Describing sound is hard..

Rocker

My post on upgrading the pickups on my PRS SE Soapbar has highlighted the difficulty of describing the sound of the guitar.  Others too seem to have the same difficulty as they attempted to describe the sound of P90 guitars they own or played in the past.

What exactly is 'fat' sounding?  P90s are often described as more 'ballsy' than single coils as fitted to a Strat.  And so on.

Roland

Every item in your sound chain, strings, body, pickups, amp, speakers etc has its frequency response spectrum.  To my ear "fat" means a slight peak between 500Hz and 1kHz. Single coils don't have as much of a peak in this region.

Cirrus

If I were to horribly characterise and generalise, single coils have clarity and a scooped twangy sound, p90s have clarity and more midrange emphasis - a slight nasal honk that cuts through at a lower frequency than single coil twang - and humbuckers have murk and lots of bottom and mids

OilCityPickups

A good P90 is a pickup that both smokes sixty Marlborough a day, gargles with Jack Daniels and razor blades ... but can still etch glass with it's top end at twenty paces
Yet ... turn that volume knob down a little and it's milk chocolate covered silk ...

Cirrus

I kind of thought your p90 is a bit hazelnut with the volume down- fucking tasty!

OilCityPickups

Grin )

UnclePsychosis

I once went to a conference talk by some guys who had some some really interesting research into how people describe sounds.

They had a keyboard/synth that had loads of different controls on it - things like eq, harmonic content, low pass filters, etc etc. However, all of the labels had been removed. They asked hundreds of people (music students, I think) to play with it and write down what each control "did" to the sound. They were then able to approximately correlate these descriptive words with whatever real feature of the sound was. It was really interesting stuff.

DannyP

I quite like the way Doug & Pat have established a small vocabulary of terms that have specific meaning to them (ballsy, throaty etc.). They explain what they mean by these terms and then use them consistently.

It's makes it easier to understand how they contrast different guitars across different episodes of their show.

There's possibly a place for florid prose about various tones, but the Doug & Pat approach really works well for what they do with their YouTube show.

ChrisMusic

@UnclePsychosis said:   I once went to a conference talk by some guys who had some some really interesting research into how people describe sounds. ... They were then able to approximately correlate these descriptive words with whatever real feature of the sound was. It was really interesting stuff.

Do you have any idea if they posted anything on the net about this?  Or who they were?

I would love to have access to the research, it is such a subjective area,  cheers,  Chris.

equalsql

When I used to play bass as my main instrument, the sound I was looking for was  "like a dumpling hitting a wall"
Now I play guitar I want the sound of the "string's metal cutting through the overdrive".
How these descriptions are interpreted by others is anybody's guess..... do I see blue as another person's red?

viz

I'd like to get that sound of warm honey dripping off a razor blade.

57Deluxe

Poets make a living out of using words to describe stuff for us readers to resonate with...!

jaygtr

I personally prefer a "plummy sound that's also chewy and accessible whilst still retaining great charisma ".

johnnyurq

I go for an angular spiky sound just like an 80's flattop with a barbed wire crown and percussive undertones like tackety boots with many segs on doing a tap dance.

p90fool

57Deluxe said:

Poets make a living

:-B