How many electric guitars do I really need to (authentically) cover the bases?

famous beagle

famous beagle

Well-known member

How many electric guitars does one really need to (fairly authentically) "cover the bases" - soundwise only?​

Curious to hear opinions on this. What I'm after is a practical approach. In other words, I'm not really interested in answers like "Well, you gotta have a Les Paul just because .... it's the quintessential rock guitar." It very well may be, but could you get close enough with another guitar? Of course you could.

So ... I'm curious to hear people's thoughts. If someone wanted to cover the following broad genres:
  • Rock
  • Blues
  • Country
  • Metal
  • Jazz
  • Funk

How many electric guitars would really be necessary?

There are a few caveats here:

1. Sometimes techniques might warrant a specialized instrument. For example, lots of rock/metal styles (especially in the 80s) made heavy use of a floating vibrato system. Of course, there were some bands/players that didn't do that, but, for example, it would be pretty hard to play like Eddie, Steve Vai, or Joe Satriani without it.
2. Tunings: Some players play a lot of slide, for example, in open tunings. If you were going to want to play a lot of slide in one particular tuning, it's probably not practical to have to retune every time. This also usually requires a specialized setup on the guitar as well.

I'm gonna stop there, because I can see a can of worms starting to open.

Anyway, here are my thoughts. I'm trying not to think of emotional attachments to certain guitars - just what tools you need to do the job well enough.

1. Superstrat with humbuckers (Charvel, Kramer, Ibanez, etc.) and floating system: This would handle the metal and hard rock. And if you just close your eyes and just listen, I would argue you could get close enough to Les Paul blues tones as well.
2. Strat: This would handle the blues, some rock, and some country?
3. Hollowbody jazz box: for the straight ahead jazz
4. Tele: Country, blues, rock


Of course, there are exceptions to this. For example, there are some jazz players that used solidbodies (Ted Greene, Joe Pass in the early days, etc.). But I think most would agree that a hollowbody is the way to go.

I debated adding the Tele, thinking that you can get pretty close with a Strat. But, when considering the jazz situation, I figured if I were going to insist on the hollowbody for jazz, then the Tele for country could be considered essential. (Although you could do a much better job emulating a Tele with a Strat than you could emulating a hollowbody with a solidbody, IMO.

So ... what do y'all think? Curious to hear your thoughts. I'm sure there will be plenty of facetious answers, like "You can never have too many guitars!" But I'm really curious to hear what people think.
 
Well, when the question was posed to Mike Campbell, a player I have great respect for,
his answer was “just one more” ;)
But in keeping on topic with your line of questioning........

A Tele is key. Often times at a 3 hour rehearsal, I’ll leave a Les Paul at home and bring a Tele instead. Why? I can get a Tele to sound like a Les Paul......but with half the weight. But I have trouble getting a Tele to sound like a strat, or vise versa.

A strat and a Tele cover all bases pretty well.
But then again........just one man’s opinion.
 
RFR said:
Well, when the question was posed to Mike Campbell, a player I have great respect for,
his answer was “just one more” ;)
But in keeping on topic with your line of questioning........

A Tele is key. Often times at a 3 hour rehearsal, I’ll leave a Les Paul at home and bring a Tele instead. Why? I can get a Tele to sound like a Les Paul......but with half the weight. But I have trouble getting a Tele to sound like a strat, or vise versa.

A strat and a Tele cover all bases pretty well.
But then again........just one man’s opinion.
Click to expand...
🤣Hahaha

When I purchased my Epi Les Paul Junior on Monday, I told my wife (knowing she'd not believe a word of it) "This is the last guitar I'll ever buy." 😁

You can get a Tele to sound like a Les Paul with single coils? Or does your Tele have a bucker?
 
famous beagle said:
Interesting.

