BLISTERING ROCK

Crave searing but expressive classic-rock sounds? Then be careful with the gain…

“I’ve listened to the guitars in Back In Black in isolation – and they’re incredible but not crazily distorted,” Dan reflects. “The thing about Angus Young is, his tone sounded magnificent but not all that distorted. So what do we do? We need to give that signal a fighting chance of being dynamic. It comes down to not over-saturating everything before it hits the amplifier. If you’ve got really, really hot humbuckers then things are going to get slammed no matter what you do. For me, when I was playing a Les Paul, I got really dynamic vintageoutput pickups and they just sound better. They just give the guitar more room to breathe.

“If you’re playing jazz, you’ve got space. If you’re playing sensitive blues, you’ve got space. But if you’re playing rock, a lot of sonic room is already taken up by the rest of the band. So another massive thing in this is to be aware of bottom-end. It takes a lot more energy to amplify a bottom-end frequency than it does the upper frequencies. If you’ve got a guitar, humbuckers and everything, that’s got a load of low-end, it might be that you’ll need to turn the low-end down in the amplifier, just so things can sit in the mix properly.

“Take an old Marshall Plexi. They didn’t have thundering bottom-end, but they had top-end forever. By contrast, Hiwatts were massive… almost like a PA. But the Plexis had this midrange that was just perfect. With this blistering rock thing, if you’re going to be loud and there’s going to be gain, having too much bottom-end can be a big enemy. So Marshalls, Tweed Fenders… anything that has those lovely mids. What tends to happen with those amps is that those mid frequencies compress first, almost. You still have this rich thing happening on the top-end, but also this creamy overdrive coming through.”