The Value Proposition of Volume

How important is how and what you hear when you play guitar?

It’s an interesting question, particularly as the world goes down the path of increasing sensitivity to everything and all those folks emoting all over the place about how things make them feel and their truth with the same volume as a diarrhetic elephant?

I’m a simple person with a pretty decent background in science and applied science. I also spend a lot more time observing than pontificating and so I thought that I would share some observations with you all.

BC (before COVID) I used to love going to guitar shops. I once had a job that kept me on planes four days a week to different cities across North America and whenever possible I would visit local guitar shops. It wasn’t about what they carried, a Gibson in Vancouver is the same thing as a Gibson in Nashville. A Strat in LA is the same thing as a Strat in NYC. What I would look for is what made the shop different.

Observation #1

The most successful shops were the ones that encouraged prospective buyers to try out a couple of guitars and to provide a place where that trial could be done at some level of volume.

Observation #2

We’ve all been in guitar shops where trying out a guitar is encouraged. Sometimes, the layout does not allow for tryout rooms and so the would be buyer plugs in to an amp on the floor to give it a go. The louder the amp is set, the higher the probability that the would be buyer is earlier in their playing skill development.

Observation #3

As a corollary to observation #2, the louder the amp is set, the greater the probability that the guitar will be out of tune and the greater the probability that the would be buyer is either unaware or does not care. As an aside, if this is you, buy yourself a tuner for your pocket, or ask to borrow one from the shop. EVERYONE will be much happier. We’ve all heard Purple Haze played out of tune enough to last for the rest of our lives.

Observation #4

In those shops without tryout rooms, more experienced guitar players are less likely to plop down for thirty minutes and try out an instrument through a low volume amp, while those shops with tryout rooms will engender the more experienced player to spend more time checking the instrument out at higher volume.

Louder is More Better ?

The electric guitar is built to be amplified. While I will only decide to buy an electric guitar based on fit in my hands and its resonance acoustically, I also always ensure that there is a trial period (aka return option) where I can plug the guitar into my own amplifiers in my own playing room. I have the great fortune that I live in a detached house with reasonable separation from the neighbours and if I wish, I can play with the amplifier at higher volume. I do not do this to show off my limited talent, I do it for a much more important reason.

The sound of a guitar is an auditory experience. The louder the guitar, the more visceral it gets. You start to feel the movement of the speakers, the air getting pushed around, you hear and feel sympathetic vibrations. I have all my guitars on hooks in my playing room which is properly humidified and when I play louder, all those other guitars start to resonant sympathetically. It’s quite powerful both physically and emotionally. When I feel these things, I feel less inhibited to try new things, to mess up and to improve.

In preparation for this article, I did a somewhat unscientific experiment. I picked a day where I was not overly stressed, or annoyed, or unreasonably joyful. I have my green Strat on a stand in the living room, the one that I just got back from having the Fralin 54s installed. The living room is not my playing room, but it is close enough to my office that I can sometimes pop out for a short mental health break between seemingly endless Zoom meetings and have schwang. The guitar is plugged into a Line 6 Helix. The Helix is a very decent tool, although I am not enamoured of the factory presets, so have built a few of my own. One of my regular configs is for a Fender Deluxe Reverb in the Vibrato channel. With some tweaking it sounds like a Fender Deluxe Reverb (mostly, sort of). I have a very good pair of Sennheiser headphones plugged into it. It’s also connected to a pair of Headrush FRFR monitor speakers that claim up to 2000w of power. A discussion of what expressed wattage means in real life is a subject for a different article, suffice to say this does not equate to 2000w of tube amplifier power.

In the first part of the experiment I played the Strat through the Helix with the headphones only. The sound was clear and articulate, although some artefacts from the Helix were also audible. I resisted my normal urge to fiddle to get rid of the artefacts and put them aside and just played for about 30 minutes. The sound was good, I was playing normally, but I did not find myself stretching in trying new things. I played in a key different to my normal playing and tried some different scale approaches and it was all fun, but in the long term uneventful.

Then I took a break for a couple of hours.

In the second part of the experiment I played the Strat thought the Helix using only the FRFR speakers for output.

I turned the output down on the Helix to what I would call bedroom level. Still completely audible but not so loud as to bother someone on the other side of the main floor. I felt the same way as I had with the headphones on. Good but not inspired.

Then I brought the volume up on the Helix output to a comfortable volume level, around 95dB on my Amazon sourced sound pressure level meter. That felt completely different to me. There were no other guitars in the room to resonate, the walls are drywall. There is carpet on the floor. Very similar to my playing room. Yet I could not only hear a different range of sound, I could feel the sound all over, not just in my ears. I played for about thirty minutes and at the end my hands felt like they had been working and I realized that while I had embarked to really just noodle, I had come up with a couple of new rhythms and chord progressions that sounded kind of cool to the point that I turned on the recorder in the iPhone to note them down before I forgot them.

I didn’t use more or less effects in either experiment. I didn't change the Helix preset settings at all, I used the same guitar. What I discovered is that I was more “in it” when there was more volume and more feel and that was for me, more inspirational. What did I get from this?

Louder IS More Better

I had heard others say this before, in particular I have heard this from Dan Steinhardt over at That Pedal Show on more than one occasion. And while I have enormous respect for Dan, I needed to do the test myself with my stuff in my home.

It makes me feel bad, to the extent of my native empathy, for players who don’t have the opportunity to play loud. With COVID locking us out of guitar shops where I live for the foreseeable future (April 2021), those folks may not have a place to go. And even if your guitar shop allows entrance, playing really loud in an open room epitomizes rudeness to the other folks, and if your guitar shop has trial rooms, don’t be that jerk and hog the room for hours.

In my area, there is a facility where musicians can hire a room to play in. You take your gear there and blast away. Many local bands rent space there when they need it for rehearsal. It’s in a location where the sound will not disturb the neighbours. I have acquaintances who rent an industrial unit at the edge of town and go there to play loud.

By the way, you don’t need a massively heavy and powerful amp to get loud. If we keep the conversation in tube land, a 100 watt Marshall Super Lead Mark II is not 3.3 times louder than a 30 watt AC30. To double the volume of a 30 watt amplifier you would need a 300 watt amplifier both running into speaker cabinets of equivalent efficiency. Even one of those Fender Deluxe Reverb Tonemasters, which is built to sound like a 22 watt tube amp, using a 100 watt Class D amplifier gets plenty loud.

Volume is but one tool to unlock your creative impulses, but it sure is a fun one.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace!