You missed my point completely. I was addressing Fricker's comment about the fact that "99% of the audience doesn't know if you have good tone, so why spend all that money on hoity toity gear?" ha ha ha ha eesh... are you 12?
We'll have to agree to disagree. I was messing with you, but it's true on both accounts. If you're achieving great tone/expression and the audience is paying attention, the 99% and the 1% know if you have a good tone. And the 99% know if you're speaking to them emotionally with that good tone (playing with a lot of expression/emotion). Audiences are far more sophisticated listeners than we think. My degree is in Music Therapy and I've gigged for a living for about 20 years, so I understand this on both intellectual and experiential levels.
If you do enough research, you'll see it yourself. Audiences and venues vary, but once you factor out the gigs where bands are background music or similar, and you factor out the influence of singer and rhythm section, you'll notice a trend where guitar players who nail a well-known tone (and expression of that tone) get far more audience reaction than players who don't. It's obvious to me because I've seen it so many times.
I've paid the bills since 1997 as a solo act, and from '90-'92, living on the road performing in cover bands across the midwest, west, canada and alaska, where I worked with 5 different lead guitar players and saw competing bands across different touring circuits.
I get your perspective though. If all you see are players that don't nail tones, and/or players in venues (nailing tones or not) where they're background music, then all you see are audiences that APPEAR to be clueless about good tone.
If you're seeing c
over song players failing to nail a tone in a venue where the audience is paying attention, then the alleged cluelessness of the audience is misleading; they're not clueless...they DON'T CARE because the player has failed to nail the tone/expression they know is in their favorite song...the tone they remember and connect with on multiple levels.
Apart from education and observation since 1986, I've experienced this personally since picking up electric guitar in 2003. Factoring out the influence of my own fun/excitement at gigging with better gear/tone, the closer I've gotten to the tone & expression of a well known guitar part, the more positively the audience has reacted. Moving to the axe-fx in 2007 and dialing 50+ FW upgrades across standard, Ultra, and II, has made a real difference in audience reaction and ability to secure gigs.
But what do I know, I'm only 12 years old - LOL.