Transcription
This is the best guitar tone I've ever had. Not the most expensive, not the most complicated, but the one that made me play better than I ever have. Here's why. Heat. Heat.
So, I'd like to start by saying I've been around a lot of guitars and amps. I grew up working in guitar shops. I've played thousands of guitars. We're talking real '59 Les Pauls, uh, early '60s Fenders, boutique stuff, vintage stuff, all of it. And honestly, for a while, I've kind of lived in the same place. I always set up my Marshalls the same. One overdrive in the front. I crank the level and I turn the gain all the way down just to slam the front end. And that's kind of where I've lived for the last few years. Lots of saturation and it feels very comfortable to play. But somewhere along the way, I guess you could say I got too comfortable. I stayed there for a long time and I guess after a while it just gets a bit uninspiring and quite frankly boring.
This tone is different because it responds. It doesn't hide anything. It rewards you when you play well and it also lets you know when you don't. Trust me, it made me play more dynamically. It made me care more about phrasing and musicality. The biggest difference to me wasn't the sound. It was how the guitar felt. Pushed back and responded. And in my opinion, everything starts here. A non-master volume Marshall. In this case, the handwired 1959 Marshall Plexi. Non-master volume amps kind of force you into a relationship with the guitar. You can't just dial in tons of gain, get loads of compression, and forget about it. You have to use the different elements available to you. Whether that's using your hands for finger style, whether that's using the guitar volume to tame your sound and control the dynamics, and in this particular case, let pedals shape the gain stages instead of the amp doing all the heavy lifting. To me, a Plexi isn't really all about its distortion. It's about the headroom and the compression when you strike that brings out all the dynamic character and options available at your fingertips. It's not doing tons of heavy lifting like a super compressed high gain amplifier. It's giving me a canvas to paint a picture, to tell a story, and to use all the different elements to control the sound that is coming out the speaker. And that is where the magic is.
Okay, so here is the rig. We're running through the Marshall Plexi 100 watt, so you've got plenty of headroom. And uh, this is it just on its own running through the Neve preamps. And I'm sure Josiah is going to run you down on what the process is and what it's running through. But this is just the amp on its own. And it sounds like this. So, as you can hear, it's very dynamic. When you push hard with your pick, you're going to get a nice compressed sound versus when you play soft, it's going to be really articulate. So overall, it's actually a little bit of a harder tone to play, but you're more rewarded in the end of it. So, plenty of headroom, plenty of dynamics, and it's just a great starting place that is also a great tone on its own.
And then the revelation that we've discovered recording this EP has actually been stacking different overdrive pedals. And that's something that, um, I've never really done before. I've always been very comfortable just having the level on 10 and the drive on zero and just pushing the amp as hard as possible. And I guess that comes from more of a kind of hard rock background. But for this kind of stuff that's maybe a little bit softer and a bit more expressive, we found great results, um, actually stacking different drive pedals and using the characteristics of each pedal. So the one that is on the most is actually this Ryra clone, which is just a, a great clone of a clone pedal. And you might notice that we've not got it just dialed all the way up. It's kind of the output is on halfway and the gain is actually on zero. So, it's a bit of a clean boost, I guess, but this is the difference between it being off and on. So, it's just giving you that extra harmonic and it's giving you that extra push, squeezing a bit more juice out the amp. And, uh, if I demonstrate what that sounds like. So, it's got a lot of juice to it. Um, you do have to dig in a little bit. It's still very dynamic, but it's a great starting point.
And then from there, this is probably my favorite tone out of all the tones that we've got out of this, this setup. And that is the clone stacked with the left side of the King of Tone. Once again, the level, the, the gain, they're all at like one o'clock. Okay, so that seems to be a sweet spot on that pedal. And stacked, it sounds like this. And something I want to mention as well is it's very rare that I'm going to be all the way up on the volume. Obviously, we're using a Strat. This is a '63 reissue, but when you're all the way up, it's going to kind of start to fart out a little bit and it's going to be a little bit too much. So, I kind of like to sit at around eight and I treat that as like my fully all the way up kind of sound. It's a lot more articulate and it's more dynamic as well. Heat. Heat. So that's that. You can hear it's a different flavor.
And then another favorite of mine is the CLA stacked with the '808 Ryra Tube Screamer. And with this, we've got everything at about 11:00. So once again, we're stacking pedals to kind of squeeze the best out of them. And we're kind of using them more for the EQ, um, as opposed to just slamming the amp as hard as possible. And that sounds like this. I guess it's more of like a Steve Howe kind of tone with that honky mid-range. Heat. Heat.
And then we, we're going to explore the sound of everything on, which is, I guess, a little bit of a crazy thing to do. You're going to have to embrace the noise, but, um, but we're going to use the volume once again to kind of control that. So. So, yeah, there we have it. That's the rig.
