Clean Tone - What options to thicken up each note

Hi all stay safe 😉

I have a guitar questions for Clean Tone [br]I been playing single line one note melodies,riff,licks

But I want to thicken up each note as I use the pick,or finger style to sound a lot fuller or wider sounding as much as possible not so thin sounding as it is now

How would You Guys approach doing this [br]For the desired effect I am after?

Does a certain pedal work

Just donot know help when You can Thanks

Guys

You can add compression, reverb, chorus, delay and still be considered kinda clean. Unless you're looking for Dry. (?)

-Carl.

I'd try using an octave pedal with it set to one octave down and mix that in slightly with the dry signal of the guitar. As long as you don't mix in too much of the wet signal from the octave pedal it will fatten your sound a bit in a subtle way and the effect won't be to obvious.

I wonder if a TC Electronic Mimiq Doubler or Keeley Electronics 30ms Double Tracker would help you achieve the sound you're looking for.

Originally Posted by: bcraig_69music

Hi all stay safe 😉

I have a guitar questions for Clean Tone [br]I been playing single line one note melodies,riff,licks

But I want to thicken up each note as I use the pick,or finger style to sound a lot fuller or wider sounding as much as possible not so thin sounding as it is now

How would You Guys approach doing this [br]For the desired effect I am after?

Does a certain pedal work

Just donot know help when You can Thanks

Guys

I'm going to go a different direction and it's something you'll hear ad nausea in guitarist interviews; tone starts with your hands.

In theory, you should be able to play through any rig, clean, and have nearly the breadth of sound you are looking for. The point is; with what authority are you playing those notes?

A friend of mine who was a great great drummer and definately not shy of a good solid hit of a drum or cymbal, when he first got in to the studio, things changed. I was there helping 'engineer' the session (though engineer is a stretch..I was helping be an extra hand, really).

For the first song recorded, the first and second take were just anemic. There was no life in these takes. After the second playback, everyone was baffled a bit. Mic ok? Input level (gain) ok? We checked each drum mic setup to be sure it all sounded good.

On the third run through I watched my friend play the take instead of watching junk in the control room. I made the actual engineer (and a friend too) stop the track. I punched to my friend's headphones and I may have said; 'Stop hitting like a (expletive) little girl!'. He was my roomate and we talked like that, but..that was the issue. The next take, he just played the heck out of that track. On playback, it all came alive. He said after playback, about the first time recording, he was afraid of making mistakes.

Remember that an amp is just that; amplifying what you're playing. The speaker only drives what you push through it. Those take my friend first made did not trandlate. Hit hit hard during setup but then changed his playing when the red light went on. It all sounded weak.

To that point; any effects mentioned here are tools to enhance the sound you already drive to the amp.

You can probably see the point here; your playing should reflect a certain amount of authority and will do much to broaden that sound going to your amp. If your hands are in control, the amp is only going to reflect what you're pushing through that. Secondly, if that's all well and good, your amp's EQ settings are next. You have to fiddle with them knobs to bring out the frequencies good to your ear. It's at this point you should have a sense of it sounding pretty good. Those effects you add on are icing. You don't want a pedal to be the band-aid. You want it to be the icing.

My thoughts.

If your tone is sounding brittle/thin when picking single notes, there's a lot of things you can do simply with the adjustments on your guitar or amp.

First, your pickup makes a difference. Depending on your guitar, you can try using the neck pickup to get a more rounded, full tone. You can also roll your tone knob back from the highest treble setting to bleed off some of the highs. Most tone knobs are tapered knobs, so they can be a bit useful after about a quarter turn - just beware of that.

Second, you can do similar adjustments via your amp. Your amp should have either a tone knob or seperate EQ knobs labeled "Bass", "Mid", "Treble". It might have all of these or a combination of them. If it has a "tone" knob, rolling the knob to the left will tilt the eq in favor of bass tones and to the right will tilt the tone in favor of treble tones. If you want to make a "rounder" tone, roll back the mids and push your lows and highs a bit. This should give a wider sounding tone that isn't as "punchy".

If these tips don't get you were you want to go, you can do what some people here have suggested and move into the land of pedals... EQ pedals, compression pedals, boost pedals with EQ control are all tone shaping tools that can get your tone where you want it with a little tweaking.

Obviously without hearing exactly what you're looking for, it can be difficult to suggest things. These are just some basic things you can try with the equipment you already have.

My main goal is to learn to do to get a soft warm rounder fuller balance tone across all 6 strings

As close as possible using just what the guitar it’s selfs offers and yes I agree tone is in my hands [br]like one person said about the different pickups

try the neck pick to get a warmer round full tone

or use the that tone knob for that pickup and roll off the piercing sonic highs

Here howI been looking at the guitar

so I could be wrong on this if please show me right way?

but when I think of the guitar

I think of 3 sections

low resiger 6 ,5 strings

mids resiger 4,3string

highs resiger 2,1

Later

with out any pedals at first

then head down the pedal road

So as I been slowly and continue to develop my soft warm fuller tone do agree tone In in the hands

I will try to post some unlisted YouTube videos as I experiment with this and then I can get better ideas 💡 from others

note I am still very much in the early learning stage guitar so I can only do what I been practicing

Thank You all for Your very valuable insight

Originally Posted by: bcraig_69musicMy main goal is to learn to do to get a soft warm rounder fuller balance tone across all 6 strings[/quote]

What guitar are you using? What amp? How loud are you playing? What music are you playing?

[quote=bcraig_69music]I will try to post some unlisted YouTube videos as I experiment with this and then I can get better ideas 💡 from others

Yes, I think a video with audio would be helpful to demonstrate what you are actually doing & what it sounds like. Let us know when you've posted one!

It depends so much on amp and guitar.

I can give you my current setting for practice.

I play on a Fender Stratocaster and a Yamaha THR10ii.

I have the Fender on neck position 4.

I have gain up enough so it's there, bass dialed back, middle a bit higher and treble a bit higher than the middle. With a slight of reverb.

But how does that help if your gear is different? :)

Hey there bcraig .. I have just bought a LP style guitar with humbuckers. When I played, the guitar sounded sounded a bit light for this style of guitar. I went to the source (Gibson) on you tube and found a video by the Gibson luthier. He suggested in the video about adjusting or making sure the height of the strings from the humbuckers was correct.

So in the video he gave out the factory height settings and added his own preferred measrements of the height of the strings from the humbuckers. I adjusted the height of the humbuckers on my guitar to the Gibson factory settings and then the luthier's preference. The change in tone wasis amazing. When I first measured the distance from the humbuckers to the strings, they were almost double of the Gibson factory settings. My guitar had a nice tone before, but it now rings out crystal, loud and with double the sustain it had when I first played the guitar.. so just another way to improve the tone.. cheers.

PS. by raising the pickups on my guitar, it has boosted the output of my 10 watt amp volume by about 30-50 %. When using distortion on the amp with a gain of more than the 9 o'clock position, I now need to turn all knobs on the EQ to Zero.