Jeff Beck, Tone Painter

Friday Playlist: Appreciating a master of sound

In the sprawling formerly seedy theme park of rock and roll, there are crowd pleasers and swindlers, circus acts and blues howlers and tricksters of every age and disposition. Over in Electric Guitar Land, we find rebels and punks with fancy hair-management systems, shredders and stompbox-dependent characters whose deal with the devil expired long ago. There are wonky virtuosos who transformed the fretboard into a weapon of terror and tadpoles whose repertoire begins and ends with the riff from “Smoke on the Water.”

Off away from these more pyrotechnic attractions is Jeff Beck. The British guitarist, who died this week at age 78, earned a space of his own over the decades for one reason above others: Tone.

As many of the tributes noted, Beck possessed unsurpassed control of the guitar’s (seemingly endless) sonic identities. You could tell it was him almost instantly. Regardless of the processing gear he used or the style of music he was playing, Beck’s guitar carved out a space for itself. It was a sound with dimension and shape and heft, perfectly balanced between frequencies. It was a magnet no matter what notes he played: Using compelling long-term sustains and oceans of open space, Beck lured listeners into whatever improvisational journey he was about to take. Some of those journeys became mind-scrambling and complex, but complexity was never the whole show. Within his blizzards of notes, it was still possible to savor the distinct notes and textures at the root of his playing – the sound of his attack, his growl, his fingers pressuring the strings to create the singe within a sustain.

Beck’s mastery of the nuances of tone production stands as something unusual in rock. It was methodical, the opposite of flashing neon. It was its own aesthetic, his pursuit alone. It shaped the way others in rock thought about sound, and influenced nearly every single one of the great rock guitarists of the 1970s and ‘80s. It’s audible on most of the studio records in his (somewhat erratic) discography, and lights up all of the live recordings. In a realm that sometimes prizes attitude over craft, the sound of Jeff Beck’s guitar offers reminders for the ages: Tone matters. Musicianship matters.

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