which amp used in a song

[Tone2TheBone]

This thread has the potential for some interesting replies. Good topic. I'll start by guessing that most of Van Halen's stuff came from an old Marshall Plexi head. Don't remember the age of the head. I do know that they were recorded with old bottom cabinets loaded with 25 watt Celestion Greenback speakers. Some sort of Variac was also used as was some kind of graphic EQ pedal along with a script MXR Phase 90 phase shifter pedal. I personally think he hit the amp with the EQ maxed out and up for added gain without the variac but this is only my opinion.

I've heard that a lot of George Lynch's tone on the later albums came from a purple Marshall head belonging to God knows who. I read that he offered to buy it from the owner but was denied.

[marnold***]

I've heard that a lot of George Lynch's tone on the later albums came from a purple Marshall head belonging to God knows who. I read that he offered to buy it from the owner but was denied.

I don't know about "later" albums, but I've heard this story too. I thought that was more around the "Under Lock and Key" timeframe. Lynch is really hard to nail down because he changes amps and effects so frequently. The only constant is really his bengal striped guitar. Otherwise he has used Randall, Soldano, Marshall, back to Randall again. He's used various overdrives, modded DS-1s, and so on. Add to that the tendency to record different parts with different amps and you get a tone that is impossible to reproduce outside the studio. Yet it always sounds like George . . .

Edit: Apparently my memory serves me well. Here's some info from http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-...ynch-tone.html even including comments from Michael Wagener!

The setup for George's guitar tone on "Under Lock And Key" was as follows:
We had two Marshall heads and two Laney heads, not sure which models, but one of them was a Plexi. We had cabs in three different rooms: two cabs were placed in the big room at Amigo, one connected to a Marshall, the other connected to the Laney. The Marshall was responsible for the high end part of the sound and the Laney was set to take care of the low end. There were 14 (fourteen) mics set up in that room in various psoitions around the cabinet and some further away to get some room tone. The second Laney was sent into a very dead room and had a Boss chorus pedal in front of it, set to very slight chorus. The second Marshall was sent into a small, tiled bathroom, to add a different room tone. Those 16 mics came in on the MCI 500 console mic pres. They were bussed to one bus and that bus had a UREI 530 EQ on it (best guitar EQ ever). George mentioned that he always gets a great tone with his Fostex 4track recorder when it's in total overdrive, so I asked him to bring it in. So after the 530 everything was sent to the Fostex 4track, which lived under a packing blanket under the console, so nobody would see it. The Fostex was on stunn, completely overdriven and was sent on to the 3M 32 track dig machine from there.

No, I am NOT kidding!!!

And again:

"In late 1985, during rehearsals following the November 1985 release of Dokken’s “Under Lock And Key” album, George Lynch rented a modified Marshall head from S.I.R. (Studio Instrument Rentals in Los Angeles). The amp was a 100W Marshall Super Tremolo (Model 1959T) - a hand-wired, pre-master volume model of the “Metal Panel” (post-“Plexi”) variety (manufactured sometime between mid-’69 and mid-’73). George was so “blown away” by this “perfect amp” (George’s words - not mine) - known to S.I.R. as “Stock #39 - that he desperately tried to convince S.I.R. to sell it to him. After S.I.R. refused to sell #39 or even reveal the name of the person who had modified the amp, George paid approximately $2,000 just to rent the amp for the first leg of Dokken’s tour in early 1986.

Upon returning #39 to S.I.R. following his rental of the amp, George finally learned the name of the mystery modifier who had performed the modification to #39: Tim Caswell (Tim had worked in S.I.R.’s tech/service department for several years until 1985, when he left S.I.R. just prior to George’s rental of #39). Subsequently, George contacted Tim in order to have a handful of his own Marshalls similarly modified.

In short, Tim’s modification to #39 consisted of utilizing the amp’s then-unused tremolo circuit (with its additional pre-amp tube) to hot-rod the Marshall by adding an extra pre-amp gain stage. A master volume control was also part of the modification to #39, since the amp was a pre-master volume model."

[Tone2TheBone]

I don't know about "later" albums, but I've heard this story too. I thought that was more around the "Under Lock and Key" timeframe. Lynch is really hard to nail down because he changes amps and effects so frequently. The only constant is really his bengal striped guitar. Otherwise he has used Randall, Soldano, Marshall, back to Randall again. He's used various overdrives, modded DS-1s, and so on. Add to that the tendency to record different parts with different amps and you get a tone that is impossible to reproduce outside the studio. Yet it always sounds like George . . .

You're right about the later albums I needed to clarify that George made that comment in one of the Guitar mags right after the "Back for the Attack" album was released. I keep forgetting this is 2010 and that was 1987. I act like it was just yesterday. Are we that old already?