The spring that I graduated from high school, an album came out that has turned out to be very nostalgic for me. As my lifelong best bud and I have said, I can hear the songs on that album and be transported back to those day. I’ll smell the model glue from the airplanes we were building and feel the hope and eagerness of graduating and transitioning to the first days of finding myself as an adult. Within a couple of months of the album coming out, I had moved across the country away from family and friends. Before I left, my buddy had copied that tape for me, and I listened to it over and over because it reminded me of home.
One of the songs starts off with the lyric “What are the words? What are they saying?” It was asking a totally different question than what I’m going to talk about here, but the questions are the same.
As guitarists, we tend to have our own vocabulary that folks that don’t play guitar sometimes don’t follow. They probably get the big ones pretty quickly. “Crunchy.” They may not know to call it drive, but they know it’s that chainsaw sound. “Woofy” and “thin” and words like those are pretty self explanatory. Others might not make as much sense to them like “crispy,” “fizzy,” or “quacky.” Sometimes I think our descriptions work really well. Sometimes they leave, even me, scratching my head. I was doing some reading the other day, and came across on that I think fits the best of any yet.
I’ve been playing around with some jazz sounds and even some actual jazz. So I’ve got one of my semi-hollows pulled out and neck pickup sounding like I think jazz should sound. I’ve really been digging the tone I’ve been getting from it. Wasn’t really sure how to describe it other than “warmer than usual.”
I’ve got it up on the neck pickup. The Tone knob is set to 4-ish. Minimal crunch in the sound. It totally wouldn’t work for a blues band, but, to my ear, it just sounds so good for what I’m playing. That’s where something I read comes in. It said that in a good jazz tone, you’re looking for it to be “warm and creamy like melting chocolate.” And that’s what this tone sounds like to me. It’s kind of warm and gooey and just slowly dripping in your ear. Kind of like a candy bar that’s been sitting on your dashboard. “Warm and creamy like melting chocolate.” Non-players may not quite understand at first, but I bet nobody that heard the tone could disagree with that statement. It’s just so appropriate!