My Gear and Tone

This page covers my guitar tone more from the technical perspective. But I have to tell the truth and say that I'm not that much of a gear-head or a tone-freak. Sometimes I think I just arrived at my tone by blind luck. To me it boils down to a combination of a few main factors: a heavy guitar, high-output pickups, a tube amplifier with a strong, bright, clean sound, and finally, a lot time spent dialing in tones with the right EQ.

Guitar & Pickups

Guitars (See my guitar collection here): My usual guitar is a custom, made by Chris Michas from Denver, CO. I also used a Gibson Les Paul custom for many years, and still like to use it once in a while because of its dark, rich sound. Both guitars are very heavy, and like I said, I think this is a key element of my tone.

A note about Trey Anastasio's semi-hollow guitars: While it's clear that Trey's semi-hollow Languedocs are an essential part of his tone, I think there is a misconception out there that semi-hollow guitars in general will produce that type of tone. As I understand it, Trey's guitars are extremely heavy, and that is why his tone is so rich. Most hollow and semi-hollow guitars are too light to produce this type of tone.

Pickups: The pickups in both of my main guitars are Seymour Duncans, a "59" at the neck, and an "Alnico II Pro" at the bridge. I have been playing with Duncans for most of my life, and am consistently happy with their smooth distortions and high output (two things that usually go hand-in-hand). I make sure to keep the height of the pickups adjusted so that they are as close to the strings as possible, without the string actually touching the pickup when I play on the highest frets. I also make sure the relative heights of the two pickups are adjusted so that the pickups produce equal volume.

Amplifier: My amplifier is a Fender DeVille 2x12. I used to play through a Hot Rod Deluxe, which has a single 12, and sounded pretty good, but I prefer the DeVille's 2 speakers and bigger cabinet. I only use the clean channel, and I have the volume set somewhere around 3. I set the equalizer knobs to "flat" because I get all of my EQ from my digital unit (described below). The amp sits on a stand, angled up toward my head when I'm playing.

Which brings me to an important overall point: I think it is essential that you point your amplifier at your head when you're playing, so that you accurately hear the true tone. If you have your amp sitting on the floor, it is pointing at your ankles and you don't hear the high end (treble) so well. Some guitarists will then tend to over-compensate by dialing a tone with too much treble. When the amp is sitting on an elevated stage, the problem can be compounded because this too-trebly tone hits the people down on the dance floor right in the face.

Effects Chain

I'll run through my effects in the order that I use them.

1. AnalogMan Bi-Comp pedal. A lot of people know about these AnalogMan pedals by now, and I think Trey Anastasio might even be using one. I probably have this pedal turned on 50% of the time (at most) during a Phix show. I use it during clean melodic passages, where the guitar has the melody and it needs to be heard over the band, and I'll use it with distortion during the jams, when the intensity builds and I again need the guitar to sing out over the rest of the band. Once in a while I'll use the "Orange Squeeze" side of the pedal, which gives me an even crisper, brighter compression--good for a really strong, bluesy sound. I typically set the "sustain" knob to about 11:00, and the "level" knob to about 1:00, and I set the OS side to about 1:00 as well. This way, I get a slight boost in volume when I kick the pedal on.

A note about compressors in general: Many people think that the compressor is a key ingredient to a good tone, and while I won't deny that a compressor is an important tool, I would not describe it as the key ingredient. Like I said, I have it turned off about 50% of the time. Compression doesn't really change your tone very much, it just smooths it out and beefs it up. So in other words, if you are not particularly happy with your tone to begin with, a compressor is unlikely to solve your problems. But if you do have a tone that you're more or less happy with, you might find that a compressor takes you to another level.

2. Boss GT-6 multi-effects unit. I have been using this same unit for about four years now, and am still very happy with it. In fact, I've tried other setups, including the well-known "2 Tube Screamer" setup, and have found that I prefer the GT-6. In fact, the distortion I use on the GT-6 is a simulation of the Tube Screamer, and to my ears it sounds pretty good. I think that the main reason I didn't like the "2 TS" setup was that, in order to get a good tone, it needed to be so loud as to be impractical. I just don't want to play that loud. The GT-6 is all digital, so I have full control of the volume of each patch, plus an overall output control.

