How is this electric guitar tone described?

November 4, 2023 7:02 AM

My family really likes the riff in Hollywood Baby by 100 gecs (previously on the blue). How do guitarists and music reviewers describe this tone? Is it "crunchy"? "Nasal"? I know a decent amount of music theory and practice, but very little of electric guitar, and guitar tone nomenclature is mysterious to me. I can understand spectrograms and harmonic analysis, but the words are more confusing.

Bonus questions:
How would this tone be achieved in practice? I don't need a detailed recipe, just an idea of the effects and order.

Is the usage of this riff an example of ostinato? Most riffs repeat to some extent, but they aren't all ostinato, so I'm wondering where the line is drawn.

Many sources treat tone and timbre as synonymous. One rando page said "Timbre refers to the specific harmonic content of an instrument that differentiates it from other instruments. Tone refers to the sound qualities of a particular sound." Is that generally accepted? If so, then does an electric guitar have the same timbre regardless of the effect chain, which changes only the tone? Or is the effect chain then considered part of the holistic "instrument" so that a guitar with delay and reverb is a different instrument and has a different timbre than a clean/dry guitar.

Any other analysis of this song/riff or things your think I should know about guitar tone are welcome, my general goal is to dissect this riff and figure out what makes it work so well for me :)

posted by SaltySalticid to Media & Arts (15 answers total)

Guitar isn't my instrument, but the guitarists I play with call that fuzz, or sometimes fat. You get it from a pedal. Here's a YT video comparing fuzz pedals where you can hear a range of fuzz. Once you get into amps and pedals, you can start layering with other pedals like distortion, overdrive, etc. Judging from the amount of gear my guitarist compatriots buy, I believe the sound of any given pedal will be particular to a guitar and an amp combo, thus justifying an increasing number of purchases to create exponentially new combinations of sound. Here's another YT video showing the differences and some layering. The guitarist talks a little about the sound wave forms.
posted by cocoagirl at 7:30 AM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: "How do guitarists and music reviewers describe this tone? Is it "crunchy"? "Nasal"? "

Those work. To me, it's a bit more "honky" than nasal, but either or.

"Is the usage of this riff an example of ostinato? Most riffs repeat to some extent, but they aren't all ostinato, so I'm wondering where the line is drawn."

Technically, I suppose it is, but I think it would really need to repeat more with more things going on on top of it to get a fancy word like "obstinate" to describe it. I'd just call it a riff.

As far as the timbre/tone question, this is from wikipedia:

"In music, timbre, also known as tone color or tone quality, is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musical instruments. It also enables listeners to distinguish different instruments in the same category."

I kind of agree with with the definition you posted, but it's a pretty grey area, and it's going to depend on who you ask. Most people don't know what the word timbre is or how to pronounce it, so you're probably safe sticking with "tone".

"does an electric guitar have the same timbre regardless of the effect chain, which changes only the tone? Or is the effect chain then considered part of the holistic "instrument" so that a guitar with delay and reverb is a different instrument and has a different timbre than a clean/dry guitar."

I would say that it's the latter. The sound of the electric guitar really only exists by amplifying it (yes, you can hear the sound of the unamplified guitar, but that's not what we're talking about), so you need to take into account the whole signal chain.

"How would this tone be achieved in practice?"

It's certainly distorted in some way. Overdrive, distortion, and fuzz pedals all do similar things in slightly different ways, and they all do their own thing well, but also can often sound like any of the other things. To me, "overdrive" is generally warmer and a bit more subtle, "distortion" is heavier and a bit brighter, and "fuzz" is thinner and more abrasive. But you could take any of those types of pedals and get more than their stereotypical sound out of them. As far as what they used in the song, it sounds like an amp was recorded with a mic that's a few feet from the amp. You can hear a little of the room sound and also seems like you can hear a bit of the guitarist playing the guitar.

I'd veer towards a distortion over a fuzz pedal. It's definitely very midrangy, so you'd want to cut the low and high frequencies and boost the mids. Much of the sound is the sound of the room. You can hear a very short reverb on the sound, so if I were trying to recreate this in a recording, if the room didn't sound similar, I'd put a bit of reverb on it and I'd use a preset for a very small room.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:45 AM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd guess bridge pickup into a fuzz into a dist/lead channel or maybe two distortions together (pedal + amp) cranked higher than typical. Sounds like square wave clipping to me, and that's a fuzz characteristic, although you can get it other ways e.g. abusing inputs of other kinds of devices, and some pedals these days will get you there alone as well. But with the overproduced sound of this band it's probably all done in Pro Tools plugins.

You ask why you like it and I don't think it's because of how it sounds, or rather not exclusively so. Riffs are good because of their groove. There's an interplay here, between tone timbre and rhythm: not all grooves fit all tones (this might not work played on a nylon classical guitar, right?); the right guitar sound can indeed make the riff and finding the right tone definitely elevates the part, but if they recorded this on a mic'd Mesa instead of a DI chain of 10 plugins you wouldn't suddenly hate it either.

