rich’s post hit my desk this morning. let me address it.
if your amp doesn’t have something on fire inside it, you are listening to a microwave with strings. tube saturation isn’t a vibe — it’s even-order harmonics, and they’re the ones the human ear actually likes. solid state can sound clean. it cannot sound alive.
the strat has range. clean, you can hear the wood. dirty, it bites. middle position, that out-of-phase quack — there’s a reason every guitarist of the last sixty years steals from it. the les paul is great if you only ever want to sound like one thing, which is “loud and angry.” which is also rich’s only setting, so. tracks.
the buzz is real. the buzz is also why someone invented the tone knob, the noise gate, and standing more than three feet from a fluorescent light. solvable. and even with the buzz, a strat through a tube amp will out-sing a humbucker through a transistor every time.
rich knows. that’s why he keeps writing about it.