The five things tone snobs are wrong about.
I have been a tone snob. I am pushing back on the version of me from 2015.
I want to be clear about something. I have, at various points in my life, been the worst kind of tone snob. I have judged players for using a Boss DD-3 instead of an Echoplex. I have argued about NOS tubes with a stranger at NAMM. I once told a friend that his AmpliTube tones were 'fine, in a way.' These were not my best moments. I am here to argue against a more recent version of me, and against the broader culture of insistence on a small number of approved choices.
First thing tone snobs are wrong about: digital amp modeling. The Helix, the Quad Cortex, the Fractal FM9, the Kemper. They are not 'almost as good as a real amp.' For 95% of the work most of us do — recording into a DAW with no time and a sleeping family in the next room, playing in-ear at a venue where the FOH engineer would rather not mic a cab, rehearsing in an apartment without getting evicted — they are better. They are quieter, more consistent, more recall-able, and more portable. The remaining 5% — a specific tube amp in a specific room with a specific mic — is still real and still matters, but it is a smaller percentage of the work than the snobs admit.
Second: relicing. I made fun of relic guitars for ten years. Then I picked up a Masterbuilt relic at a friend's studio and played for an hour and realized the entire point. The neck feels like a guitar that has been played for forty years. The finish doesn't grab your forearm in summer. The aesthetics are a side effect of the playability. I am still not going to spend $9,000 on a Fender Custom Shop, but I understand why people do. It is not pretending. It is a different product.
Third: tube amps versus solid-state amps. See the earlier piece on myths. The audience cannot hear your output tubes. Fourth: pickup snobbery. The PAF clones from Throbak and Heaven's Hand are wonderful and I have several. But a $99 set of Tonerider Alnico IVs in a $900 import Les Paul will fool a great many people in a great many mixes, and the snobs who tell you otherwise are mostly working backwards from their purchases. Fifth, and the one I lose friends over: the obsession with vintage everything. There are a lot of bad vintage instruments out there. Survivorship bias does not equal quality. The 1958 Les Paul is a great guitar because the great ones survived and the dogs got cannibalized for parts in 1973. A modern Murphy Lab will get you 90% of the way there at 15% of the price, and the remaining 10% is a number you can decide whether to pay.
Thelma (thelma.weller) plays a Drop-C# Jazzmaster through a board that has zero boutique pedals on it. She plays harder and more interestingly than most of the snobs I know. The gear was never the gating factor. It was a permission slip, and most of us write our own.
'Survivorship bias does not equal quality. The 1958 Les Paul is great because the great ones survived. The dogs got cannibalized in 1973.'
— Johnny
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