This Tone Tip, like most in the series, is a simple one, but one that nevertheless is still ignored by too many players today. I’m here this installment, in short, to urge you to match your amp to the size room you’re playing. Or, put another way, don’t drag along an amp that’s too powerful to reach its “sweet spot” without blowing your listeners through the back wall of the club and into the pool room. Let’s work toward some specifics via a little history. Back in the early 1950s, when many of the classic electric guitar and amplifiers designs first hit the scene, around the time Gibson issued its first solidbody electric in the form of the Les Paul Goldtop, few amps pushed more than 20 or 25 watts or so maximum, and many put out a lot less (Gibson’s own flagship amp of the time, the GA40 Les Paul Amplifier, put out only 14 to 18 watts from a pair of 6V6GT output tubes). For one thing, the technology usually applied to tube guitar amplifiers wasn’t the most efficient available, but that’s in large part because not a lot more volume was required.

This Tone Tip is about as simple as it gets, but it’s one that—once understood, and mastered―proves a surprising revelation to many players. During what I would reverentially refer to as the Golden Age of Tone, the late 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, this tip was second nature to great electric guitarists. It seems to have fallen from the knowledge bank, however, in the “high-gain era,” the late 1970s and ’80s, when everything was multi-channel, supercharged, and hotrodded. But long before the propagation of channel switching, the master volume, and massive pedalboards, legendary rock players still had a straightforward means of achieving clean, crunch, and lead tones―right from the guitar even. They set their tube amps for the best lead sound they could achieve, turned the guitar’s volume knob down a little for crunch, and turned it down a little more for clean. That was it: the volume control was used like it was meant to be, as a remote appendage of the amp’s controls. Work with this yourself, and you can get a lot out of this control right here in the 21st century.

However much you swap your guitar’s pickups, strings, and wiring configuration, tweak your amp, or revamp your pedalboard, you will never achieve the golden tone that rings in your head if you don’t take one tip to heart: it all starts with the wood. Sure, these are electric guitars, and all the electronic components in the sound chain will affect what comes out of the speaker, but they are acoustic machines first and foremost. Hit the strings with your guitar unplugged, and it still rings and resonates, and the sound you hear—even with no electronic devices attached—still defines the core of your tone. And to make sure this is the right tone for you, or to avoid fighting a tone with endless component tweaks that never seem to satisfy, you need to understand a little bit about how all that wood sounds.

There’s a little tidbit of tonal tweakage that is entirely within every player’s power to modify at will, without risk to guitar, amp or effects, without voiding any warrantees, and at very little expense. Simultaneously, this item is one of the most underappreciated tools in the tone arsenal. I’m talking about the humble pick, brothers and sisters, that little triangle of semi-rigid material that sets your strings a-humming. Picks—or plectrums—of different sizes, shapes, and thicknesses, and which are made of different materials, all exhibit different sounds. Gibson Gear offers a wide selection of Gibson picks, all of which are available through your authorized dealer, and of course you can experiment with a myriad of other makes and styles of picks to alter the tone of your Gibson guitar. And flesh—bare fingertips—offers a different sound alternative still. Since the pick or fingertip’s contact with the string or strings is where it all begins, this is really the first ingredient in the sonic stew.

Most players are aware of the fact that adjusting your pickup height will affect your guitar’s output, but fewer tend to realize the ways in which such adjustments can affect your tone, too. The instruction you most often encounter is that, in order to achieve the hottest sound possible from the pickups that are already in your guitar, you need to lift the pickups themselves as high as you can get them, short of raising them to a point where the magnetic field starts to exert pull on the strings and interfere with their ability to vibrate freely (which is heard as a slightly dissonant, atonal sound, like an out-of-tune harmonic that follows the root note). There’s a lot more to pickup height adjustment than merely maximizing volume, however, and a little consideration of the other variables will give you a new tweaking tool in your tone arsenal.

One of the things that players love most about Gibson guitars is that they yield a hot, fat, full-throated sound when compared to so many other makes and models. Whether your Gibson has PAF-style alnico humbuckers, hotter ’buckers like the ceramic 500T, or P-90 single coils, chances are it packs a bigger punch than most other instruments out there with inferior humbuckers or thinner single-coil pickups. Plug your Les Paul, SG Special, ES-335, or Flying V straight into a vintage-style tube amp, crank it up, and wail. It’s the way the blues, classic rock, and even heavy metal were born.