Okay, so Josiah, tell us what's going on in this room.
>> So what we have here is a Marshall 4x12 1960s lead, uh, with Greenbacks in it. Um, it's, uh, decoupled on some, just some old breeze blocks. Uh, we're running a Shure 57, a Sennheiser MD421, and a Sonic Sigma ribbon microphone, which is just capturing a little bit of the room ambience. Um, a bit of the low mid plume. It sounds really, really good. It's a steadfast, very common micing setup for any sort of cab. Sounds great straight off the bat.
>> So how long have you owned this cab and how much difference do you think it makes to have broken in the speakers?
>> I've had this cab in the studio for roughly 10 years now. Gets used all the time. Uh, the speakers are very well broken in, which makes a huge difference to the tonal quality. You find if you have a new cab, the tones can be quite brittle and a bit ice-picky. Um, these are super smooth, really well-rounded tones, and this cab works so well with so many different amplifiers, and I, I, I use this cab more than any other cab I've got in the studio here. Um, it's absolutely brilliant.
>> Sweet. Yeah, I've always noticed that when it comes to Plexis, Greenbacks really do lend themselves to, uh, that amplifier setup. I don't know what it is. It's just something to do with how open it sounds. But yeah, we've captured something really cool here. Anyway.
>> Yeah, bro.
>> Okay, so I think a lot of the magic, to be honest, is the actual outboard gear that we're running through. Uh, because I've been very comfortable with my tone for a while. I've always been happy with it, but something I noticed about recording this EP was it's very articulate, very dynamic, very bright, but it's not harsh in any way. And I think that's a lot to do with the stuff that we're running through. So, Josiah, you've got the brains here. What the hell is going on? What is the amplifier running through?
We're running from the cab. We're running, uh, the three mics into our Neve 1073s. They're attenuated so that I can push the, the gain and get some, some of that nice harmonic distortion, some of those nice harmonic tones from the 1073s. These are classic preamps that have been used on so many massive records. Um, and then what we're doing, we're running from the 1073s through this Martian grade Lynx Aurora, um, AD converter, which sounds absolutely amazing. And that's where the magic is.
And for those that don't know, obviously the, the Neve is giving some saturation there. What else in its character is it actually giving in terms of its color? What does it typically tend to do?
>> What I find with the Neves is that when you push the gain, especially in that attenuated mode, you've got the minus 25 dB. You've got, even with that minus 20, 25 dB attenuation, you've got a lot of clean headroom to play with. But the more you push that gain, the more harmonic information is introduced. And that's what we've achieved with the, the tone. And it's really added a real nice color, a roundness to the sound. Um, and it just sounds great. Sounds really, really nice.
>> Okay guys, quick disclaimer. I'm not one of those content creators that are going to feed you a load of information so that you go out and buy a product. This video is not sponsored and I'm not trying to make out that this gear is going to make you the best player in the whole entire universe. In most cases, it's only that extra 5 to 10% and to be honest, sometimes even less. However, sometimes it's that 5% that makes you want to pick up the guitar and keep playing. And I know this is easy for me to say sat around tons of nice gear. I've been very fortunate and lucky to do this for a living and I've collected some really nice equipment over the years, but I want to make this a real point and that is, don't let gear stump your creativity. Great music has been made on way less gear than this. But in this particular situation, when it was time to record my EP, the 1959 Handwire Plexi, the Greenbacks, the three mic blend, the Neve preamps, that was the magic here. I truly believe that that was the most inspiring tone that I'd ever played and it really contributed towards the results on the final product.
Anyway, all that being said, I've actually got something really cool to share with you guys. During this process of recording the EP and being so inspired by these tones, it got me thinking, how am I going to recreate this sound on guitar clinics? Uh, for instance, I'm flying out to the NAM Show in January. It's not really that convenient to fly out a 4x12 cabinet with Greenback speakers, a Marshall Plexi, big pedal board, uh, Neve preamps, you know, it's just quite frankly, it's impossible on the level that I'm at. And this is when we realize something. We could actually capture this sound. We're talking the microphones, the cabinet, the Neve preamps. We're actually able to capture it through the Neural DSP Quad Cortex profiling feature. So, we wasted no time and we captured it exactly as it is, exactly as you're hearing it on the EP. It's the same capture that we created on the Quad Cortex. Same mic blend, same feel, same pedal interactions. This is the tone that inspired me to make the choices that I did. And now you guys can download it at home and try it out for yourself.
Anyway guys, that leads us to the end of the video. I hope you enjoyed it. And I just want to leave you with this last little bit of inspiration. Chasing tone isn't about perfection. It's about finding something that makes you forget about the gear and just play. So if this tone inspired you, then the link is in the description. Use it however you want and most importantly, make it yours. I've been Danny Zelli Cruz and we'll catch you in the next video.