How to get a "hot" sound

Recently I said we'd soon be talking about how to get hot sounds and high-gain tones from a stratocaster. This is something a lot of people say you can't do, but they're incorrect. Now, if you're happy with Les Pauls or Jacksons or Ibanez RG models or whatever, that's cool, I'm not criticizing your choice of guitars. I play lots of different guitars, including a 1970 Les Paul (on indefinite but long-term loan from a friend whose neck hurts too much when he plays it), a Jackson Fusion XL, etc., and I, too, had some difficulty early on getting the really ultra-hot sound out of the clear-tone single coil classic. But the techniques I'm going to address here can be used on ANY guitar, so get ready to sound really hot. After I'd been playing guitar for about 12 years I took a multi-year break from electric guitars, but I still wanted to play more than folk and bluegrass. So if I wanted to emulate an echo I had to play something more than once, and adjust my dynamics, right?

'62 reissue Fender strat, made in 1982

To emulate a distortion I had to vary the pick (or fingernail) attack and do things like roll the strings over each other with my left hand, etc. This is good mental exercise, by the way, to emulate electric guitar effects with an acoustic guitar. And along the way I learned various ways to play "hot" without high-output pickups. So to play a guitar like a strat but get a really hot sound out of the non-high-gain pickups you have to learn to PLAY hot, not rely on hot pickups.

Some techniques for this you can only learn by trial and error, and some are impossible for me to describe (I should have finished that college degree in writing, eh?). But here are some that I can describe. The first is to vary your pick attack, both the angle of attack and the power and speed. I'm not talking about playing more notes faster, I'm talking about the pick moving faster when it makes contact with the string. Varying the angle that your pick meets the string also changes the tone, ie, instead of the flat of the pick striking the string you can turn your pick so you strike with just a little more angle toward the edge of the pick meeting the string. A sharp, powerful snap of the wrist when you attack the string makes the tone of the note hotter, also.

Note that I'm not talking about hitting the string harder with the pick, that won't always work. Sometimes that seems to make the sound almost softer through the single-coil pickups, like the sound is receding. I'm talking about hitting the string differently, with different angles and different degrees of plucking or snapping or popping attacks. The fingering hand is important, too. You can slide up into a note while striking with a strong, snapping pick attack, you can twist your finger making the note slightly, not quite a vibrato, just a slight torquing motion. There are as many different ways of making a note as there are different ways of attacking the string with the pick or finger of the picking hand. You have to experiment and develope a feel for the techniques. You can turn the pick sideways and use the edge, for a sound without the "clicking" noise of the pick against the string; you can use the more rounded end of the pick, or ANY part of it at ANY angle; you can use the fingernail, or the flesh of your finger, and vary the angle of attack with them, also. Everything you can think of to do differently actually causes the tone of the note to sound different. Some of those differences lend themselves to clear tones, some to "hot" sounds.

There are also certain notes or combinations of notes that sound "hotter" than others naturally. For instance, if you find a note that really sings on your guitar and really pop the string strongly with the pick while stretching the note and slightly torquing with the fingering hand, you get a much hotter tone out of the note. If you play, say, a B note on the 12th fret of the B string and an A note on the 14th fret of the G string, and play both notes while stretching the A, as the tone of the A climbs up toward A# and B it sets up a harmonic wave with the other note, which causes a naturally "distorted" or "hotter" sound. Try this, and even without any high-gain amp channel or overdrive you'll see. If you can play three-note chords and stretch the different strings to different degrees, the same thing happens.

The key to this, and any other technical aspect of playing, is to PRACTICE. Practice a lot, then practice some more, then practice a LOT more. The reason so many people say, "you can't get a really hot sound out of a strat" is because THEY can't get a really hot sound out of a strat, because they haven't put forth the practice time to learn how to do it.

The reverse of all this, of course, is how to get a clean sound out of hot guitars. Don't use the hottest pickups on the market. When you use really high-output pickups everything you play will sound hot, that's true. But it'll all sound the same, no clean tones when you want them, not a lot of control over the dynamics of your sound. Get clean pickups and learn to play hot when you want and cool when you want. A lot of people buy hot pickups and then can't play anything else. That's maybe okay when you're learning to play, and you want to sound heavy metallish or something, but after you've been playing a few years you might want to do something different so you don't get bored. DiMarzio's PAF Pro is probably my personal favorite in terms of humbuckers.

Now, what about a truly high-gain sound from a single-coil pickup like on a strat? Well, to get a truly high-gain sound you have to have high gain. How did Jimi Hendrix get a high-gain sound out of a strat? Partly, he played really, really LOUD. If you play really loud or you play loud through a modern-design amp with a high-gain channel (like various Marshalls, Mesa/Boogies, Hughes and Kettner, etc.) you can accomplish this easily. (NOTE: Watch out if you rely on playing LOUD- Hendrix did it, but his hearing really suffered from it, too; he was practically deaf in one ear. USE EARPLUGS if you are a total volume-head!) Using lower-wattage amps helps; you can overdrive a 20 watt Fender tweed Deluxe a lot easier than a 100-watt Soldano SLO-100! Thus you have the effect of the tubes being overdriven at a volume level that won't leave you saying, "Huh? What?" to all your friends in a few years, being driven to deafness or tinnitis, or trying to get by with the volume turned down on a big, loud amp. There's a certain amount of amp "noise" all the time, so the volume of the music coming out of the amp has to be loud enought to be picked up clearly through the tube noise. Solid state amps, of course, don't suffer much from this. But turning down the volume of a big amp gives you the same amount of noise as the amp always has, but not much music volume to be heard over it. Recording, this can give you a broken up, muddy sound. It also means that you're not pushing the tubes enough to get the TONE that the amp was designed to deliver.

Also effects devices like overdrives, distortions, etc. will add the high-gain sound. You'll usually get a better sound if you consecutively slightly overdrive several stages of gain instead of just crank up the amp or the fuzz box. If you play hot, then slightly push the signal with an overdrive, then slightly overdrive the preamp, then slightly push the power amp, you'll get more gain and better sounding tone than if you just crank up the amp or the overdrive to start with.

I recorded a piece about a year and a half ago with literally the heaviest guitar sound I have ever come up with, and I used a rosewood-fretboard '62 reissue strat to do it, 18-year old stock pickups; no "special boutique pickups", no humbucker. I had "hotter" guitars available, but this is what I did. I used the neck pickup, tone turned down to 5. The sound could be bassier by turning the tone lower, but it was plenty low as it was. I ran into a Fulltone '69 pedal with the controls set up like an early germanium fuzz face, but any heavy fuzz or distortion would appoximate the same sound. I ran that signal into the high-gain channel of a Marshall 4100 retubed with Svetlans 6L6GCs. I ran that through an effects loop with an analog delay, set with just enough delay to add more depth to the sound, not to make a long echo. It sounded like I was playing very, very loudly in a subway tunnel. It was powerful, heavy, and high-gain, BUT the sound was also articulate and clear because it was a regular, stock single-coil and not a really high output pickup as the first thing in the signal chain.

So to get a high-gain sound out of a single coil pickup you've got to really crank it, but to play "hot" is in your fingers, not in the pickups. You have to learn to drive the guitar and the amp, not let the pickups of the guitar drive you. Or else you'll sound like your pickups, instead of sounding like you.