The Most Versatile Guitar

BBBlues

Why limit yourself to one!

p.s. the answer is a 335 Monday-Friday and a Strat at the weekend.

NelsonP

I have an rg750. It has ibz dimarzios and an edge term. It's very versatile.

Rocker

The limiting factor in my guitar playing is ME.  My most versatile guitar is an Anderson.  Three pickups, trem, undersaddle piezzo, user choice of parallel humbucker, series humbucker or single coil for the pickups, blower switch and BFTS, seperate outputs for piezzo and magnetic pickups [can be blended to one output] .  Every choice except perhaps a sustainer pickup.  But at the end of the day the limiting factor is me.  It is a lovely guitar to play though.....

rossi

I find either my Midtown or Tele cover what I play which is electric blues and bit of country and  a lot of jazz.Fancy a jazzy electro nylon though .

DefaultM

Stevepage said:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VMD_rBqzZK8/TxrWvITRcvI/AAAAAAAAAiE/Ro-083dZxzM/s1600/10_morpheus-nt-no4_3-11-11.jpg

Perfect for playing Death-Murder-KillKill Metal and the Ed Sheeran cover set at your local social club

How did you get a picture of my Praise & Worship guitar?

Sassafras

Any guitar and an EQ pedal will cover everything.

impmann

Voxman said:

JDE said:

Voxman said:

I like Tele's but assuming you have a standard Tele with single coil p/ups they're not versatile from the perspective that they can't cover both single-coil and hum-bucker tones. You could equally argue that Strat's (3 single-coil) are the most versatile guitars - and Strats are way more popular than Tele's. 

I agree with you in principle, but did you see the recent thread on Bashful Guitar by Johnnie Jenkins? We all thought it was a different guitar - some said Strat or Tele, some 335. I think well played guitar can play tricks on you, tone-wise.

Agreed..but only up to a point.  The more distortion you have, the more tones can blur. And studio fx and EQ impact too. Most folk didn't know the whole of Led Zep 1 and the lead solo of Stairway was done with the Paisley Tele given to Jimmy Page by Jeff Beck. Its certainly easier to dirty up a clean tone than clean up a dirtier tone. 

But if you listen to Claptons woman tone with his 335 or SG, you simply can't get that with a conventional Tele or Strat. Ditto the thick tones Paul Kossoff got from his LP, or Gary Moore etc. 

For one guitar to do it all in theory you'd need something like a Line 6 Variax...although having tried the latest James Tyler version I was less than impressed.  

But a good combination of SC and HB tones in one guitar will cover most things.

Hmmm... I think Clapped Out might argue with you himself on that. After all he plays some of the Cream numbers on his Strat these days, and even did so with Bruce and Baker - and didn't sound that wide of the mark. Whilst his Strat does have a mid boost, you can get very close to that with modern high gain amps - all it does is boost!

Kossoff occasionally used a Strat in the Studio for tracking. And Gary Moore played a Strat more than a Les Paul at one point. I don't think Gary ever sounded 'thin' but he did hide behind quite a lot of gain... see comment above.

The 'woman tone' is frankly just a matter of the tone control wound down and gain/volume - boost the gain and you can get into that territory with any SC guitar.

However, I will concede that using only the equipment available to the musicians at the time these things were recorded you needed Humbuckers to push the amp hard enough to get those thicker sounds.

kjdowd

Poss the deciding factor here is trem or no trem. The unmistakeable strat 'spank' aside (which you can get close to with other guitars) so much tone is in the rest of the signal chain that the guitar - while far, far from immaterial - isn't always the deciding factor. The most instructive lesson for me on this was finding out that the guitar on wicked game is a strat..,