Much of the sound is the sound of the room. You can hear a very short reverb on the sound

I think it's a spring reverb (plugin). It's present in the intro but not in the rest of the track. Common technique to make the intro sound smaller so the main song sounds bigger, more impact when the drums and bass come in. The intro guitar will be single tracked and reverb/filter (or far mic) setup to sound smaller / distant, then everything comes in close-mic / double tracked / full range when the track begins.
posted by cape at 10:08 AM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you already speak technical EE-speak then it might be helpful to say that overdrive/distortion pedals typically create distortion via clipping (eg at the extremes of the waveform) whereas fuzz pedals usually introduce crossover distortion (at the zero-crossing). That makes fuzz more "constant" because every signal crosses zero twice per period, whereas some lower-amplitude content might "escape" overdrive distortion and pass through undistorted. To many ears that makes a distortion pedal sound more aggressive (because nastiness is correlated with volume) while fuzz is more of a constant background hiss and usually heard as a little gentler, probably because it's less volatile.
posted by range at 10:09 AM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

It sounds like besides Distortion/Overdrive there's a filter limiting the frequency range, One way of accomplishing this would have been to put a wah pedal before the dist/od and leaving it in one position.
posted by drezdn at 10:10 AM on November 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Bridge pickup = more high frequencies for the distortion to affect, more "hairy" if you will.

Humbucker (double coil pickup) = not TOO many high frequencies, a little fatter and less tinny than a single coil ... and it cancels out the interference! (Fender Jaguar has been spotted with the band, not necc. what's used during recording though.)

Room reverb = could be an amp + reverb simulation, could be a room with an amp and a mic. But they recorded in EastWest Studios so you could be hearing an actual room, maybe one that you've heard on a Rage or RHCP album.

I don't think there's any fancy effects like chorus or flanger or anything else.
posted by credulous at 11:12 AM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

And I would have to defer to classical guitarists, but I don't think they distinguish between tone, tone color and timbre, it's all about the dynamics of the fingers meeting the strings and the harmonic content. "Tone" for electric guitarists can refer to just about anything, or it's something you say when you can't think of anything else to say.
posted by credulous at 11:35 AM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Search youtube for "holywood baby guitar" and "cover" or "lesson" and the performer will probably discuss the tone
posted by canoehead at 11:51 AM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Based on their Reddit AMA, a photo of Laura's pedalboard, and Equipboard posts for 100 GECS and Laura Les (which are based on the AMA, other interviews, live video, etc.), it's a guitar with a humbucker bridge > Metal Zone distortion pedal > Two Notes Torpedo C.A.B. M+ speaker simulator and then into some kind of amp—which could be a Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier, a Kemper Profiler head, or something else. (Ultimately, the Kemper Profiler head and C.A.B. M+ speaker simulator pedal should be able to emulate most amp/speaker combos.) It's likely that part of the signal chain goes through a laptop running Logic Pro X and involves some sythesizer plugins to further modify or filter the sound, as mentioned by others.
posted by Woodroar at 1:28 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

A lot of it sounds more like a guitar tone that was sampled and played on a keyboard (or edited on a computer) to me. Woodroar alluded to it, and I agree - the attack of the notes sounds unnatural for a guitar to my ears.
posted by MrKellyBlah at 1:56 PM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Isn't that what digital recording is though? These days?

As a Gibson SG owner, dual humbuckers for the win! Then woodroar and all these other music engineers lay it all out for us. Thanks to all the cool responses upthread. Though I may have clipped some of your frequencies.

But electric guitar just has so many possibilities. This should have gone in the other ask, but, get some gear, (described above), and make some insanely crazy noise. And that is like only at 5, it does go to eleven. All the discussion, and watching pro's with gear, just blows my mind.

Get some fuzz. Copy the riffs you like. Play with your instrument. So fun, even if you and yours are terrible. (All four of our kids were subjected to piano lessons. And, OMG, they are all so good. None of them have dropped out to go into music. Sigh... I can't do two things at once with my hands very well, so I bailed on piano early.)

Oh, reread the thread post. Ugh. Get your family to grab some guitars, and cheap amps, and see what you can do.
posted by Windopaene at 4:35 PM on November 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Great answers everyone, thanks! I love all the different angles on this. I do know what distorted electric guitar sounds like more generally, I suppose it is indeed a lot about how the groove of the notes and tone and drums etc all fit together.

This one feels very different to me than other sort of more canonical examples of distorted guitar riffs, e.g. the riff on Blue Orchid. But maybe there's another aspect of the envelopes?

The attack of the notes sounds unnatural for a guitar to my ears.
Yeah, I sort of felt that way too. Also the decay seems super fast/sharp. However, I also have confused heavily effected guitar with synths/samples stuff in the past. As a synth dabbler, I regularly end up playing with patches that are tonally in the space of distorted electric guitar or electric piano, but with a keyboard I can't really get that analog mechanical response of plucking strings or tines that leads to lots of subtly different attack/decay/sustain/release profiles, not to mention rich timbre.
Now I wonder if maybe there's some kind of envelope play going on in a pedal or plugin to get that super tight attack and decay?

