My brain has a hazy memory of a quote from John Cage. I think I read it in the Village Voice, maybe in an article on the Bang on a Can festival, where someone suggested Cage move to another location because it sounded better there. In my memory, the Cage quote is: “Imagine a sound being better!”
It’s a Zen Master type of response, both aloof and grounded, meant to break down the walls of perception or something. It’s also kind of dickish because those folks were probably just being nice. The quote made it into the Village Voice because it exemplifies a particular Cagian, relativist attitude that eschews standards of beauty for appreciation of the object as it is, without judgement. Like, very Zen.
I think of this when the subject of GUITAR TONE comes up because the topic is based completely on the premise that there are better sounds. There is a whole industry around TONE, which supports the larger industry built around ROCK and THE GOOD MUSIC. Thankfully, the idea of the GOOD MUSIC vs. the BAD MUSIC (usually, pop-radio and non-guitar music, and if you’re old enough, any rap) has eroded over the years, but you’ll still get guys like Joe Bonamassa (who seems like a nice, thoughtful guy, actually) praying to the gods of TONE through ancient guitars into equally ancient cranked tube amplifiers, channeling the blues masters in the sky.
And you have legions of of guitar guys (almost entirely guys) who supplicate themselves in the pews feeling the TONE in their souls. You can’t talk about electric guitars without the topic of Boomerism, and TONE is a quintessential Boomer topic because it is largely about reinforcing the myth that the Boomers took the sacred texts of The Blues and perfected the Greatest Music of All Time through 30 years of LPs and AOR radio.
TONE is a supporting pillar of this. Lost with the Boomer’s youth and the relentless advance of technology were the magical formulas for the TONE as a basic building block for GOOD MUSIC. The last time the TONE appeared, unadulterated, was from PAFs and Filtertrons piped into screaming tubes, blasted through tape compression and cut straight to vinyl on AC-DC’s “For those About to Rock” in 1981. Everything after is suspect.
But where does this leave us in 2023? Is there such a thing as TONE anymore, outside of Bonamassa-style youtube sinkholes or AARP-sponsored concerts in mid-size theaters? There are lots of guys (and now more girls!) out there saying “it sounds better over here!” for all types of gear - and the gear creation machines of Fender and Gibson are always running, Lorax style, regurgitating sometimes laughable “new” ideas: would you like a Tele-Strat? A Jazzmaster-Tele? A period reissue with a “modern C” style neck? They’ll all be made of Truffula wood but they’re perfect for your next project!
If there is any truth in this world at all, it’s that your kids will make a mess of whatever you thought was sacred. In the music world this used to mean they take the cheapest gear available and wrangle new sounds out of it (Jazzmasters in 1990 through shitty digital reverb, for example),
but with every song ever recorded available for reference, and a usable simulation of any possible instrument just a few screen touches away, the future of music is infinite for the first time and it will be both familiar and unrecognizable. Which brings me, late in this stream of thought, to the aphorism I really wanted to explore - “TONE is in the hands of the player.” Which gets almost to the truth, and the truth is that music is from people. And it has nothing to do with TONE.