Tech Tuesday: Guitar Tone on "Legacy"

Starting today and hopefully repeating every Tuesday, I'll be writing a short bit about some piece of technology or gear related to music making. My goal is to help any of you fellow musicians out there to make informed decisions about what gear will help you to make better music, easier, and without spending too much money on unnecessary stuff.

Let me start by expressing my honest and heartfelt gratitude to all of you who have bought my album "Legacy" and sincere thanks for the wonderful comments and praises. One of the compliments I've gotten a number of times has been on my guitar sound. So today's piece will be focused entirely on the guitar rig I used to record the album.

If you scroll back through prior posts, you can see that I've already shown the nine guitars I used on the album. What may come as a surprise is just how simple my amp and effects setup was. My guitar plugged straight into my Mesa Boogie Mark 5 Twenty Five.

For every song with the exception of "Orbit", I used "lead" channel 2, and my settings were pretty consistent from song to song. Gain at around 50%, Treble & Mids at around 1-2 o'clock, Bass between 10-12 o'clock, and Master set so that my peaks were between -6 dB and -3 dB on my computer's audio interface. I have the graphic EQ set to the usual Mesa "V" shape, although the boosts and cuts were about 75%. I mainly used the Mk IIC+ and Mk IV profiles.

For "Orbit", I used the "clean" channel 1 with the Clean profile, and the tone settings were about the same as my crunch tone, aside from the Gain being pretty low (maybe around 7-8 o'clock).

In the amp's effects loop, I had nothing more than my TC Electronic Flashback Mini Delay pedal. I created my own "Tone Print" for Legacy, but I have since found that the "Modulation Delay" Tone Print created by the super awesome guitarist Pete Thorn was actually a refined and better sounding version of my creation, so I've since switched to that. My delay settings stayed pretty consistent from song to song, and my strategy was to use the delay more like a less-defined reverb sound vs a clear & precise echo.

My settings were roughly: Delay @ 175-250ms, Feedback @ 12 o'clock, and Level @ just loud enough to hear the repeats.

I had the amp plugged into one of my Marshall 4x12" speaker cabinets, just for monitoring. I used the amp's "CabClone" output to capture a direct signal without having to mess around with microphones and the absolutely horrid acoustics in my studio room.

Believe it or not, that's it for my sound on Legacy!

Just yesterday, I added a TC Electronic Hall Of Fame Mini Reverb after my Flashback in the effects loop, and I'm already in love. You'll most certainly hear this combination on my next project.