Get your family to grab some guitars, and cheap amps, and see what you can do. Yeah! I should have maybe said that I have been learning hardware synths and keys for a while now, and working on strings more recently. I have some basic FX pedals and a bass amp, and3-string children's electric guitar. Maybe I should get a few more pedals and an electric guitar for grownups :)
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:17 PM on November 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Distortion can sound like a lot of different things, because there are a lot of different ways to achieve it. (Or rather, there's one way to achieve it - turning up the volume until it sounds the good kind of shitty - but there are a lot of ways to do that.) You can think of distortion of being an umbrella term, or perhaps there being a spectrum from overdrive to distortion to fuzz. This one is a fairly tight one that i associate with pop punk. Super tight attack and decay can be both from technique or from aggressive use of compression and noise gates, too.

I agree with drezdn that there's a filter limiting the frequency range, and also thought about a static wah pedal. I think that's what contributes to the nasal/honky tone. There also might be a phaser or flanger in there that contributes to the bit of honk that's in that tone.
posted by entropone at 4:56 AM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Definitely digital distortion of some kind. Sounds very "square wave" to me, but the track is also heavily produced and i suspect the guitar is recorded directly through a pre-amp by the audio interface, through a pedal chain or maybe with distortion plugins, instead of a microphone recording an amplified guitar. The gecs work hard to have a distinctive sound so I suspect there's a lot of tinkering with a few layers of eq and effects to get this just where they wanted it.
posted by dis_integration at 7:55 AM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Is it "crunchy"?

Yeah, "crunchy" would be a pretty commonly used & understood description of this sound - in contrast, with, say, the "high-gain, scooped mids" "metal" sound of someone like Mastodon. The 100 gecs sound definitely has more midrange and is not quite as distorted.

If so, then does an electric guitar have the same timbre regardless of the effect chain, which changes only the tone? Or is the effect chain then considered part of the holistic "instrument" so that a guitar with delay and reverb is a different instrument and has a different timbre than a clean/dry guitar.

I think you have now put more thought into the possible difference between "tone "and "timbre" than any rock guitarist ever. ;) Timbre is a rarely used word in the rock world, so "tone" kinda refers to everything about how a guitar sounds. If you threatened to smash their guitar unless they could define the difference, I suspect most guitarists would say "timbre" is something inherent to a particular guitar - which basically boils down to the kind of pickups that are in the guitar plus maybe scale length and type of bridge) - and "tone" would be everything else, including effects and amplifier. My Telecaster sounds different than my Jazzmaster sounds different than my Ibanez Flying V and those differences are audible when plugging into the same amplifier and effects chain. So each guitar has its own individual "timbre", and all the guitars share certain characteristics that allow our brains to identify them as "guitar", but the "tone" I derive from each includes the amplifier and effects.

is the effect chain then considered part of the holistic "instrument"

Yes, especially if you are using discrete pedals and especially especially analog pedals, as these will interact with each other and the guitar pickups and the amplifier in ways that can be hard to predict.

so that a guitar with delay and reverb is a different instrument

But no, guitarists won't think of this as a different instrument - it's just a guitar with effects on it.

Now I wonder if maybe there's some kind of envelope play going on in a pedal or plugin to get that super tight attack and decay?

Yeah, that sounds quite plausible to me. I mean, there are plenty of guitarists who can get really short tight attacks and decays (palm muting, and/or using your fretting hand to mute strings), and use of a fret wrap is not uncommon when recording, but the Hollywood Baby riff sounds really tight.

At the most basic level you'd use a noise gate, either pedal or plug in, and of course there's a good chance someone went in to the track in the DAW and relatively painstakingly edited the recording so the attack & decay is super short and sharp.

more canonical examples of distorted guitar riffs, e.g. the riff on Blue Orchid

It's interesting that you cite this as a canonical riff, as the guitar sound in Blue Orchid has kind of a lot going on - there's obviously multiple tracks of guitar, and there's both octave up and octave down sounds in the riff. IOW, it's maybe a little more "synth-y" and a less straightforward example of distorted guitar riff compared to, say, Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water or AC/DC's Back in Black.


One side note is that it's very common for guitarists to experiment with different guitars and amplifiers and effects when recording (often to the point where the guitarist, the engineers, and the producers can't remember exactly what was used) and that's before you get into any aspects of plugins and other tone shaping or sonic manipulations that happen in the studio or DAW. So while gear lists are fun to peruse, don't get too caught up in "must have THIS PARTICULAR guitar/effect/amp to get that sound" as they may have done the recording with gear entirely different from what they "normally" use. Especially when you're deriving what they "normally" use from information about what they bring on tour, as durability, replaceability, and availability often take precedence over "sounds just like the record" when you hit the road.
posted by soundguy99 at 9:34 AM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]