Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Twenty Tones You Meet In Heaven

There's a post on O'Reilly about keyboard tones. It started with 20 Sounds That Must Die, a list of way-overused keyboard sounds in 1995. He then reversed it, going to 20 Sounds That Must Live , a group of keyboard sounds that sound good and can generally be used in most situations.

That's interesting. But that's keyboard talk. I have a guitar.

No. That's not right.

I have several guitars.

I have a big dreadnought acoustic.

I have a tiny classical acoustic.

I have a Tele with dinky strings.

I have a Tele with heavy strings.

I have two lap steels.

Not to mention my pedals and the amp with clean and gain channels. And that multieffects box with bank after bank of emulation.

This is a big part of GAS. You need more instruments so you can get more sounds. A keyboard guy has bank upon bank of synth sounds, but to get a fundamentally different sound, you need to spend money on a fundamentally different instrument. You can break it down into acoustic, clean, crunch and lead tones, which might be useful for explaining. What are the tones you need to play? How do you get them?

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