One guitar sound for all covers?

welshboyo

I'm on 1 preset all night - that preset has varying amounts of gain and a clean scene (Fractal FM9) - changing presets per song is just a faff and much like Jon says above, I just treat it like an amp - otherwise, it would be similar to pulling out a different amp for each song - in the old days (lol) we only used 1 amp..

Voxman

The only way you might make that work is careful use of the guitars tone, volume and pickup selector controls. 

p90fool

Voxman said:

The only way you might make that work is careful use of the guitars tone, volume and pickup selector controls. 

That's why they're there, isn't it?

I use one base tone all night in a covers band with around 120 potential songs from probably around 100 different artists. 

All I need is a post gain master volume pedal, everything else happens from the guitar, though a boost is handy occasionally too. 

I've come to realise that you have to be confident in who you are as a player, then you can impose that on any good song without giving a damn what effects or sounds are on the record.

When I'm playing Blame it on the Boogie or Warwick Avenue in a guitar/bass/drums band I'm playing complex chords voicings to try to suggest all the important parts of the record, the "tone" the guitarist used is irrelevant and wouldn't work anyway. 

Pete Townshend was always interesting to watch, playing a wide variety of Who songs which had very different recorded sounds including a lot of acoustic parts, all played live with just a pair of P90s, a mid-gain amp sound and a lot of skill.

It's a real lesson in how to convey the dynamics of a song while ignoring the equipment used when it was made. 

If you think of a guitar and an amp as one musical instrument, having a single good sound is way more liberating than it is restricting.

Rowby1

My original post wasn’t about a single core sound being tweaked with the controls on the guitar. That’s very much my approach too. The guitarist in question used exactly one sound, no variation in gain, at all, full on metal grind, for the entire set of covers.