Nine paragraphs about a guitar tone, as promised. Actually four. I…

Nine paragraphs about a guitar tone, as promised. Actually four. I have edited myself.

The thing about that whole sound is that it is distance rather than distortion, which took me an embarrassingly long time to actually hear. You can put as much fuzz on a guitar as you like and still sound like a person standing in front of you. What makes it work is the reverb sitting slightly wrong in the mix: further back than the vocal, wetter than it should be, so the guitar occupies a room the singer is not in.

That is why it does the thing it does emotionally. Nobody is being aggressive at you, it is more like somebody playing very loudly in the next building and you happen to be in the street outside.

I have spent two months trying to get this out of a pedal and the answer keeps turning out to be: play it quieter and put it further away.