Guitarists - how do I make my electric guitar sound like one?

to the OP the pacifica is a great guitar, but if the basic model it can come not amazingly set up. You might want to measure the height of the pickups from the strings and compare to the yamaha service manual recommendations. If your guitar is always sounding thin no matter what you do it can be due to the pickups being set too low. Equally don't raise them too high or it things get bad quite quickly - youtube has lots of videos of the problems either way.

To get a shadows tone on a budget you want tremolo and a bit of reverb, possibly a touch of delay. I own these and they are great mini-pedals and very budget friendly (as guitar pedals go):
Donner Golden Tremolo
Donner Yellow Fall (adjust to one repeat approx 0.25-0.5 seconds after the strike)
Mooer Shim Verb (use on spring setting)
Donner incredible V amp and cab sim

You can go straight from the V into a PA/interface if you want to. The tone is quite reasonable for a budget set up. I'd be amazed if you can't tweak those to give you a very good shadows tone.

Basically it is the tremolo and (occasional) slap-back echo (1 repeat) that will get you there. Then a bit of reverb and an amp+cab sim to broaden the sound and job done. Clean soloing nailed. The incredible V will also give you a reasonable overdrive too. Trick is to balance the gain with the volume on your guitar so you start to get breakup at 7 on your volume dial when you are playing very heavy, or at 10 when you're playing lightly, then roll back the volume so it is clean under normal playing. the aim is to keep it at, or just below, the point of breakup then you can dig in for crunch or play light for clean. Same applies for your amp settings. Never just dial the overdrive to max. It's all about balanceand you want it to respond to your dynamics. Distortion is a different beast but trust me if you're after the Hank Marvin/Shadows' tone you won't want to be playing with distortion.
 
ik9000 said:
To get a shadows tone on a budget you want tremolo and a bit of reverb, possibly a touch of delay
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The Tremelo you refer to is the Tremelo Arm (Whammy Bar), I don't think he was ever famous for the Tremelo pedal effect, I know I never had one when I used to play his music.
He was also famous for his taped echo and had a multitude of echo effects, without the echo you won't have Hank Marvin.

and a quick Google - https://www.reidys.com/blog/how-to-sound-like-hank-marvin/
 
made this wee vid to show the Line 6 interface...how much easier it is than button combos etc...I dunno what the Blackstar app will be like but should be similar?

it's a Hank Marvin setting (downloaded)...starting with direct /bypass sound...then switching just the different effects on and off to show the difference they make to the sound, and the setting...the compressor really fattens up...then switched the amp model on at the end. using an Ibanez RG321 hardtail on the bridge humbucker pickup

 
The yellow fall pedal is an analogue delay. It will give you the echo. IIRC he used the built in tremolo on the vintage fender amps for proper volume modulation, not just the whammy bar for vibrato (tone modulation).

Scratch that I'm getting him confused. He was ac30s and they don't have tremolo just his custom treble boost
 
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A few points here.

1. @SexyGreyFox, @builder22 : I'm heartened to hear how you speak of Line 6. I'm, at best - on a good day - a mid level intermediate player. I've been playing for over 30 years but just don't have the time, or desire, to practice for hours a day. I first became aware of Line 6 in the mid 90s ((?) not sure of the timeline here). But I do recall that at almost every guitar shop I went to, one-off boutique or national chain, I would get sneers, and condescending looks when I enquired about Line 6. But, if I enquired about a specific pedal I would get an enthusiastic "this is the best, it's what I use" from the salesman. This confused the living **** out of me. WTF is the difference? Why is a pedal ok, but a POD is nothing more than a gimmick? Anyways, I went with Line 6 and loved it despite feeling a bit like a know-nothing amateur.

2. @danlightbulb : Back in the day amps were nothing more than a big box with some tubes and a really big speaker. You had a few to knobs to make some adjustments and that was it. Any tone you wanted came from the amp, specific guitar or a certain guitar setup.

Modern amps are really just computers with really big speakers. The sounds you can get from almost any physical guitar are almost unlimited. As a result, not only do you have to learn how to play the guitar *you must learn the capabilities of your amp*. Think of it as an extension of your guitar, and one that is equally as important.

** I will gladly yield to those who know better If they think I'm wrong here.**
 
BlueMerle said:
1. @SexyGreyFox, @builder22 : I'm heartened to hear how you speak of Line 6. I'm, at best - on a good day - a mid level intermediate player. I've been playing for over 30 years but just don't have the time, or desire, to practice for hours a day. I first became aware of Line 6 in the mid 90s ((?) not sure of the timeline here). But I do recall that at almost every guitar shop I went to, one-off boutique or national chain, I would get sneers, and condescending looks when I enquired about Line 6. But, if I enquired about a specific pedal I would get an enthusiastic "this is the best, it's what I use" from the salesman. This confused the living **** out of me. WTF is the difference? Why is a pedal ok, but a POD is nothing more than a gimmick? Anyways, I went with Line 6 and loved it despite feeling a bit like a know-nothing amateur.
Click to expand...

Things have come a long way since the first POD and Line 6 amps, they were a bit of a gimmick but were great in the studio.
Has time went by the programming got way better and the emulations got so that you couldn't tell the difference.
There is the old valve v digital arguments but at least over the last 10 years you wouldn't tell in a blind test.
Line 6 with their Helix pedals and powered cabs are at the pinnacle of sound along with the other greats in the digital world.
I used to have loads of individual pedals and make different pedal boards up but playing in a pop covers band I'd need about 50 pedals and 10 guitars on stage but I can do it all from a digital pedal with no messing.
It comes to something where most of the professional guitarists I know who are also playing with different acts just go round with a couple of guitars and a Helix or Kemper.
I was reading somewhere that if you are a musician who plays in the West End type productions around the World you are expected to have that type of gear and they may provide the sounds for you to put in them.
 
Tone is not just from the player, their guitar, or the amp speaker, but everything in between: the woods in the instrument, the strings, the pickups and how they are positioned, the pots and caps and resistors in the guitar circuits, the length and type of cable, the preamp circuitry, the poweramp circuitry, the frequency responses and resonant spikes (and scoops), even the speaker cone materials and cab airflow etc etc etc. You get interaction between all that and certain guitars with certain amps set at a certain level just respond in a certain subtle way as you sweep the volume knob that gets lost in the modelling, though good modelling will try and capture it as much as possible, but no-one can record every permutation perfectly.

What you gain is the ability to get the modelled tones without having to drive a twin cab 8x12 at stadium volume levels so you win some and you lose some. Digital can only ever reproduce a digital sample, you go analogue-digital-analogue and cut off that signal chain. Same thing applies with say a digital delay pedal that does not incorporate a dry signal bypass blend. Your signal becomes... sterilised.

That's the purists' argument anyway and why guitar shops will try and sell you that boutique true-bypass germanium fuzz and a thermionic valve transistor amp head instead. As other's have said - can people actually tell the difference in real life? High bit-rate sampling these days is pretty good. Torpedo Cab sim has been a huge step up in amp modelling for example vs say the Boss GT10 which is the previous modelling I have access to.
 
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