What Specifically Is The Relationship Between Fingers And Tone

[tone4days]

seymour w duncan demonstrating the relationship between fingers and tone

[Rich_S]

Interesting thread, as I just had a revalation along these lines last night. Rather than the fatness of the tone, I was worried more about the transient response, snappy starts to rhythm riffs, and clean breaks between chords. My rig was sounding mushy to me, with everything kind of blurring together. At first I thought it was my EL84-based amp, which I'm still getting used to. I also played around with different gain and tone settings (not hard since this amp has 1 tone and 1 volume, plus the Weber MiniMASS on the output).

After about an hour of foolin' around with it, I reached a conclusion: the riffs all sounded blurry and imprecise because I was playing them that way. After nearly ten years of little to no guitar playing I SUCK. Time to work seriously on my chops rather than my gear.

[Stringmachine]

In my opinion the fingering doesnt matter that much. As long as you aint got a fret buzz, everything is allright.

Pick material, pick thickness, how you hold your pick, where you pick and placing of the picking hand, however does.

[Zerberus]

IMO the fingers are THE most important ingredient in the tone....

As many have stated, the most miniscule things (Worn pick vs New, guage of pick, and of course EVERYTHING having to do w/ body mechanics) can make a huge difference....

Most people don´t realize that the fretting hand is just as important...There are actually pickups out there like the Dirty Fingers that seem to accentuate THAT more than anything else...whether it´s a lil vibrato, a bee sting, or just a simple hammer-on, the exact way you do it it was makes it sound the way it does....do it slightly differently, and you´ll see what I mean

I would sum it up as : if your fingers are crap, your tone will be, too....if your gear is crap as well, then you´ll end up uninspired by both your playing and your tone, and either buy new equip soon, or take lessons, or quit.

If your fingers are mid level, then gear can actually make or break the difference to a certain extent, because this is where inspiring tone is really important...to open the doors that you need to create, and keep you pumped up and able to play.

But if your fingers are great, then everything else is just icing on the cake

[twoheadedboy]

Pick attack has a TON do with it. Do this little experiment. Record yourself playing with a thin, wussy pick, then with a heavy pick, then with something like a quarter or a penny. You should notice some pretty big differences. Also, stuff like where you pick the string, how you hard you attack and the angle that your pick hits the string at is all pretty important to how your gear responds to your playing. A friend of mine gets amazing tone with a JB in a les paul through his amp, but he gets a very thin sound with the way he plays. If I plug into the same rig, the low notes fart out and the high notes sound nasty and fizzy. It's all about finding the gear that creates the most pleasing balance for you as a player.