Jon's guitar tone
 

Why is Jon's tone always so crappy and thin??
You would think that with having all that equipment and money and with Richie having such a great tone on his guitars that Jon would have a similar one. It's not the Telecaster because he gets that same shitty tone out of the Les Pauls he uses aswell, While I've never used a tele, I've seen a LOT of bands get kickass tones out of the same guitar. I know that now that Bobby's there it doesn't really matter but it was even before to much chorus and not enough gain, and still on the HAND tour with him doing the solo of I'd die for you it was even more noticable.

Was just watching a few performances and I noticed it, no biggie... :)

Because the guitar techs know that the sound guys are just gonna turn him down anyway so why bother putting in the effort to try and make his guitar sound good? :D

yeah, most likely, though you can hear him a lot of the times it's just that Richie's guitar drowns Jon's out. Or maybe they do turn him down and turn his guitar up only for certain times during the song, I don't know. Sometimes it really kills the momentum, like at the end of Runaway when he does that little doodling, it's definetly not the right tone for the song.

Nah, I guess it's a case of the tone that fits most of the song that they aim for and if for some parts, like in Runaway, it doesn't seem to fit right, it's no biggy. They'd probably rather not worry about mucking around with it too much cos he's the singer and not the lead guitarist - just my guess though....

I still say that it would sound a lot better with a bit more gain, maybe pay a little bit more attention to it.
Come to think of it, Bobby's tone seems a bit thin aswell, but maybe that's more to do with the sound he's played with all these years.

I don't think there's need to have Jon's guitar part in Runaway at all. In 80s they played with one guitar and the performance was much better. I think it's because of the keyboards - they were huge back in 80s now it's thin (nice word you used :-) ) I was watching Runaway from each decade carefully and found out that in 80s David played the main melody with both hands, now he use only the right one!!

Back to topic - I do not hear Jon's guitar parts very often. On the other hands - Sleep in Amsterdam 2005 sounded weeker with only Richie playing.
And what about the vocals - I always have feeling that mics of all the band members are turned down compared to Jon's.

Could it be his amp? What kinda amp does Jon really use?
I've been wondering 'bout that for a long time. If anyone knows what amp Banderia uses, that would be great.

i've never really thought he had crap tone.

i just looked up some videos on youtube and it's not that bad at all.

of course tone is subjective but the one thing i will say, if jons tone seems a little "thin" it's predominantely a case of richie's guitar needing to take up most of the frequency spectrum that the guitars fill.

I'm not a keys player but I have a feeling if rashbaum sees the thread he'll back up the fact that keyboards in general are MASSIVELY more powerful than they were back in the 80s so that's not a reason for the sound being "thinner". In fact, with patches being made up of more and more layers now, you can get immense amounts of depth with the polyphony on modern keyboards when compared to even keyboards of the late 90s.

The recording device used to capture a performance, personal taste of the musos and sound engineers in control of the mixing desk, the venue's acoustic properties, the changing instrument models/brands etc., will all play a role in dictating how the tone comes across.

With respect to the guitar tone, You have to remember that Jon also plays teles live which have a naturally 'thinner' sound than say a Les Paul or even a Strat anyway.

Even when he played that kickass Les Paul on the HAND tour the tone was still the same.