Guitar Tone Buzzwords
I have a simple goal in this article, you guys: I'm going to do my best to define some guitar tone buzzwords. I'm not a dictionary, I'm just a normal guy, but somebody has to do this, and today is the day to get ‘er done.
So, I’m going to forgo any further ado (try saying that five times fast) and dive right in.
Transparent Overdrive
The first buzz word we need to tackle is ‘transparent overdrive’. This is one that's everywhere. People talk about it. People argue about it. People say things are transparent, people say things aren't transparent, so what is transparent? Webster’s dictionary defines transparent as “having the property of transmitting light without appreciable scattering so that bodies lying beyond are clearly seen”. I don't know about you, but that seems like a pretty morbid definition. I don't want to talk about bodies lying around.
Don’t worry. Transparent overdrive is really simple. It's an overdrive that keeps the sound of your guitar and the sound of your amp in place and just adds a little bit of dirt, a little more grit. It doesn't give a big mid boost like a lot of Tube Screamer style pedals. It doesn't add a ton of bass. It just keeps things like they are, but gives you a little bit more.
You can leave it on. You can turn it off. The only difference is a little more grit.
True Bypass
Next up: true bypass. What is it? A lot of you are losing sleep over this, but I'm here to help. Here's the story.
In the 1960s, pedals hit the scene. They were awesome, but when you turned them off, they were never really off. They kind of ruined your original signal, and that wasn’t good. So by the 1970s people were trying to figure out how to fix this, how to do it better, and then companies came along like BOSS and they perfected a system called electronic FET switching, also known as ”buffered bypass” switching.
Now, I really like it. I think it's genius because when you push the foot pad, you basically touch a momentary button that's located underneath. It's the same thing that's in a computer keyboard when you're typing, but all it's doing is telling a circuit which way you want your guitar’s signal to go. You hit this foot pedal, that activates the little button, and the button talks to the circuit and says, “Hey, they want to change the routing.” So instead of your guitar going into the pedal and then through the overdrive circuit and out, you click it, it goes in through a FET transistor, bypasses circuit, and goes out to your amp. Long story short, this works really, really well.
By the 1990s, we had a boutique boom. A lot of builders started building things in their homes and there's this whole new scene. The best example I can think of is Fulltone, the FullDrive, by Mike Fuller. It’s a genius company and Mike is a fantastic designer. He starts using mechanical switches. When you click them, they click, they make a noise, and that's mechanical, so “true bypass” is basically what we call switching that uses this little mechanical foot switch. You have your signal, it's going through your overdrive, but when you click it, it reroutes it completely around, with no circuitry, no FET, nothing.
It's basically a light switch for your guitar.** Turn it on to get your overdrive. Turn it off to just have your clean signal and it's good. But is true bypass really the best? No. True bypass and buffered are both really good, it just depends on the pedal and depends on what the musician wants. If you want to know more about this, go watch my Top 6 Pedal Myths episode.
**That’s a freebie for any pedal makers out there. Totally use that in your next advertising campaign. They’re gonna sell like hotcakes.
Boutique
“Boutique” may be the most misunderstood buzzword on this list, simply because you’ve got a hundred different definitions to choose from. We’ve got to know what this means. We see it all over the place. Is this pedal boutique? Is this amp boutique? What does that even mean?
Webster's defines boutique as “a small company or business that builds highly specialized products or has highly specialized services.” I think that's perfect. That's exactly what it is.
Here’s an example: when I started JHS Pedals in 2007, I was definitely boutique. I built everything myself. I hand populated every board, I labeled the cases, I shipped them, I wrote every email. Literally, I did everything. It was very small, very specialized. But we've grown. I have around 25 employees and I'm not even gonna claim to be boutique anymore. I’m just as concerned with making high quality products and offering great service as I was when we got this company started, and we still do a good job of that, but in the strictest definition of the word, I don't think JHS is boutique anymore.
Honestly, I really don't think there are a lot of boutique builders left. Yup. I know that's a sticky statement, but I stand by it. Here’s some of the people who are still in the boutique land: Analog Man, Scotty at Pro Analog, and Paul C and the Timmy Pedal out of Tennessee. With all of these companies you have one person and maybe a couple of helpers specializing in something very particular. It's still small. That’s boutique.
I rest my case, Your Honor.
Sustain
Next up we have “sustain.” What is it? What do people mean when they say this? I hear this term in conversations and there's no way that the people are referring to the same thing. It's a semantical nightmare.** So, what is sustained?
**Good band name, by the way.
Okay. As guitarists, when we hear this term, we think of a guitar, a note, searing with huge distortion through time and space, bringing kings and gods to their knees. It evokes a pretty big feeling, picture, what have you, and we expect to get it all in a pedal. That can get confusing.
