distortion in tubes builds up quite gradually. It begins with only the strongest parts of the signal for a nice bluesy edge on the sound. If the whole signal is so strong that is distorts, you’re in heavy metal territory. Clapton found that out: in his Bluesbreaker- and Cream-years he would play over a Marshall-stack at maximum volume. And keep his distance, to rescue his hearing.
There were other ways to get your sound distorted. The great pioneer is called Link Wray, who in the late fifties started slashing the conuses of his guitar speakers. Listen to The Rumble. A lot of punk/grunge sounds pay tribute to him. Dave Davies from the Kinks - top guitarist – followed his lead and also slashed his speakers. You Really Got Me displays that sound from the get go.
Solid State amps rely on transistors to do the heavy lifting. Much more reliable, less power consuming, but… the headroom is virtually non-existent. Of course that has evolved and the modern modelling amps – nearly always solid state – can emulate the old tube sounds. But never ameliorate! The wonderful English player Dave Simpson, nearly a reincarnation of Peter Green, claims he cannot hear the differences and so he is sworn to solid state.

What does all this bring for Musesounds?
If you start developing virtual guitars that have to sound like the real world-ones, you should look at the real world. Study the effects of nails or picks on strings of different gages and construction, work out what the different types of pickups do to colour the sound and how strong the effect of feedbacks is, what the amp does on or off demand and what the speaker brings to the party.

Niek van der Heijden.