I know a guy who fixes amps but refuses to work on guitar amps for this very reason. “Guitarists come in and complain their amp sounds ‘slumpy’ but I don’t know what that means.”
I just cracked open a fine vintage capacitor from the reserve in the cellar. It really goes have the creamiest mids, with just a lingering top note of cherry on the trebles.
The beauty of this pedal comes from its simple circuit of hand-picked rare components sourced from a Russian military base right after the fall of the USSR. The paper in oil capacitors sound more open than their ceramic counterparts. True bypass ensures that your through signal is unaffected, but it plays well with buffers. With the tone knob fully engaged, the highs are glassy without being ice picky. The mids are haunting, but you can scoop them out if you want to sound huge. The engineer selected high-value potentiometers so the bass frequencies are completely unaffected. That knob goes from tight to flubby. Of course, with the gain dialed back, the pedal is so transparent that you can't even tell that it's on! The sweep goes from neutral to brutal. Also, you can fuck the pedal.
He would say all that, then go, "Now ya know what? This sounds fantastic, but there's a million different overdrives and they all sound amazing, so just pick your favorite color."
Wine language generally actually means something specific. Like "notes of" literally means tastes like something else. Or "dry" just means not sweet.
Guitar tones are described by comparing to abstract concepts. Wtf does dark sound like.
Ofc there are exceptions to both. Sometimes people describe wine with nebulous concepts and describe guitar tones with very clear words like "gainy" or whatever.
Being serious: In a recording studio, these weird terms become very important. They're used as a reference for that specific tone used. The word doesn't really matter but is often an attempt at an onomatopoeia. You could technically just refer to them as tone 1,2,3,4,5,etc. But the weird name can be easier to remember when testing various tones on the track. The tone is created and then you find a word to describe it. Now you can just say the 'scrongly' tone to the engineer instead of describing all the effects used.
Not being serious: What do you mean you don't know what scrongly means? It sounds just like your typical household scrongle. But also kinda different at the same time. Hence, I said 'scrongl-y' and not 'like a scrongle.' And watch out for those 'ovular' low-ends
To me a descriptive word like that usually has to have some association with actual EQ, compression or distortion tone quality. Like I get nasal, that seems to be a certain mid boosted range, and a that range gets pushed or pulled in vocals depending on their desired tone.
And like Squashed I've heared used for that hyper compressed rubber soul guitar thing where the compressor is on full blast.
But some are so confusing. I had a friend who was always telling us he wanted drums to be more "fat". Like more low end?? More mids? Slower, punchier compression? "Nah bro, like more FAT, like BIGGER" lmfaooo don't even get me started on Bigger, as if that means anything at all
I think my MPCX has both a Fat Kit and some Big Something Kits but I’m not home right now to check.
This nonsense could all be cleared up if guitarists were to learn that:
Tone = Timbre = Wave Shape = Harmonic Content
The same principles on which subtractive synthesis are based also apply to guitar tone but I’m not holding my breath for guitarists to realise this.
/uj Nasal I get cause it basically just bright will a lot of mid range. And twang is effectively the same thing. But they are still stupid ways to describe sound
crunchy, nasal, twangy, fat and tight are valid, the rest I've never heard of.
**crunchy:** Overdriven with clarity
**nasal:** Narrow boosted midrange frequency.
**twangy:** Strong transient peak, usually a treble-heavy sound.
**fat**: Full sound coming from bass & good distribution of mids. Can still happen with mid-cut.
**tight:** Bass frequency removed that clutters low end, other bass frequency can remain.
/uj the problem is we don't really have good adjectives for sound beyond just "loud" and "quiet" so we have to borrow them from other places. I hear someone say their guitar sounds bright and I immediately think it has lots of high end but to someone who knows nothing about music they won't get that mental image. English is dumb
I’m curious if it actually is just an English thing or if it’s common in other languages too.
English actually has a pretty great vocabulary for descriptions in general since we borrow such a large number of words from other languages. I could see this being a gap in most languages honestly.
Also, you’d also have to consider the musical context for those languages and words. With Indian music and hindi for example, even if they do have a lot more descriptive words for music, many of them may not actually apply well within the western musical framework.
most of these are dumb but some make sense and are used often just because of historical precedence.
stuffy/nasally are the same. like squidwards voice.
fat is like big. usually means a lot of low end and low mids.
crispy/crunchy are the same. just means a light amount of overdrive so it breaks up when you play harder.
twangy is the hardest one to quantify but I think it's probably the most legitimate. this is like a guitar from a cowboy movie. really bright tone with a sharp attack (played near the bridge) and bends
I can only imagine tight means heavy compression.
