He starts with the basic explanation - that fizziness in distortion comes from the harmonics @ 4-4.5k or higher - and goes through several demonstrations of fizzy and non-fizzy tones. On the demos where he eliminated or reduced the fizziness, he was quite clear in explaining the various techniques for managing the tone better. The techniques involve mic placement, speaker selection, turning up loud to get more of the power-amp section or speaker distortion and reducing reliance on pre-amp distortion, careful EQ sculpting after recording, and all the way to amp modifications.
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Two things struck me:
First, the discussion of pre-amp vs. power-amp and speaker distortion really rang a bell for me. He discussed that the 4-4.5k+ harmonics still may have peaks and valleys, and that the sections after the pre-amp may have different patterns of peaks/valleys, so if you get both pre- and power-amp (and speaker) distortion, you'll get a more full sound overall. I'd never thought of it like that before. I'd say that idea carries over into pedals too; often an overdrive into a distortion pedal sounds better than either of them separately, same with a distortion into a fuzz.
Second, the demos where he started with a very fizzy tone but then tamed it with EQ in the DAW were enlightening. This was not so much because the video was very detailed in going over the EQ settings or anything (it wasn't!), but more that I could hear a nominally "good" tone and see at the same time the drastic type of EQ it may take to achieve that tone. All of which, of course, leads back to the idea that such drastic processing is not as good as getting it right at the source!
(I.e., if I make better sounds, I'll make better recordings. A related idea is that my mixing, if it is getting better at all, the improvement isn't so much in whatever particular plugins I use and how I use them, but more fundamentally that I've gotten better at listening and hearing the quality of the sounds and am getting better at judging whether those sounds are "good" or "not good", and making needed adjustments only after getting that understanding. But I digress....)
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Anyway, it was quite educational for me
and I thought I'd share. It almost made me wish there were a thread parallel to The Tone Thread, but rather than being examples of toanz we produce ourselves and submit for critique, it would be a sticky thread where we could share especially useful videos or articles on the topic of guitar tones which are published outside our little corner of the internet. Maybe instead of critiquing the tones, we vote on whether or not the video/article in question is worthy of being a reference. And maybe call it "Johan's Gems" or something?
