The best tone to practice with is…as close as you can get to the one you use on gigs. I have a slight issue with that because I have a different rig for most gigs than for practicing. But I still do the best I can to approximate it.
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actually if you’re working on legato technique… many advocates… some of the best in the biz… Rick Graham… Chris Brooks, etc. recommend a tone that facilitates that technique…
to use a tone with no compression, and hardly any gain … to make it " more difficult" is actually counter productive.
I see this a mostly a LH quandary. if you’re struggling to sound notes, clearly then yes, increasing gain, or trying to hide with a “better tone” … doesn’t achieve anything…
you can’t really “hide” bad technique behind a good tone/gear etc
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Yeah, I’m mostly in your camp, too.
I think tone should follow objective, though. What are you trying to practice? What will make any mistakes you make practicing that thing more obvious? Use that tone.
My legato playing only really came together when I started practicing legato unplugged - I figured, if I could get clean note articulations with no amp at all, then I wouldn’t need to lean on gain to make it work. Over time I moved away from primarily unplugged to primarily an unforgiving lightly crunchy tone, where weak notes would be obvious, but so too would too strong notes.
Practicing muting errant string noise and making sure nothing rings out, jack up the gain. This makes any excess noise much more obvious, and can really help you focus on keeping things clean.
Picking, once you’ve got the basics down, a clean tone can really help ensure that gain and the compression it imparts isn’t helping you cover over accidentally weak/mis-hit notes, and a slighrly crunchy tone can help with evenness as well, though they seem to bring out different weaknesses and are probably both worth doing.
I’ll also practice a lot with just my usual lead sound for laziness and because I think Joe Stump is at least partly right here, too, you need to practice getting a good feel for how your rig responds in normal playing conditions, too. But when I’m working on simething very specific I’ll almost always change things up.
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Perhaps an advantage of a modeling amp (Fractal, Kemper, ToneX, …) is that it’s easier to get the same tone everywhere.
A lot of gain is also “unforgiving”. Are you muting all the open strings? Do notes ring together when shifting strings or bending? Less gain makes you dig in more, which could sound clumsy with more gain. I like to play along with records and dial in a sound that can be heard in the mix without being too loud or bass-heavy. It’s probably not your favorite sound when you turn off the play-along…
If I practice without amp, I sound like shit with amp.
I like the idea to aim for “practice tone(s) = performance tone(s)” that many have expressed.
Additional unprompted opinion(s) 
I think the best way to spot mistakes is not to use an unforgiving tone, but to record yourself (ideally also on video), and to listen and watch back. In my personal experience it’s crazy how many details I miss in the moment, which only become obvious when listening after the fact.
People (myself included) often complain that they play better when they are not recording. However, how do you know it was better, if it wasn’t recorded? (I’m mean I know) 
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100% this as well. I actually bought myself a new webcam for that so I can film myself easily without too much hassle 
When I’m in a mood where I extremely hate myself I sometimes also record the DI in the DAW to check timing, etc but that’s more on the rare side.
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I think there’s a lot of sense to this too - as someone who’s been slooooowly recording an album this year, nothing tightens up your playing like playing a challenging run, lostening back and hearing some slop, and then doing like 200 takes of it until you nail it, at which point suddenly you’re nailing it repeatedly. This has happened a whole BUNCH to me this year.
But, in the meantime, an unforgiving tone DOES help make mistakes easier to hear in real time, too, and that saves you the trouble of recording and listening to the playback.
Yeah I think the recording process forces you to do a form of deliberate practice. Instead of mindlessly repeating a lick of exercise hoping that it gets better, you have to be very specific about what you want to change/improve between one attempt and the next. So while you do end up doing some repetition, the repetitions are more meaningful.
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I think this depends massively on what we mean by “practice”, what it is that we’re “practicing” and what counts as a “mistake.”
There are absolutely times when I want to sound good while practicing, because I’m practicing to sound as good as I possibly can. For me, this is a process of defining my intentions and focusing my attention upon realizing them faithfully.
There are dimensions of guitar technique concerning things like tone production, articulation, dynamics, and bending and vibrato. Everything starts with harmonics on the strings, and your technique is what creates those harmonics.
When coupled with phrasing and note-choice, it’s these dimensions to technique that people usually describe as “playing with feeling” or “having a good touch.” These techniques can be studied, and they can be practiced.
If this is the subject of practice, then the tone I practice with needs to be responsive to variations in these dimensions. Other people might call it an unforgiving tone, but it’s the tone that keeps my hands connected to my inner ear.
If the tone is too processed, compressed or distorted, I feel like I lose this connection. It’s weird and unsettling to me.
I also feel that there’s an important interplay between tone and phrasing. If I’m working on a particular type of phrasing, I want to find a tone that works for it, and vice-versa. I’m probably a “medium” gain player by most standards and I often practice/play on a dry tone (or with just a little reverb), but I also enjoy delay on lead tones or some delay and chorus on clean tones. It changes what I play and how I play.