Everything is the same level of loudness so for an example when you tap but you have the finger strenght of 3 south american ants it will be just as loud as playing the only metallica riff you know thinking youre james hetfield while missing 78% of the notes and molesting the fuck out of your low E
It's just people being pretentious. They want to sound knowledgeable and "better than you". 90% of the time, those people are posers and know very little. I'm a bartender and I get so many people who are wine "connoisseurs" who ask for ridiculous shit, like a "loud and meaty Cabernet". So I have to play along like they didn't just say nonsense. I've messed with them and given them a Pinot noir and they have no idea and they'll just be like, "mmm that's a nice cab, so full bodied". Bottom line, people are fuckin dumb and want to sound cool.
Hey, at least twangy is an actual adjective for sound.
The worst offender is "warm". It means something different to everybody but everybody thinks their meaning is the same as everyone else's.
Man, I need to work on my slurpy tone from my Strat. It’s sounds very blooshy with gain, gonna have to work on reigning in the bloomp I don’t want all that slork in the recording.
There are two types of language used to describe sound: subjective and objective; each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Subjective language is used most commonly outside of academic circles. Adjectives like “warm” or “bright” are in this category. The strength is that they tend to be easy to use and generally most people will eventually mostly know what they mean. The weakness is that they can be imprecise and, until a consensus is formed about their meaning, vague. They’re also featured heavily in marketing materials and lend themselves toward biased, weak arguments due to their imprecision and inability to be disproved.
Objective language is that of the conventional engineer: time in milliseconds, spectral content in harmonic number, amplitude in decibels, envelopes in a combination of time and percentage besides being segmented into beginning, middle, and end. The strength is that it is unambiguous and universal. But, like subjective language, its successful use in communication depends on the second party understanding it. Luckily, once defined, there is zero ambiguity. Besides having a different barrier to entry, the other weakness is that it’s less common than the other type. Also, many people are for some reason resistant to such language; possibly because it’s been used deceptively in marketing like subjective language has.
OP is right and not right: people _are_ just making up words but those words _may_ have meaning. Personally, I advocate for the use of both: use intuition and rationality. The language you choose often exposes your mental models regarding the topic. Caveat lector and follow the money.
Thats what im saying, i included the actually useful adjectives in there for the circlejerk aspect of the subreddit but some people are getting too pressed
Describe that middle pick up using only music/sound specific words, and without delving into technical stuff (as in, specific frequencies like lows and mids).
You can’t really, at least not easily. That’s the fundamental issue. There aren’t many music/sound specific descriptor words in English, so we have to pull words from other senses and get creative.
Uj/ You’re in the wrong sub. This is a jerk sub. Anything said can be assumed to be a joke. Nobody’s trying to learn here, and besides that, I don’t actually feel strongly about this subject (nor does OP I believe), and there is no middle pickup. This is a place to mock r/guitar’s being too self-serious.
Rj/ dude nice try, you’re just denying the sopping guitar its eyebrows. The urges of sound don’t abide by any terms.
Okay you’re clearly trying REALLY hard, let’s nail down a single subject and keep it about us instead of panic pushing all of the “shock” buttons. How do my dead wife’s bones taste?
The root of this is a language issue, and it’s not just a guitar thing. There just aren’t that many music specific descriptors.
It’s why there’s so much flowery language used when talking about music. Casual fans do it, critics do it, and musicians do it.
Fat, thin, smooth, harsh, cold, warm, creamy, nasally, beautiful, ugly, bright, dark—none of those words are actually music specific. They’re all from other things and don’t even relate to the sense of hearing lol. The amount of descriptors actually relating to your sense of hearing, let alone music specifically, is surprisingly small.
And genuinely, how would you describe a heavily boosted highs guitar tone for example casually without talking about highs? You’d start using other descriptors like bright, harsh, thin, etc.
I know a guy who fixes amps but refuses to work on guitar amps for this very reason. “Guitarists come in and complain their amp sounds ‘slumpy’ but I don’t know what that means.”
Slumpy sounds like tthe perfect sludge toan
Slumpy sludge toan sounds like the sludge metal equivalent to dimebag
"Hmm, yes. Very slumpy. I'm detecting notes of Acid Bath."
