Module 15: Professional skillsLesson 3professional⏱ 90 min + a recording every practice day

Tone, recording and live sound

Set up amps, pickups and effects for any room, manage stage volume and monitoring, work with sound engineers and DI boxes, behave in a studio, and use home recording as the most honest teacher you will ever have.

Why the room decides your tone

Your tone at home is a hobby. Your tone on stage and on a recording is what people hear, hire and remember, and it is decided as much by the room, the PA, the drummer and the engineer as by your fingers and your amp. The professional skill is not having one great sound; it is producing a usable, well-balanced sound in any room in five minutes, then stopping fiddling and playing. The second half of this lesson is about recording, because listening to yourself on tape is the fastest way to improve every other lesson in this course.

The basics of the instrument (pickups, strings, picks, a clean warm amp setting) are in Your instrument, tone and technique. This lesson assumes those and deals with the variables you cannot control.

Amps and settings for the gig

An amp setting is a response to a room. Start from the known setting you use at home (write it down: it is your reference), then adjust for three things:

• Bass. Small rooms, stages with hollow floors, and hollow-body guitars all add low end. The first move on a boomy stage is to cut bass on the amp, not to turn down. If you still hear a boom on certain notes, move the amp off the floor or away from the wall.
• Treble and presence. A loud drummer and a big room swallow the mids and highs that make the guitar articulate. Add a little treble or mids before you add volume; often the band hears you better with less volume and more definition.
• Volume. Set it with the band playing, not alone, and set it so that you can hear yourself without hearing only yourself. Many players set up with the amp tilted or on a chair, pointed at their head, so they hear it at the level the audience does. If you cannot hear yourself at a sensible level, the fault is usually position, not power.

A few habits that separate professionals from players who are always too loud:

• Keep a sound diary. For every amp you own and every amp you regularly borrow: the settings that worked, the room, and the band. A page of notes will give you a good sound in any familiar venue in one minute.
• Leave headroom. Set the amp so the loudest thing you will play (a chord stab with the band shouting) does not break up unless you want it to. Jazz tone is mostly clean; distortion that arrives only on the loud bits sounds like an accident.
• Tone roll-off is a tool, not a setting. Rolling the guitar's tone knob back a little warms the sound; rolling it all the way off makes you disappear in a band. Dial the amp for the full-tone sound, then use the knob to fine-tune between tunes.

The example is a sound-check phrase: two bars of four-to-the-bar chords to set the overall level and the low end, then two bars of single notes from the low register to the high register at a different dynamic to check that both extremes sound even. Play it in every room before the band arrives.

\tempo 120
.
\ts 4 4
:4 (6.6{dy mf} 5.4 7.3){ch "Bb6"} (6.6 5.4 7.3) (6.6 5.4 7.3) (6.6 5.4 7.3) | (1.6 1.4 2.3){ch "F7"} (1.6 1.4 2.3) (1.6 1.4 2.3) (1.6 1.4 2.3) | :8 6.6{dy p ch "Bb6"} 5.5 8.5 5.4 8.4 7.3 10.3 8.2 | :8 10.2{dy f ch "F7"} 8.1 11.1 13.1 :2 -.1 |

Pickups and guitars for different jobs

The same player should sound different on a big-band gig, a trio gig and a funk function, and most of that difference is instrument and pickup choice, not effects.

• Neck humbucker on an archtop or semi-hollow: the default jazz sound, warm and round, with flatwound strings. Feedback is the enemy at volume; stand to the side of the amp, turn the bass down, stuff a cloth in the f-holes in emergencies.
• Semi-hollow or solid-body with a neck humbucker: nearly the same sound with far less feedback, which is why most working players bring one of these to loud or amplified gigs. Flatwounds or a heavier roundwound set keep it from sounding like a rock guitar.
• Single-coil solid-body (the "Telecaster" style of jazz tone): brighter, more attack, excellent for comping behind singers and for Western swing, bossa and funk-adjacent work. Rolls off beautifully for ballads.
• Floating pickup on an acoustic archtop: the most acoustic sound and the hardest to amplify; it belongs on quiet gigs and in studios with a good engineer.
• Nylon-string with a pickup: for bossa nova and ballads, often through a DI rather than an amp. Keep the preamp flat and roll off low end.