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My approach to this has less to do with how much gain you prefer to use…but most importantly to practice, some of the time, with ZERO time based effects whatsoever. Unless you’re use to playing bone dry (no delay or verb) it’s borderline horrific…however…you will hear so much more detail in rhythmic accuracy, note attack, duration, evenness, consistency and extraneous / unwanted noise e.g effective muting of unused strings.
Give it a try…and be prepared to hate doing so, lol. Don’t allow your effects to conceal your slop!!!
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I’ve known people where I thought their playing was “good” that, when they stopped drenching everything in reverb and delay, two weeks later I was blown away by how good they sounded.
I almost never use delay and reverb in hopes of replicating this effect for myself. So far it hasn’t worked 
I’ve also heard people recommend playing fast rhythmic stuff with heavy delay, because when you drift, it becomes VERY obvious. 
I suppose this is part of the point of recording while practicing though, I might have a delay in the loop of my amp in the room, but capturing a DI into an amp sim ITB for the time being, it’s easy to shut off the delay or leave it low while reviewing takes…
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I always play practicing with dry tone to hear just what im doing. That’s the way to get the better tone with your fast playing, I mean if you can do 170 bpm sextuplets 16th with dry tone you can add wherever I want, but if you try to play 170 bpm with reverb delay etc you disguise the sextuplate and can be not very clean.
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I swear i read somewhere that Warren Dimartini practiced mostly unplugged. I do a decent amount of this myself on the couch. It is extremely cool that @BlackInMind had Joe Stump as private instructor at Berklee. We need a whole separate thread on Joe Stump guitar instruction stories …
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I have 2 or 3 practice tones that I use.
- A very clean, unforgiving (not the song) high treble/presence tone where you have nowhere to hide.
- A nice Kemper 5150 profile. I think practicing sweeps with distortion is key to getting them clean
- An ACDCish slightly distorted tone that sounds terrible if you play sloppy
Though I’m a huge Yngwie fan I dont practice on the neck pickup as I feel that hides too much. Same for delay and reverb
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Interesting thread.
I read most of it, my apologies if I messed something my reply mashes with.
The last two phases of guitar for me have been a bit extreme. YJM to SRV.
8-11-14-22w-32-46
13-15-19-28-38-58
Both setup with high action on strats with dunlop 6000.
Each time for practice it took me a while to setup my rig for realistic compression levels. I’d try to get my tone where it’s at with least amount of gain/compression. So yes, there’s is some restraint being applied on my part during development sessions.
But what I really wanted to share was that I had an epiphany a few days ago working on tin pan alley and rude mood, ( srv material )
I found that due to the massive strings there was no way to fight them, instead I found that sometimes it was effortless and other times exhausting, lactic acid cramps are not fun. On further observation I found it was speed of preparation before the note was even picked that made all the difference.
I believe I’ve been at a point where my picking hand has been way ahead of my fretting hand for a while now. All my current problems are around my fretting hand trying to keep up.
So I figured it’s two parts, fretting hand prep and the pick action is the release. If there is delay or any issue in prep, there is no bruit force in the world that will avoid long term injury. This is specifically looking at players where you can tell there’s a certain amount of correctable tension, most famous case is Steve Morse, I think he had long term problems. I’m not the best person to explain it but even Troy has a stiff picking hand to an extent. SRV or say frank Gambale and others just flow effortlessly and you can hear it in the feel and fluidity.
I’m going to be in trouble here I suppose to speaking out about this unless it’s also been covered and I’m late to the party. The whole thing to me after all these years is now a two phase process.
The prep by the fretting hand, it’s the setup that done to prepare for the final release by the pick stroke.
Again when the prep is timely, the release ( pick note ) is fluid and effortless. Any tension in the pre cannot be fixed on release. As I mentioned some players manage to play under tension but the results are not elegant.
It’s like if you are learning to ride a motorbike with gears, riding at higher gears at lower RPM make you feel like the engine is going to stall and make you fall? It’s the same fight I have with getting the prep on time with minimal effort so that the release (final pick action) flows correctly and is in phase with the next cycle.
Messing with compression will mask or reveal mechanical issues in the prep and pick phase.
Malmsteen would practice legato unplugged up and down a single string, when he crashed his car he was pleased his fretting hand was unharmed. I think we stress on the picking action a but much here. Necessary but it needs to be balanced.
My apologies to be preaching to the choir.
Happy New Year folks.
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Very ironically, as a legato guy from wayback and even now that I’m getting my pickinghand mostly sorted someone who still loves legato and feels most at home with looser flowing passages like that… I’ve definitely hit a point where the limiting factor is mostly no longer picking hand precision, it’s fretting hand precision. Go figure. The nice thing about doing all this in the context of tracking an album is it’s giving me all sorts of great opportunities to really focus on tightening that up.
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