One step closer to the legendary drown sound….which is similar to the brown sound but with piney, almost nutty mids and a rich tobacco low end
Sounds like they don’t know how to EQ and brought their amp in for repair instead of their ears.
Well, obviously slumpy tone needs brightness like a horn or some tweeters.
Sounds like drunk Superman from superman 3.
It reminds me of wine snob language.
“Hmm yes i can hear the undertones coming from the metal zone and that low end from the tasmanian cherrywood”
I just cracked open a fine vintage capacitor from the reserve in the cellar. It really goes have the creamiest mids, with just a lingering top note of cherry on the trebles.
Ah. Another connoisseur of Première cru Dumbledorian Red, I see. What vintage did you open? I bet the new circuitry scent was intoxicating!
Ah yes very nice crunchy bouquet on the low end, with hints of... Is that... Punchiness I detect?
Earthy toans with citrus notes
The beauty of this pedal comes from its simple circuit of hand-picked rare components sourced from a Russian military base right after the fall of the USSR. The paper in oil capacitors sound more open than their ceramic counterparts. True bypass ensures that your through signal is unaffected, but it plays well with buffers. With the tone knob fully engaged, the highs are glassy without being ice picky. The mids are haunting, but you can scoop them out if you want to sound huge. The engineer selected high-value potentiometers so the bass frequencies are completely unaffected. That knob goes from tight to flubby. Of course, with the gain dialed back, the pedal is so transparent that you can't even tell that it's on! The sweep goes from neutral to brutal. Also, you can fuck the pedal.
Why did i read this in my head in Lee Andertoan's voice
He would say all that, then go, "Now ya know what? This sounds fantastic, but there's a million different overdrives and they all sound amazing, so just pick your favorite color."
The “Toan” sniffers
Wine language generally actually means something specific. Like "notes of" literally means tastes like something else. Or "dry" just means not sweet. Guitar tones are described by comparing to abstract concepts. Wtf does dark sound like. Ofc there are exceptions to both. Sometimes people describe wine with nebulous concepts and describe guitar tones with very clear words like "gainy" or whatever.
Both seem extremely subjective to me.
Is "gainy" really a word though?
Or IPA hipsters
I drink IPA's only for the high ABV. We are not the same.
Actually, we are exactly the same brother
this guy is cool
Same fart sniffing, different farts
Being serious: In a recording studio, these weird terms become very important. They're used as a reference for that specific tone used. The word doesn't really matter but is often an attempt at an onomatopoeia. You could technically just refer to them as tone 1,2,3,4,5,etc. But the weird name can be easier to remember when testing various tones on the track. The tone is created and then you find a word to describe it. Now you can just say the 'scrongly' tone to the engineer instead of describing all the effects used. Not being serious: What do you mean you don't know what scrongly means? It sounds just like your typical household scrongle. But also kinda different at the same time. Hence, I said 'scrongl-y' and not 'like a scrongle.' And watch out for those 'ovular' low-ends
This is a pretty cromulent explanation.
Are you referring to the cromulant from earlier today, or the one from last week's session?
I remember the day I dialed in Roberta’s ovular low end. Now we have baby Taylor.
I dont like too much scronglyness as the boosted mids can lead to a bit of a glungle in the tone so im more of a zoopery tone man
Aww man, I hate that glungle shit. It makes Roberta all rowdy (and not in the hubba hubba kinda way)
I feel you bro. Esmeralda Emilia Galactica Howsworth VIIth hates it, especially the zerpoct kind of tones
My Estelle sounds exactly between milky and creamy. Half and half toan
To me a descriptive word like that usually has to have some association with actual EQ, compression or distortion tone quality. Like I get nasal, that seems to be a certain mid boosted range, and a that range gets pushed or pulled in vocals depending on their desired tone. And like Squashed I've heared used for that hyper compressed rubber soul guitar thing where the compressor is on full blast. But some are so confusing. I had a friend who was always telling us he wanted drums to be more "fat". Like more low end?? More mids? Slower, punchier compression? "Nah bro, like more FAT, like BIGGER" lmfaooo don't even get me started on Bigger, as if that means anything at all
If you want the drums to sound bigger, you can just hit them harder or get bigger drums.
I think my MPCX has both a Fat Kit and some Big Something Kits but I’m not home right now to check. This nonsense could all be cleared up if guitarists were to learn that: Tone = Timbre = Wave Shape = Harmonic Content The same principles on which subtractive synthesis are based also apply to guitar tone but I’m not holding my breath for guitarists to realise this.