In ’69, Electro Harmonix released the Big Muff, and even on this reissue you're going to notice it says “sustain” for the fuzz control. I think this is where the confusion started. In the ’70’s a little bit later, we see Roland and BOSS start to create distortion-free sustainers in contrast to the Big Muff, which added more confusion. Was “fuzz” an entirely separate effect from “sustain”? How did distortion fit into that sphere? Can sustain be clean? Does it always have to be distorted?
Let me be super clear. For this topic of effects pedals specifically, I’d define sustain as the effect of artificially extending a note beyond what the guitar itself is capable of. That’s about as clear as I can make it.
Scooped Mids
The next buzzword on the list is “scooped mids.” I'm not sure where it first showed up. I'm going to guess the ’80’s. We've all scooped ice cream. A lot of us have scooped poop, but have you ever scooped your mids? Only you can answer that.
Basically, “scooped mids” means that you remove the mid frequencies; you cut them out.
If you want to test out this effect, you can take an Angry Charlie and get it raging like a JCM 800. Then you’d want to turn the mid control all the way off, essentially “scooping” the mids out. This is a sound you’ll definitely recognize. Whether or not you like it? That’s up to you.
Dumble/Dumble-esque
Next up: Dumble-esque**. Is that overdrive Dumble-esque? Is it a Dumble style sound? Isn’t that the name of that one guy in the Harry Potter books? What does this mean? Let’s be real. A lot of you have no clue. No shame in that. Maybe you've seen this word, but it intimidated you so badly you didn't even want to try it.
**Coincidentally, if you want a good laugh, here’s a list of words my transcription service auto-translated Dumble-esque to by mistake: gumball-esque, dumbbell less, jumble “S”, and dumb burlesque. I honestly can’t pick a favorite.
This is a safe space. I’m gonna break it down for you.
Let’s start with the basics. A guy named Alexander Howard Dumble starts modifying fender amps around 1963, then he gets a job for Mosrite. He designs some amps for the Ventures. He sees success, and then he goes out and starts a solo career as an amp builder. Now, this is the time when Mesa Boogie is starting, companies like that, and Dumble starts building these high gain, hot-rodded, Fender-style circuits, but he does it really uniquely.
He goops the circuits. He puts black epoxi all-over stuff. You can't see what he's doing. It's super mysterious. It's eccentric, it's wild, it's fascinating, and you can't look away. He only builds them for people he wants to build them for. It’s exclusive. It’s elite.
His gear ends up with a lot of famous players’ hands, like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Johnson, but nowadays you really only see him with John Mayer, Bonnie Raitt, or Robin Trower. If you want a Dumble these days, you’d better be willing to drop some serious money. By that I mean, you’d pay the same price for a house.
Okay, you’ve got the history. So, what is Dumble-esque?
I don't know. I know that’s probably not the answer you were expecting, but I think it's impossible to define ‘Dumble-esque’ because all of his amps sound different. It’d be like playing an Earthquaker pedal and asking if it had a JHS sound. It all depends on what pedal you’re comparing it to, not just the pedal-maker. I've played ten different Dumble amps, and they all sounded different.
Is there a Dumble sound? I didn't know. So I called up my friend Eli from Two-Rock Amplifiers. I own several of his Dumble-inspired amps. He knows more than anybody, so let’s ask the expert.
Eli was quick to point out that “all the Dumbles I played do have the characteristic that the low end holds together really nice[ly]. It's like a snare drum, kind of full, on top of each other...The Dumbles do hold together very nicely and they're a good platform.” When asked whether he’d call his amps Dumble-esque, his answer was simple: “I tell people, this is our interpretation of what we think that is. It's our incarnation of all of the best Dumbles that we’ve played...We don't make a direct clone because, like you said, they're all so different.”
There are tons of pedals out there that are Dumble-themed, but a few of my favorites have to be the Overrated Pedal (yes, that’s actually the name of the pedal), the Zen Drive, Mojo Hands, Extra Special, and then Vertex has several: the Steel String Slinger, Steel String Clean Overdrive, and the Ultraphonics. Now do these sound like the Dumble? I don't know because what is the Dumble sound? Even the expert couldn’t give us a definitive answer on that. They're all different, but I get that there’s a theme here.
Let’s just agree that they are very cool pedals. I love all of them, and I would put them on my board. Case closed.
Earthy
One of my personal favorite buzzwords is earthy, as in, “Hey, I'm looking for that earthy mid-range.” I'm not completely sure where this started or what it even means.
Let’s go back to our old friend Webster. He defines earthy as “resembling dirt or soil.” I gotta be honest: my guitar tone has never looked like dirt or soil. I’m not sure what my guitar tone looks like at all, to be completely honest. Like a soundwave? Like that cartoon Soundtrack that popped up in the middle of Fantasia and hung out with Deems Taylor?
