What do they mean when they say "chewy?"

skay

The opposite to snappy, so overlaps more in the ‘forgiving’ circle of the amp tone Venn diagram 

Modulus_Amps

WiresDreamDisasters said:

what the hell do people mean when they say an amp is 'chewy' ????

Maybe more manuals should say "Caution High voltages inside, no user serviceable parts, oh also do not eat any part of this appliance"

To me its  wide open pushed amp, where the top end starts to roll off and sound sweeter, and when you hit a string you can see the harmonics coming out of the speaker like little butterflies.....

merlin

Hendrix had a chewy sound for sure. 

Modulus_Amps

This is what I would call chewy

LastMantra

Tbh I'd have thought drew would be the last one to worry about a bit of wacky, colourful language 

DrCornelius

LastMantra said:

Tbh I'd have thought drew would be the last one to worry about a bit of wacky, colourful language 

I don't think he is worried, this thread is the second in an occasional series - preceded by the classic 'What sort of bellend calls an amp 'forgiving' '  I fully expect such future gems like 'What sort of c%$£ calls an amp 'spongy' ' , 'If you call an amp 'brittle' you must be some sort of tw£$' etc etc :-)

randella

It's an internet phenomenon, word salad full of all these phrases that get bandied about until, eventually, they distil into three or four ('dirt', 'chewy', 'unforgiving', 'bit of hair') that seem to indicate something to a small subset of people but sometimes mean bugger all to the rest of us.

The bassist Guy Pratt once said a difficulty when recording sessions was being asked things like 'can you make your sound more zooshy?' His response was 'yeah, hang on, I'll turn up the zoosh knob'. I'm paraphrasing, it was a number of years ago I read it, but that was the gist.

Thing is, Pratt was talking about singers asking him things like this - you would expect a bit of leeway for a musician who didn't play an amplified instrument and have to spend hours tweaking knobs to get their tone. As for the rest of us, dunno - maybe we should produce a 'guitarist's thesaurus'.

Dirt - distortion
Chewy - compression
Unforgiving - an amplifier that I'm not used to
Bit of hair - ...I'm lost on this one. I think it's one down from 'dirt' and one up from 'chewy'.

TTBZ

I'd say it's compressed and "squashed" in the feel, but a bit more dry/raw/fuzzy and not in that super smooth "liquid lead tone" sort of way. That was all the buzz words. Orange amps can sound and feel like that I think.

HAL9000

Works well with a guitar that plays like butter perhaps?

ArchtopDave

Yeah, like butter but with valves in it, so it gets crunchy when you bite into to it.

Grumpyrocker

I know what chewy means to me, and when I've dialed in a tone I'd consider chewy, but I'm not sure I could put it into words. 

A tone you can squash into, not harsh and hard. 

hywelg

Modulus_Amps said:

This is what I would call chewy

This.

De_Batz

Now then...

I too find it very difficult to describe a guitar sound using words that are not in the slightest bit germane to the job. 

Having said that, I forget where I saw it but someone described a sound as 'having that umlaut' you need for full bore metal. And I knew exactly what he meant. 

De_Batz

https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/gain-staging-channel-switching-vs-volume-knob.2304148/#post-33549083

Could have been this...

In which case I may have slightly exaggerated the bore of the metal in question...

TTBZ

Also, tele neck pickup into a thick crunchy amp is what I'd call chewy.

S56035

All these words are bullshit but if you go to 3:58 in 5 Minutes Alone by Pantera that's what I think of as a chewy sound.

randella

S56035 said:

All these words are bullshit but if you go to 3:58 in 5 Minutes Alone by Pantera that's what I think of as a chewy sound.

I can't think of the bit you mean without listening to it, but it's a tune alright. That and 'Regular People (Conceit)' from the Vulgar Display... album are probably my favourites. 

ryanverbena

I always think of the intro to funk #49 

JayGee

I dunno, but Steve Craddock probably does - Moseley Shoals by Ocean Colour Scene has a lot of guitar sounds in it which I’d struggle to avoid using the word “Chewy” (along with “Squashy” and “Organic”) if I was trying to describe them…

slacker

DrCornelius said:

LastMantra said:

Tbh I'd have thought drew would be the last one to worry about a bit of wacky, colourful language 

I don't think he is worried, this thread is the second in an occasional series - preceded by the classic SPOILERS

imho chewy is a phaser or autowah giving movement. That kind of movement is implied in funk 49 by what is played.

The problem as stated before is that nobody can agree what the terms mean. Case in point that Burn clip is very distorted but described as cleanish.. So if we can't agree on what overdrive means any term using food, bath accessories or redemption isn't going to be effective.