Everybody has their own idea of what the “ultimate sound” for their style of playing is, but few of us ever can really dial into exactly what we want. Some of us like a smooth over-driven sound, some wanna sound like Van Halen, some people like a ratty ear piercing sound and still others prefer a classic bluesy tube tone. Whatever your taste in tone, we all have pretty much one thing in common. It’s hard to tweak in the exact sound that we want with what we got.

We usually beat ourselves up jumping back and forth between tweaking our pedals and then tweaking the amp tones, then back to the pedal in an endless and frustrating quest to get a good sound.

Many factors come into play when it comes to tone. For one, just the acoustics of the room can dramatically affect your sound. You might have a great sound at home in your music room, but take your amp somewhere else and all of a sudden it sounds like crap. What’s up with that?!

Personally, what works best for me in getting the right tone is simply using a multi-effects pedal. I use the Digitech RP-200 pedal. I found it in a music store for a couple hundred bucks a couple years ago and have been lovin’ it ever since. The other really cool feature is that it has a built in drum machine (pretty standard anymore ) so I can jam some cool riffs, licks, etc and practice my timing at the same time.

The secret to tweaking the right sound without driving yourself crazy is to set all your tone levels on your amp to a flat 0 setting. On most amps, this is in the center position. So, in my case I would set the Bass, Treble and Midrange to 0 and Reverb to 0. It’s also a good idea to move back the gain for your overdrive too if you have two volume knobs.

Now, I’ll proceed to tweak my settings entirely inside the multi-effects pedal. Set my amp settings, EQ tone, reverb, compressor, noise gate, delay, etc. You may even find a preset that is perfect for your sound. The idea is to get as close as you can with your sound. Once you get in the ball park with your sound, then save it. Now you can tweak the tone knobs on your amp to enhance and fine tune your sound to just the way you want it.

By doing it this way, you can normally find the sound you like without beating your head against the wall for hours. The other advantage is that by tweaking your sound completely inside the pedal first, you already have the sound you want regardless of the acoustics of different rooms. All you have to do from there is to adjust the tone settings on the Amp when in a different room to compensate for the different acoustics.

Getting the right sound doesn’t have to be a chore. Usually keeping it simple is the best solution. No need to have a thousand different gadgets, funky pickups, and the higest priced amp on the market just for a good sound. By shaving off the excess, you might be surprised with what you end up with.