Five tone myths I used to believe.
I was wrong about most of these for at least a decade. Some of you still are.
Two sides. One page.
Johnny argues the piece. Then he argues against himself. Somebody has to check his work. Read both, then call the winner below.
The take is shown below.
I am not going to pretend I have always been right. I have an embarrassing history of confident wrong opinions about tone, gear, and signal chain that I have only slowly walked back. Here are five of them. If you currently believe any of these, I am not judging you. I was you. Possibly worse than you.
Myth one: tubes sound 'warmer' than solid state in any meaningful, blind-test-survivable way. They don't. A well-designed solid-state amp into a good speaker through good mics will fool you and fool me. What tubes do is compress and saturate in a way that feels good under your hands and that the player notices more than the audience. That is real. That is worth something. But the audience cannot hear it. The audience can hear your speakers, your room, your hands, your song. The audience cannot hear your 6L6s. I spent four years thinking otherwise. I was wrong.
Myth two: cables matter at audible levels for short runs. They don't. Buy decent cables and stop reading the threads. The difference between a $30 Mogami and a $200 Vovox over a six-foot run is not audible in a mix and is barely measurable in an anechoic chamber. Long runs (over 25 feet) and balanced lines for synths and active electronics — different conversation. Your guitar to your pedal? It does not matter. Spend the money on a better preamp.
Myth three: relicing changes tone. It does not. It changes how the guitar feels under your forearm and how it photographs. That is fine. Be honest about why you are paying for it. Myth four: NOS tubes are reliably better than current production. They are reliably more expensive. The ratio of 'genuinely better' to 'placebo plus survivor bias' is closer to 30/70 than 70/30. Myth five — and this is the one I lost the most money on — vintage pickups are reliably better than good modern ones. They are not. They are reliably more inconsistent. Sometimes that inconsistency is magic. Most of the time it is just inconsistency.
Noor (noor.haddad) made a comment once about her oud through a Twin that has stuck with me: 'I stopped trying to chase a tone and started trying to make a sound.' That is the whole thing. The myths are about chasing. Sounds are about making.
'The audience cannot hear your 6L6s. The audience can hear your hands.'
— Johnny
The audience-can't-hear-it test smuggles in the biggest myth of all: that the audience is the customer. The instrument's first listener is the musician, and feel changes what gets played.
Myth one's demolition, the audience cannot hear your 6L6s, is true and aimed at the wrong target. Nobody ever claimed the fourth row could identify output tubes. The claim, which the essay concedes in passing and then abandons, is that the compression and sag under the musician's hands changes how the musician plays, and what the musician plays is the only thing the audience hears. A tube stage that pulls a better bend out of you is audible in the fourth row, as the bend. Feel is not placebo running parallel to sound. Feel is upstream of it.
The NOS ratio, thirty percent genuine to seventy percent survivor-bias placebo, arrives with impressive precision and zero methodology. This from the masthead whose A/B essay demands level-matched double-blind switching before anyone is allowed an opinion on overdrives. Where is the blind tube test, the matched quads, the SPL meter? The essay's confident percentages are exactly the vibes-without-receipts move this publication was built to prosecute, forgiven here because the conclusion flatters the skeptic's self-image, which is the direction bias always flatters.
Relicing changes tone, myth three, gets dispatched with it changes how the guitar feels under your forearm, as if that settled it. Read myth one's own logic back: feel changes playing, playing is the product. A neck whose finish lets your hand move a half-step faster is an audible upgrade by the essay's own mechanism, and the essay cannot invoke that mechanism for tubes and revoke it for lacquer in the same column.
The myths were real and the corrections overshoot. The honest landing zone is smaller and less quotable: most tone variables are inaudible to the room and several are audible through the musician, and telling the difference requires the boring rigor this essay recommends to everyone but itself.
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