Okay, sorry. Let’s focus. I think I know what it is.
“Earthy” is that Stratty, slightly dirty, slightly gritty sound that comes in those in-between positions on a Stratocaster or any guitar where you're combining the pickups. “Earthy” is that kind of phasing, multi-pickup sound. Look up a demo for the Moonshine Overdrive, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a real mid range heavy or even, dare I say, Dumble-esque sound?** Combine that with two pickups and boom!
**Feel free to Google the gif for “Dramatic Prairie Dog” to really get the feel I’m going for here.
Haunting Mids
Next up we have “haunting mids.” Can mids be haunted? Apparently they can be earthy, so I don’t see why not.
I first noticed this buzzword floating around in comments on Instagram. Particularly, our account people would say, “The mids are so haunting”, and it was always with an LOL or a laughing cry emoji. That tickled my funny bone for sure. It was precisely the right amount of silly.
I decided to run with this, so around 2017 I released a limited pedal for Halloween and I called it the Haunting Mids. Now this is an active mid preamplifier. It's a mid boost, a parametric EQ you might say, and it did really well. We put it out and then I realized there was a pedal called Haunting Mids and a whole backstory. Now I had drug myself into this, I’ll be the first to admit that, but a lot of people thought I knew about the whole situation, and really I didn’t. I just liked the name**.
**This could literally be its own chapter in the “History of the Guitar Pedal,” just clueless pedal makers accidentally borrowing names from competing gear companies. Happens all the time.
Let me explain what happened. Apparently, around 2006 an awesome Wah designer Geoffrey Teese coined this term on his gear page. He said “haunting mids.” I can see this happening, ‘cause he makes Wahs and Wahs are full of mids. Basically, there’s a disagreement, a schism, and a group of people leave the gear page. They start a forum and call the forum Haunting Mids as an insult to the people at the original gear page over their disagreement. Then the haunting mids forum made about 50-100 fuzzes that said “Haunting Mids.com” on the pedal. Long story short, those pedals exist and they go for crazy money on Reverb. If you have one you’ve been sitting on, this is a great time to sell it.
About a year later, I put out my own Haunting Mids pedal. I like it, it's a great product, and I’m blissfully unaware of all that that went on. Honestly, even after it was explained to me, I didn’t really care. I was happy with the pedal I made.
But now you can confidently answer the question, “Can mids be haunted?” with a resounding, “Yes”, so you’ve got that going for you.
Smooth Highs
Is this one a buzzword or buzz phrase? I don’t know. I’m talking about “smooth highs,” as in, “Does this pedal have smooth highs?”
I’m not sure where it came from, but I remember back in the early days when I modified pedals, I saw people saying that their mod smoothed out the high end, and I'm going to be honest and confess to you that I even put this in a lot of my copy because I didn't know what else to say. Basically, we're taking a pedal that has a little too much high end treble and we're smoothing it out. By “smooth” we're just saying we're removing some of it. Easy peasy.
Complex Harmonics
The last buzzword in this article is probably my favorite. It's fun to just look at it and it's fun to say, so say it with me: “complex harmonics.” It's awesome.
I see people asking if this distortion has complex harmonics or this amp is very complex in the harmonics, and I'm not completely sure what it means. I'm not great at this high level thinking. Fortunately, I’m a member of a Facebook gear group called Pedalboards of Doom. Check them out; it's generally a really positive forum with intelligent people, and I love the conversation. I asked them, “Hey, what are complex harmonics?” I got 123 responses. I'm not going to list them all (I just heard that collective sigh of relief), but I am going to read some of the highlights:
-Harmonics infused with a blend of 21 herbs and spices.
-A conversation with your wife
-Expensive
-The opposite of simple harmonics
-Tones that overanalyze everything and are no fun at parties
-Harmonics that are complex
-Microtones
-Overtones
Here’s one of the more detailed answers I got: “Complex harmonics are harmonics that are created by distortion. They sound pleasing because the ratio of frequencies is mathematically closer to a whole number. Even harmonics create complex ratios and they don't sound as pleasant. And then we have harmonics with many repeats, usually in the octaves and fifths.”
Clearly, there's a lot of math involved here. I'm not good at that. But we should be able to Encyclopedia Brown this out for ourselves. Take an octave fuzz, an old school primitive circuit, play it and listen really closely for complex harmonics. You’re going to hear your original note, but then you should hear above that note a screeching high end octave that's tracking loosely. That's complex harmonics. Because #mathematics.
Hopefully you guys are ending this article feeling better than you started. My goal is that you would be able to dive into a guitar forum and confidently make small talk about transparent overdrive, true bypass, the real definition of boutique...I’m basically setting you up to look awesome. Think of me as the Hitch of guitar pedals, and you’re fairly close.
Hey, I’m just here to help.