Choose the instrument for the job before the gig, not the amp settings during it. A player with one guitar should own the most versatile one: a semi-hollow with a neck humbucker covers ninety per cent of professional work.

Effects: what a jazz gig actually uses

Jazz is a mostly dry music, and the first effect you should master is none. That said, a working pedalboard usually contains:

• A tuner (always), ideally a muted-output tuner so you can tune silently between tunes.
• Reverb, if the amp has none, set low. A little room-size reverb makes a dry stage comfortable; a lot turns a trio into mush. Many professionals use none on stage and let the room do the work.
• A clean boost or volume pedal for solos. A volume pedal also gives you swells for ballads and pads and lets you duck under a singer instantly.
• Compression (light) for comping behind singers and for funk functions: it evens out chord stabs and lets you sit lower in the mix. Not for swing, where the dynamics of the stroke are the music.
• Chorus, delay, overdrive: modern and fusion gigs, pop functions. Use them as part of an arrangement, not as a permanent coat of paint. Learn to set a delay by tempo (a dotted-eighth or quarter-note delay at the tune's tempo) rather than by ear in the chaos of a soundcheck.

Whatever is on the board, know what every setting sounds like at band volume, and build the board so that a single dead pedal can be bypassed in seconds. A patch cable that fails inside a chain of six pedals is the hardest fault to find on a dark stage; carry a short cable to go straight from the guitar to the amp.

Stage volume, monitoring and the engineer

On most gigs beyond a small club, your amp is a monitor for you and the band, and the audience hears you through the PA. That changes everything:

• Your amp volume is for the stage, not the room. Set it to what the band needs; the engineer handles the room. If the engineer asks you to turn down, turn down, then ask for more of yourself in the monitor.
• Mic or DI. A microphone on the amp (usually a dynamic mic close to the speaker, slightly off centre) gives the engineer your amp's sound. A DI box (direct injection) takes the signal from your guitar, pedalboard or amp line-out straight to the desk; it is cleaner, more consistent and what most engineers prefer for acoustic and nylon-string guitars. Carry your own active DI so you are never dependent on the venue's.
• Monitors. Ask for what you need in your wedge or in-ears by priority: "a little vocal and the bass, and a touch of me". Do not ask for more guitar first; if you cannot hear yourself, turn your amp towards your ears.
• Talk to the engineer as a colleague. Give them your input list in advance ("one DI from the pedalboard, one mic on the amp"), tell them what the band is and how loud it is, and ask what they need from you. A guitarist who says "whatever is easiest for you" and then plays at a reasonable volume gets a good mix every time.
• Stage layout. Put the amp where you can hear it and the drummer cannot stand directly in front of it. On loud gigs, use the amp's line-out or a load box and keep the stage quieter: the engineer will mix you louder in the room than you could ever manage from the stage.

The cardinal rule of stage volume in jazz: the band's acoustic level is set by the drummer and the bass; the guitar fits inside it. If you are competing, something upstream is wrong (the drummer is too loud, the room is too small, the monitors are too quiet). Fix that; do not win the fight with the volume knob.