I'm curious. What style/application do you need the P90s for? (They are, in fact, single coils.)
And the Filtertrons?
Click to expand...
The P90 is one of my go to guitars. Amazingly simple but covers ground from super clean to grinding rock filth. :P
A Filtertron is something I have yet to try, but it's different enough to consider it another flavour (Gretsch).
 
famous beagle said:
🤣Hahaha

When I purchased my Epi Les Paul Junior on Monday, I told my wife (knowing she'd not believe a word of it) "This is the last guitar I'll ever buy." 😁

You can get a Tele to sound like a Les Paul with single coils? Or does your Tele have a bucker?
Click to expand...
Just use a gain pedal with some mids boosted. Or roll back the tone a bit, or use a boss 10 band eq. Lots of ways to skin that cat. And we’ve all heard stories of Jimmy Page using Tele’s in the studio.

Granted I’m using custom wound pickups that are a bit hotter than off the shelf Tele pickups. No ice picky tones. But it still spanks with the volume rolled back.

Keep in mind the 50s bursts that every one covets had low output pafs and rolling the volume back a bit gave that spank. Gibson wasn’t initially trying to create a “new” humbucker sound. They were trying to improve on the existing popular tones by elimination of hum.
As rock and roll evolved, the desire for hotter pickups to hit the front end of the amp harder changed the sound of humbuckers. Anytime you add more winds you’re boosting mids.
 
I could cover the bases with 4:

Semihollow (ES335, Guild Starfire 4, H535, etc)
Tele
Strat (HSS to be more versatile)
Dreadnought acoustic

If you can't do it with one of those, you can't do it at all!
 
The guitar from my "I did a dumb thing" thread.... is a Charvel Pro Mod So-Cal model.

One of the appealing characteristics of this guitar is that it makes for a decent "does it all" guitar. It's got coil splitting and tone control for both humbuckers - so you can mimic bridge and neck LP and Strat tones - but also a pseudo tele sound by going single coil with the push/pull volume pot and setting the pickup selector to the middle position. All those possibilities combined with the Floyd Rose makes for a versatile instrument.
 
It really depends on the player. I play all of the styles mentioned in the first post except for metal (Metalica type sound). I get it done with two guitars: Reverend Kingbolt with two humbuckers and an SSS Strat. The reverend covers all of the LP type sounds plus it has a bass contour knob that gives the guitar a whole different character which can render some decent twang. The SSS Strat obviously covers a lot of ground. In my case I prefer to play Jazz on a solid body or my acoustic guitar. If I were to add anything it would be a Tele just to get more of that authentic Tele twang. IMO the true sound of the guitar is most evident when playing clean. Once I add overdrive or distortion I can change the sound dramatically with pedals.
 
I have two electric guitars, one a 6-string and one, a 12-string. I also have 2 electro-acoustics, one a 6-string and one, a 12-string.
Between those 4 and the varying ways I might use pedals, my 2 amps or double-track or quad track, I have enough for any electric guitar sounds that I might want. I'm personally not looking for "a Gibson", "a Strat", "a Tele", "a Rickenbacker", "an Epiphone" or any other specific brand sound because quite frankly, I couldn't tell what guitar is used in which song. To me, an electric guitar is an electric guitar ~ there are a variety of sounds one can get from it and so I'll create sounds with an electric that I think will be useful to whatever song that particular electric is appearing in.
That's just my take. I'm very functional when it comes to musical instruments. I don't dispute that there are "better" and "not quite so better" {:D} instruments and all of mine are relatively shitty. But who cares ? They do exactly what I want them to do and I have fun driving them like pack mules and utilizing their limitations to get differing sounds.
My older son has a Squier strat and when it's around, I'll use that too, for variation. But the variation doesn't only come from the guitar, the guitar is, for me, part of a package.
 
One electric (Gibson Les Paul special), one Martin acoustic, and a cheap short scale Ibanez bass. The heavy lifting is done by Amplitube (VST) or in the case of the acoustic, good mic'ing. Covers all my bases, and I score a lot.
 
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