Well of course ... but remember, guitar tone controls and most amp tone controls take away signal content but don’t add signal content. You could conclude having the tone controls fully up is “the true tone” from your guitar or amplifier, and it is. With the volume and tone controls dimed, your pickups are fed mostly directly out to your amp and with the amplifier tone controls dimed, signal is not attenuated and with a good amp this can sound wonderful. But is that what you need?
EVH maintains “volume is tone”. This is true for him. He is hyper-sensitive to tonal nuances (can or at least could hear the differences between 10 foot and 20 foot instrument cables from guitar to amp) and typically plays with his amps so far into saturation that volume changes on his guitar move the amplifier response further in or out of saturation. So turning up in this situation increases the saturation in the pre-amp and the overdrive in the power amp and changes the frequency content of his sound. The sound gets fuller because more harmonic content is present, but not necessarily louder, because the amplifier cannot produce more power – the additional harmonics are being amplified and consuming the power amplification potential of the amplifier.
Let’s talk about harmonics. A pure tone is a sinusoidal signal. These can be generated from tone synthesizers as simple as tuning forks (tuned to generate one single frequency) or sophisticated electronic or digital equipment, but are not naturally occurring. Instruments each have their own characteristic sound, and that sound is made up of a multitude of sinusoidal signals of different levels all mixed together. If you are playing an A (440Hz) on a tone generator, the signal is almost all a pure sinusoid at a frequency of 440Hz and one A 440 tuning fork will sound just like the next. Play the same A note on a guitar or piano or any musical instrument that can play that note and you get a different sound from each one because they all possess their own unique mix of 440, 880, 1760, … 440 x n Hz harmonics. Just like human voices are unique due to their harmonic content, all things which generate noise are unique for the same reason.
So your strat doesn’t sound like your tele and that’s why – unique harmonic signature. Some strats may sound very close to other strats, or teles like other teles, LPs to other LPs, but the uniqueness of each is due to their differences. Now the signal from these unique instruments goes into the amplifier and a well designed amplifier will allow that uniqueness to be retained and amplified. We have all tried some amps with overdrive or distortion controls and know that any guitar will sound just like any other. Good amp? No way.
Back to amp saturation and power potential of the amplifier. Since the guitar signal has its own harmonics, and a saturated pre-amp will add more harmonic content, all these signals show up at the power amp. Can the power amp amplify all these signals the same amount regardless of how many or how much? Of course not. This is an amplifier not a energy creation machine. That 50W amplifier can amplify one sinusoidal signal (specs typically use 1000Hz) to a level able to generate 50W RMS in your 8 ohm speaker. (We can talk about specs another time) Now that you have 1000, some 2000, some 3000, 4000, 5000, 1000 x n, …. Hz signals are amplified as possible. Lower and higher frequencies, outside the frequency band the amplifier, are attenuated and treated to some less amplification, and the frequencies inside the amplifier band are amplified as the amplifier frequency response allows. So the EVH situation starts to make sense now, the signals in the power amp change frequency content due to the level but not necessarily volume. So volume is tone in this case.
So what are tone controls for? To get what you need. You don’t always need balls to the wall full tone and a cranked and saturated amplifier. This quickly loses listeners’ interest, so a better approach is moderating the signal content and level for more interest. The music we play is not always for us – the audience does have a say. If the audience leaves a venue with buzzing ears and the impression the guitar was way too loud for human consumption, they won’t be back, and neither will your band. So, the tone controls and volume controls too, are really for the music listening audience, who don’t care that your amp sounds great when it is dimed – they only care that you are playing great music they can listen and enjoy, and they want to hear more.