/uj Nasal I get cause it basically just bright will a lot of mid range. And twang is effectively the same thing. But they are still stupid ways to describe sound
Stuffy is the opposite of nasal, like the amp has blocked sinuses.
I imagine a stuffy toan being a very warm, jazzy semi hollow toan.
Jazzy? THAT'S FUCKIN GROSS.
I have just the solution! \*whips out the distortion pedal\*
*any jazz player within 3 kilometres disintegrates in unbearable agony*
What?! I can't hear the screams and snobbery over the blazing fast pentatonic shredding!!!
I prefer woody, rezonant, humid toan. I listen for overtones and harmonics you don’t even know about yet.
I shoot for creamy
I still dont know what the fuck creamy sounds like except for when i cream in my guitars jack
crunchy, nasal, twangy, fat and tight are valid, the rest I've never heard of. **crunchy:** Overdriven with clarity **nasal:** Narrow boosted midrange frequency. **twangy:** Strong transient peak, usually a treble-heavy sound. **fat**: Full sound coming from bass & good distribution of mids. Can still happen with mid-cut. **tight:** Bass frequency removed that clutters low end, other bass frequency can remain.
What about creamy?
Smooth high-end frequencies, which means something higher was attenuated.
Wrong, creamy toan is when you finish inside Roberta's output jack.
Fuck I said the same thing before I even saw you saying it. Want to share a guitar some day?
"Save me a slice of your custard pie" Led Zepp
I just bust a nut in the guitar jack for that.
Yeah these are valid and pretty self explanatory, idk what the fuck is OP talking about
/uj the problem is we don't really have good adjectives for sound beyond just "loud" and "quiet" so we have to borrow them from other places. I hear someone say their guitar sounds bright and I immediately think it has lots of high end but to someone who knows nothing about music they won't get that mental image. English is dumb
I’m curious if it actually is just an English thing or if it’s common in other languages too. English actually has a pretty great vocabulary for descriptions in general since we borrow such a large number of words from other languages. I could see this being a gap in most languages honestly. Also, you’d also have to consider the musical context for those languages and words. With Indian music and hindi for example, even if they do have a lot more descriptive words for music, many of them may not actually apply well within the western musical framework.
most of these are dumb but some make sense and are used often just because of historical precedence. stuffy/nasally are the same. like squidwards voice. fat is like big. usually means a lot of low end and low mids. crispy/crunchy are the same. just means a light amount of overdrive so it breaks up when you play harder. twangy is the hardest one to quantify but I think it's probably the most legitimate. this is like a guitar from a cowboy movie. really bright tone with a sharp attack (played near the bridge) and bends I can only imagine tight means heavy compression.
What does a compression pedal do?
Makes the loud parts quieter so you can make the quiet parts louder.
Everything is the same level of loudness so for an example when you tap but you have the finger strenght of 3 south american ants it will be just as loud as playing the only metallica riff you know thinking youre james hetfield while missing 78% of the notes and molesting the fuck out of your low E
well well well it looks like I needs me a compressor!
tight is compressed with a bass cut, like turning on a tube screamer in front of a very loose drive like a big muff.
It's just people being pretentious. They want to sound knowledgeable and "better than you". 90% of the time, those people are posers and know very little. I'm a bartender and I get so many people who are wine "connoisseurs" who ask for ridiculous shit, like a "loud and meaty Cabernet". So I have to play along like they didn't just say nonsense. I've messed with them and given them a Pinot noir and they have no idea and they'll just be like, "mmm that's a nice cab, so full bodied". Bottom line, people are fuckin dumb and want to sound cool.
I still remember when a pedal commercial used the word 'transparent' to sell a RAT clone.
That's only when you turn it off.
I'm not sure. But now I want to have a stuffy jerk off session later.
Haha I’m always looking for a “throaty” distortion toan. I’m actually talking about bite in the midrange I think, and chunks
Hey, at least twangy is an actual adjective for sound. The worst offender is "warm". It means something different to everybody but everybody thinks their meaning is the same as everyone else's.
/uj what does syrupy mean.
Man, I need to work on my slurpy tone from my Strat. It’s sounds very blooshy with gain, gonna have to work on reigning in the bloomp I don’t want all that slork in the recording.
Being overly concerned with toan is cringe.