Studio etiquette

Recording sessions are expensive by the hour, and the guitarist who makes them run smoothly is called again. The conventions:

• Arrive early with everything working: fresh strings (changed the day before, stretched and stable), a tuner, spare cables, your usual amp and a second option (a smaller amp or an amp simulator), and the charts you were sent, marked up.
• Know the material before you walk in. If you were sent demos, learn them; if you were sent charts, read them in advance and check the form.
• Tune constantly and silently. Between every take. Studio microphones hear tuning errors that stages hide.
• One idea per take. Play what the producer asked for, cleanly, then offer an alternative ("I could try that with a darker sound or with a volume swell"). Do not change the part without asking; the part may be in the arrangement for a reason you cannot hear in your headphones.
• Headphone mix: ask for what you need, briefly, and then play. Many players put one ear half off to hear the amp.
• Noise discipline: no string squeaks you can avoid, no pedal clicks, no talking on an open mic, no playing between takes while the engineer is listening back.
• Punch-ins and comping (in the studio sense: compiling the best take) are normal; do not apologise for them. Do not demand a full retake for a tiny error the engineer can fix.
• Deliver files properly on remote sessions: the sample rate and bit depth requested, dry and processed versions if asked, files named with the song title, part and take, starting from the same bar as the session so that they line up.

Home recording for self-assessment

This is the most valuable technique in the lesson and the one most players avoid, because the recording tells the truth. The purpose is not to make records; it is to hear yourself as a bandleader, a student or an audience hears you. You need very little: a phone or a small interface, one microphone or a DI into a laptop, and a play-along or a metronome. Use it like this:

1. Record one chorus of whatever you are practising (an étude from Sight-reading, a solo on the blues, a chord-melody arrangement) with the metronome or backing audible on the recording.
2. Listen once without the guitar in your hands, as if to a stranger. Write down three things: one about time (rushing? dragging? uneven eighths?), one about sound (attack, dynamics, note length, buzzes), one about content (did the phrase make sense, did you play the changes).
3. Fix the one worst thing in the next ten minutes, then record again.
4. Keep the files, dated, in one folder. Once a month, listen to a recording from three months earlier; progress you cannot hear day to day is obvious across a quarter.

Three technical points make the recordings useful rather than discouraging. Record dry, with no reverb, so you hear the real articulation. Set the input level so the loudest chord stab does not clip (peaks well below the top of the meter), then do not touch it; a consistent level lets you compare recordings. And record at three dynamic levels in the same take, as in the example below, so you can hear whether your quiet playing is clear and whether your loud playing is still clean.

\tempo 100
.
\ts 4 4
:2 (5.5{dy p} 5.3 6.2){ch "Dm7"} (3.6 3.4 4.3){ch "G7"} | :1 (3.5 5.4 4.3 5.2){ch "Cmaj7"} | :2 (5.5{dy mf} 5.3 6.2){ch "Dm7"} (3.6 3.4 4.3){ch "G7"} | :1 (3.5 5.4 4.3 5.2){ch "Cmaj7"} | :2 (5.5{dy f} 5.3 6.2){ch "Dm7"} (3.6 3.4 4.3){ch "G7"} | :1 (3.5 5.4 4.3 5.2){ch "Cmaj7"} |

What to listen for, in order of how much it matters to people who hire you: time (against the click: are the eighths consistent, do the chord stabs land with the click or just after it), note length and articulation (Articulation and phrasing), dynamics (is there any?), tone (is the sound even across strings and registers), and only then the notes.

Exercises

1. Amp map. For your main amp, find and write down: the setting that sounds best alone, the setting that sits best with a recording of a trio played through speakers in the same room, and the difference between them. The second is your gig setting.
2. Feedback control. With a hollow or semi-hollow guitar, find the volume at which feedback starts in your practice room, then find three ways to raise that threshold (position, bass cut, orientation) and note how much each one helps.
3. DI test. Record the same phrase through your amp mic'd and through a DI, listen to both in headphones, and write down what each loses and gains. Then set your pedalboard so that the DI sound is usable without the amp.
4. Studio dry run. Record a four-bar part from a chart you have not seen, to a click, with two takes maximum, as if the clock were running. Time how long it takes from reading the chart to a usable take.
5. Monthly review. Listen to recordings from today, a month ago and three months ago. Write one paragraph about what changed.

Quiz