“I went through all these amplifiers. And I could never figure out why I didn’t sound good”: Steve Vai on crafting the perfect tone
Been spending the better part of your guitar journey searching for the perfect tone? Here are some tips from Steve Vai that might just make that journey a little easier.
Speaking in a new interview with Guitar Center, the virtuoso explains why the answer to “tone” lies not in the sea of shiny gear out there, but in constantly refining one’s technique and listening to your own playing.
“People say the tone is in the amp, the tone is in the guitar, the tone is in the neck, the tone is in the body or the pickups,” Vai begins. “On one level, yes. There is a tone in all of those things, but you’re the boss of the tone because you’re the one playing it, and you’re the one hitting the note.”
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Like many players, Vai, too, struggled to achieve the sound he heard in his head at first.
“I changed my picking style completely in 1983 because I was just getting tired of not having a great tone,” he says. “I went through all these amplifiers. I was searching for something that sounded like some of the things I was hearing at the time. Edward van Halen had hit the scene. You had Yngwie [Malmsteen]. So many players. And I could never figure out why I didn’t sound good.”
The guitarist says that his breakthrough came when he stopped searching for external fixes and started fine-tuning his technique.
“I started to experiment with the way that I pick, where I pick, how I pick, the angle, all of these things. You get to a point where you hear it and you know it, and then the work starts. Your ears have to be the police of your technique.”
As Vai explains, the tone of a note has “so many moving parts to it”: “One of them is just where you hit the string. There are so many parameters in creating the tone that comes off your fingers,” he adds.
For the guitarist, this means experimenting with things like the angle of your pick, how hard you hold the pick, and even the way you touch a note.
“The intonation is dictated by how hard you push, how hard you pull this way, what your vibrato is like. All of these things go into discovering your unique tone,” says Vai.
During the chat, the virtuoso also highlights the power of visualisation in developing tone.
“One thing to experiment with if you’re interested in improving your tone: you just sit quietly and you kind of imagine in your mind the tone you want,” he says. “You actually see yourself creating it.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
