The Base Tones

Josh-Hayes

For a while now I have been thinking about the best way to cover most/all of my tonal bases.

I recently revisited a PG article, by Peter Thorn, about creating a set of base tones which can be useful when you need to cover a lot of ground. They are as follows:

(From the article)
Base Tone 1: An American-style clean, with a bit of compression and lots of headroom and sparkle.
Base Tone 2: An edge-of-breakup tone with some chime and a bit of overdrive that’s reminiscent of a Vox AC30.
Base Tone 3: A British EL34 crunch, reminiscent of a great Plexi or JCM800.
Base Tone 4: A boosted, singing lead tone—usually with some delay.

Here is the whole thing: http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/4_Must-Have_Base_Tones I recommend it as a read.

What I want to know from you guys is can you add anything to this list that you feel is missing. I want to know if there are any other tones or tonal combinations (whatever you want to call them) that you guys can think of that will cover even more ground, musically that is. And of course, how you achieve them.

Cheers.

AlanRatcliffe

Yup. That's pretty much my base tone set too - clean, jangle, crunch and drive.

From there it's a few effects available for each to provide variation to each theme: compressor, plate or spring reverb and slapback echo for cleans; jangle gets a room reverb and maybe a phaser or rotary; crunch gets an extra drive and a very short delay or ambience; drive gets a wah, flanger, long delay and hall reverb.

Not much you can't do with that collection, from 50's R'n'R, through funk and pop, all the way up to classic rock.

Chocklit_Thunda

??? I didn't realise it but these are the exact 4 tone presets I have on my amp.

I do have a 5th one that translates from iron maiden-esque high gain with my X1 to Ted Nugent heavy drive with my Yorktown. (It depends on the pickups in the guitar) but yeah basically it's 5 settings all just increasing in gain.

Gearhead

I would only add a tone parallel to your fourth: a driven Fender tone with lots of sag, for when you want to do background blues tone with double stops and don't want to get in-your-face EL34/84 but smooth 6L6/V6.
I do get this from my switch-the-power-tubes amp at the moment but I would prefer to also switch speaker from the Celestion Vintage 10 to a Jensen P10R for less mid-high.