Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
At The Back => Time Out => Topic started by: tomjackson on October 07, 2009, 11:02:17 PM
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Just a though, everything has to be transparent nowadays. Every guitar magazine review seems to say how transparent the effect was, cables are transparent and even amps are transparent.
They say things like 'you would hardly know it was on' or 'it just gives you more'.
Everything has to be more transparent than everything else.
I had a Barber Ltd, it was transparent, it was also boring. It's sometimes nice to have a bit of non-coloured push to your amp but it's also nice to step on your pedal and hear a fat sustaining sound that doesnt sound just as it did before, something completely different.
Even Chorus is described as transparent but I though the point of chorus was to be the opposite of transparent, to thicken and colour your tone?
I'm not against the idea of transparency, I just think a new word is required.
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Is tone even the right word? Isn't tone how you express yourself, so it should vary as you play?
What we refer to is the sound, so putting feeling into the instrument yields tone?
:D
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I understand what you say Tom
It has become the buzzword and sometimes you want an effect that stamps it's own character on the proceedings but is undetectable when not engaged.
Sometimes transparent can be good, but there is a bit of a trend for it.
As long as whatever you use allows you to express yourself and keep some degree of dynamics in the sound - unless it's a compressor and then you lose the normal dynamics.
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Colour can be very good, but its also unpredictable.
But a lot of the time people want reassurance that the effect or whatever is going to do its job without any other unanticipated effects on the sound.
For example, I use 2 EQs in my FX loop - an MXR 10 band, which is very transparent, and its what I do all the actual EQing with, and a Boss EQ20, which is a far cry from transparent, but I very much like the effect it has on the sound, and I run it flat for its un-transparency/colour.
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I think 'transparent' is being used as a politically correct term to make 'characterless' sound like a positive thing.
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I think 'transparent' is being used as a politically correct term to make 'characterless' sound like a positive thing.
yeah, I can see that view, but you can see that it is also a marketing speak reassurance that its not going to do unpredictable adverse things to your tone, too, yes?
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Yes, transparent is very boring :) I dont get why people try to get their sound so clear and hifi. Its not what guitar is about!
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Yes, transparent is very boring :) I dont get why people try to get their sound so clear and hifi. Its not what guitar is about!
...to you
Guitar isnt about being any one thing to all people, save enjoyable, surely? And then for many different reasons.
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Oddly enough the windscreen on my car is transparent.. works for me though.
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Yes, transparent is very boring :) I dont get why people try to get their sound so clear and hifi. Its not what guitar is about!
Surely the point is that your sound doesn't seem excessively processed.
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i guess it depends on how you want it to change the sound of your guitar + amp... or if you are layering a lot of effects together, the more transparent each effect the better.
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It depends what you mean by "transparent"? because I'm having difficulty understanding the term as it can mean many things. My own interpretation is that transparent simply means high fidelity/less noise, my confusion comes from trying to relate the word to music:
transparent
• adjective 1 allowing light to pass through so that objects behind can be distinctly seen. 2 obvious or evident.
— DERIVATIVES transparently adverb.
— ORIGIN from Latin transparere ‘shine through’.
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It depends what you mean by "transparent"? because I'm having difficulty understanding the term as it can mean many things. My own interpretation is that transparent simply means high fidelity/less noise, my confusion comes from trying to relate the word to music:
transparent
• adjective 1 allowing light to pass through so that objects behind can be distinctly seen. 2 obvious or evident.
— DERIVATIVES transparently adverb.
— ORIGIN from Latin transparere ‘shine through’.
It means, or my understanding at least, is twofold:
It lets the source (guitar, duh) or any other tone shaping thing involved (amp, pedals etc) sound like they sound like without adding its own sound. This applies, to my mind, to things like modulation effects, where you want the modulation effect but may or may not want any changes to the core tone in the process. When this meaning (as I take it to be at least) is applied to amps and pedals, I laugh. Ever plugged a guitar into a totally (or near as) dry and flat input and listened through something designed to be really, genuinely (in theory) transparent, like monitors? Practically unrecognisable. Amps shape tone, a lot, all of them, even cleans.
It lets the details of your playing, nuance of pick attack, vibrato, and what have you come through. it doesnt over-manipulate the input such that those things are suppressed. I like this to be the case with all my kit and it seems to me that it applies to everything musical (gear wise)
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Oddly enough the windscreen on my car is transparent.. works for me though.
And wouldn't your journeys be far more exciting if it was opaque?
QED.
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Oddly enough the windscreen on my car is transparent.. works for me though.
And wouldn't your journeys be far more exciting if it was opaque?
QED.
:lol:
Well played, sir!
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Oddly enough the windscreen on my car is transparent.. works for me though.
And wouldn't your journeys be far more exciting if it was opaque?
QED.
:lol:
Well played, sir!
I don't know, I never look.
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its another buzz word like 'class A' where the items being described as transparent or class A rarely are either of those things :roll: