So we had this amp fest at Yoeris place here in Belgium, and there were very good players and top notch gear. We had a '68 Plexi and some more very nice Marshalls, some handmade amps (Olaf Krampe amplification), 2 SLO100s, my XTC and Cornford, an Elmwood M60, a BigTone100 (great amp!) and so on and so forth, some rack stuff etc.
Loads of Tylers were there, about 6 or 7 different ones, and other great guitars too.
Great, great gear really.
Playing and listening to others play I realised that I had less gain in the fingers as some other players. What I mean is that I tend to reach for the gain knob on the amp, trying to get more overtones and a livelier gain structure. But all this does at volume is to make the tone thin and drop off in sonic mush. There were especially two very accomplished players, who sounded like a lot of gain when they played, but I actually realised the gain was way down. Like their leads were kind of where i had played rhythm.
I tried playing with less gain today and it's tempting to turn it up more, to get that legato-guitar-plays-itself feel, but I wanna stick to less and learn again to milk the notes off the guitar with more finger effort.
My conclusion from the amp fest actually is that amps and guitars don't matter so much, they pretty much all sounded great there, but I wanna focus more on playing and finger technique again.
