Scott Henderson Discussion

[pbognar]

Hey Scott,

I've been playing for years, (although you woudn't be able tell) and I've got a question about your views on gain, sustain, tone and ease of playing.

We all know that as we employe more and more gain, playing becomes easier, to the point where you could play just with your left hand.

At the same time, with all that gain and drive, you can hear the quality of tone degrading to the point of sounding like a square wave.

When I've see videos of you playing, it strikes me that you are employing quite a bit of normal left and right hand effort, almost to the point where I think you would be able to pull off most of those great solos even using a relatively clean sound. This is as opposed to the "let your (left hand) fingers do the walking" approach.

I hope I made that as clear as possible.

So anyway, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject of the gain, tone and playability thing.

Thanks

[Scott Henderson]

You're right, the more gain you use, the more fizzy and ugly the tone. I try to use only enough gain to get the job done, unless I'm going for an over the top crazed solo. Back in the Tribal Tech days, I was using .009's and really low action, but the tone was thin - after switching to 010's, single coils and higher action, the tone is better but I have to apply more pressure to the strings with my left hand to play legato. I think just doing it all the time made my left hand stronger and now playing legato is almost as easy as it used to be.

Even though the left hand is working hard, the key to playing legato is picking soft, because that makes hammer-ons and pull-offs as loud as picked notes. That technique allows you to play legato even with a fairly clean tone.

The biggest obstacle for playing legato is loud volume - if the notes are so loud that they want to feed back, a hammer-on isn't enough to make the next note pop out. One thing that helps my legato playing on stage is my Snark headstock tuner. It adds mass to the headstock and it makes left hand notes pop out easier. The tone is a tiny bit thinner but it's very subtile. I don't use it when recording but I like what it does live.