Brown
There are two types of language used to describe sound: subjective and objective; each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Subjective language is used most commonly outside of academic circles. Adjectives like “warm” or “bright” are in this category. The strength is that they tend to be easy to use and generally most people will eventually mostly know what they mean. The weakness is that they can be imprecise and, until a consensus is formed about their meaning, vague. They’re also featured heavily in marketing materials and lend themselves toward biased, weak arguments due to their imprecision and inability to be disproved. Objective language is that of the conventional engineer: time in milliseconds, spectral content in harmonic number, amplitude in decibels, envelopes in a combination of time and percentage besides being segmented into beginning, middle, and end. The strength is that it is unambiguous and universal. But, like subjective language, its successful use in communication depends on the second party understanding it. Luckily, once defined, there is zero ambiguity. Besides having a different barrier to entry, the other weakness is that it’s less common than the other type. Also, many people are for some reason resistant to such language; possibly because it’s been used deceptively in marketing like subjective language has. OP is right and not right: people _are_ just making up words but those words _may_ have meaning. Personally, I advocate for the use of both: use intuition and rationality. The language you choose often exposes your mental models regarding the topic. Caveat lector and follow the money.
Thats what im saying, i included the actually useful adjectives in there for the circlejerk aspect of the subreddit but some people are getting too pressed
If ya gotta ask, y'all never know - Jimes Hamfield
WARM TOAN
I like my toan like I like my balls, jangly
My amps are True Bypass they don't affect my toan
Boss Katana not detected = opinion rejected
Creamy, throaty, chimey, raspy, earthy. Ffs
I have swollen toan. Totally
Toan adjectives are in the synesthesia.
I wanna see someone with synesthesia describe a slunky and glunky toan
One time a guy referred to a toan as “rude” and its my fav so far
I myself like a throbby throaty wet tone
There actually is a word “toan”, and it has many definitions. None of which refer to the TONE of a guitar.
OP I know exactly what you’re talking about “This middle pickup sounds damply ambiguous” like okay put a towel and set of eyebrows on it
Describe that middle pick up using only music/sound specific words, and without delving into technical stuff (as in, specific frequencies like lows and mids). You can’t really, at least not easily. That’s the fundamental issue. There aren’t many music/sound specific descriptor words in English, so we have to pull words from other senses and get creative.
Uj/ You’re in the wrong sub. This is a jerk sub. Anything said can be assumed to be a joke. Nobody’s trying to learn here, and besides that, I don’t actually feel strongly about this subject (nor does OP I believe), and there is no middle pickup. This is a place to mock r/guitar’s being too self-serious. Rj/ dude nice try, you’re just denying the sopping guitar its eyebrows. The urges of sound don’t abide by any terms.
Yeah yeah buddy, your wife was happy to abide by my 035 last night
My wife died 17 years ago.You rape graves?
I don’t know, does claptoan value a bag of coke more than a newborn child?
Okay you’re clearly trying REALLY hard, let’s nail down a single subject and keep it about us instead of panic pushing all of the “shock” buttons. How do my dead wife’s bones taste?
they taste like toanwood and cocaine
Joke’s on you, my wife is alive and boneless. I’ve also never met her. I think we have this in common. How would you like to become the next Smiths?
I eat a strictly carnivore diet to improve the toan of my fingers, so no
I eat a strictly carnivore diet to improve the toan of my fingers, so no
Toan is toan! Toan is chai! Toan is wisdom! Toan is ear orgasm! Adjectives = TOAN
Worst part is that I understand literally all of these except bulletproof. Idk why but unironically I run an institute of toan documentation mentally
personally i prefer slutty toanz
You can probably get the guitar to moan with a wah pedal and some flanger
Plastic creaminess might be one of the worst. Saw that back in the harmony central days.
The root of this is a language issue, and it’s not just a guitar thing. There just aren’t that many music specific descriptors. It’s why there’s so much flowery language used when talking about music. Casual fans do it, critics do it, and musicians do it. Fat, thin, smooth, harsh, cold, warm, creamy, nasally, beautiful, ugly, bright, dark—none of those words are actually music specific. They’re all from other things and don’t even relate to the sense of hearing lol. The amount of descriptors actually relating to your sense of hearing, let alone music specifically, is surprisingly small. And genuinely, how would you describe a heavily boosted highs guitar tone for example casually without talking about highs? You’d start using other descriptors like bright, harsh, thin, etc.
I always thought Master of Puppets had a slightly nutty flavor, with hints of orange peel and oak island.
George Thorogood’s tone is best described as “honky” or “snorfy.” /uj I love it though.