One thing I should add about the GT-6 is that it took me a long time and a lot of tweaking to get the tones I wanted out of the GT-6. The factory preset tones on it are mostly useless--I think their purpose is just to show you some of the things the GT-6 is capable of. I am working on documenting all of the settings on my GT-6, but for now, here's a general description of how I have my tones dialed. I use four basic tone settings and the basic principle is incrementally larger amounts of distortion, reverb, and delay on each to make each tone sound progressively bigger and louder:

1. Clean. I spent a lot of time dialing up the biggest, brightest, fattest clean tone I could come up with. I also add a little bit of reverb and even a tiny little bit of delay to this tone to round it out a little bit. Ironically, I rarely use this tone onstage because it doesn't cut through the mix very well. I will occasionally use it when playing chords during a piano solo or bass solo. However (and this is VERY important), this tone is used as the starting point from which I build all of my other tones. The reason for this is that I want all of my tones to sound consistent--so that it's not very noticeable when I switch tones. I think this is a key component of Trey Anastasio's overall sound, by the way--although he has a lot of effects and switches tones constantly, the tones are consistent all the way through.

2. Not-so-clean. This is probably the tone that I use the most. It is a mostly-clean tone, with just a slight edge of distortion. The distortion is really only noticeable when I hit a chord strongly, but it definitely fattens up the tone overall, so that when I play a melodic passage, it can be heard clearly over the band, but still sounds pretty much clean--only someone who is listening closely would notice it.. I also think that the slight amount of distortion warms up the clean sound a little bit. I add slightly larger amounts of reverb and delay to make the tone sound even bigger and rounder.

3. Distortion. This is a basic distortion that is not overpoweringly loud. I use it for rhythm guitar parts in the more straight-ahead rock songs, chord work in the dirty funk jams, and in the earlier parts of an open jam, before the intensity builds up so high that the tone gets lost.

4. Lots of distortion. This is the same kind of distortion as #3, but a lot more of it, and also an extra helping of reverb and delay to make it sound even bigger. I tried to achieve the maximum amount of sustain with this one as welll. I use this one for the big solos--it is loud, obnoxious, and very distorted.

The "Ctrl" pedal. I use this extra pedal mostly to add chorus to any of my tones. I like to use chorus now and then, especially when playing chords during a keyboard solo or a funk jam. Makes the sound a little bit more diffuse.

Other tones: I keep a couple of banks of tones that I use every now and then for something different. Again, in an effort to be consistent with my tones, all of these started with one of my four basic tones. I add things like a flanger, an octave divider, and an auto-wah just to get some different sounds. But I rarely use any of these more than once during a given show, and many times I don't touch them at all.

Boss Rotary Ensemble. This is a relatively new pedal made by Boss, and I have been enjoying it a lot. It is a simulation of a Leslie speaker, on which you have a fast-slow control. You can adjust the fastness of the fast, the slowness of the slow, and the "rise time," or the time it takes to get from slow to fast and back. I use it in a few different circumstances, and I particularly like using the fast setting to get that vibrating sound like Charlie Hunter or John Scofield. Sounds GREAT when comping under a keyboard solo or in a funk jam.

Q-Tron Envelope Filter. I pretty much use this pedal for a single purpose--to get that Jerry Garcia wah tone, like you would hear in the song "Shakedown Street" or "Estimated Prophet". I don't use it very often, but for the $150 that it cost, it was worth it. Always throws people for a loop to hear Garcia-esque sounds in the middle of a Phish song.

Boomerang Phrase Sampler. This is another one that I don't use that often--maybe 3 or 4 times during a show at the most. Good for creating weird sonic backdrops for a jam, including the "funk siren" made famous by Trey Anastasio. I don't feel like I am very good with the Boomerang, though, and am to this day still unable to reproduce some of the things that Trey does with it. But I also have my doubts as to whether the Boomerang is really worth the $400+ that it costs, and if you couldn't do just as well with a Boss Loop Station for about $250.