Re: 80s Hard Rock/glam Metal Tone
Respectfully, I disagree. The sound on say Invasion of Your Privacy "What You Give" vs Dokken Back For The Attack "Kiss Of Death" with the exception of some hand 'English' is pretty dang similar....IMO.
Again - ignore the few (very few) bands with a distinctive personality and the majority are, in a very general sense, what I said: Hot Rodded Marshall, Delay, perhaps Chorus....specifics may vary, but overall, that's the genre.
Again - there are really very few "distinctive" personalities. The guitar players for Keel, Loudness, Roughcutt, and on and on and on....Hot rodded Marshall, delay, chorus, in some measure more or less.
As for your recommendation on a SUperD or Invader....and a TS9...that's a pretty early version if you ask me. Almost a 78-81 version or photo sound. By the time Hair bands were Hair bands...
SD's, JB's, Rats, and ADA's, JMP's, or Soldano's or a tweaked Marshall were the order of the day. If you ask me.
But as you said - no doubt a variety of approaches in the specifics. However - DEFINITELY mids! Back when even guitarists knew how to cut through the mix with razor sharp punchy tones!
If anybody has the right to dissent in this case, Ace, it is you, and in my exasperation I might have overstated my case, as admitted in my addendum. It bears repeating here exactly what I disagreed with, viz., the idea that the early EVH tone is oh-so-precious and needs a ton of very specific gear, whereas the rest of the bands mentioned – which included Ratt, Guns N' Roses and Def Leppard, bands which in my opinion sound nothing alike – can basically be had with a Rat pedal into a Blues Cube. The cavalier dismissal of "the others" is what irks me about the thing. When you are already on that level of ridiculousness, why not suggest a Metal Zone straight into the board?
These are not your opinions, of course, and I provide them for context only. Even so, I think there is something to be said for the diversity of approaches used. You mention George and Warren, who at one point were roomies, and who used to fight over the same amp heads. That they, of all the guitarists around, could arrive at similar results is not a surprise to me. Even there, however, their approaches to effects differed markedly, with George's tone generally being more processed. It should also be mentioned that
What you Give probably is the crunchiest tone Warren ever got, and the difference between the two gets bigger from there. Take a track like
You're in Love, and I'd say he's closer to Eddie's
Unchained than to George. Even guitarists who basically used the same approach got very different: Slash and Reb Beach both basically had a gainy Marshall tone, yet sounds nothing alike beyond that. If we go a few years further back, Carlos Cavazo always sounded to me like he EQed his guitar very differently from his contemporaries. It is not necessarily a tone I'd chase, but it is different. Then consider the Rockman tone, say, Steve Lynch on Autograph's Loud and Clear. That tone is miles away from his non-relative George, yet it does not feel out of place in the context of the genre. Since Rough Cutt was mentioned, it should be said that a lot of what you hear on their second records are guitar synths, and again, I find their approach to sound rather different from the other ones.
Now, I readily concede that I have probably spent more time than most contemplating the diversity found here (as have you, I suspect). I also agree that getting an approximation of these tones, so that you can play them all in the same set without anybody but annoying pedants such as myself raising an eyebrow, is more than possible. You are not going to get there by putting a Rat into a Blues Cube, though. And once you get there, you'll find that, surprise surprise, your tone is going to do a pretty darn good job playing
Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love, too. Turn the guitar volume down to 7 and turn off the chorus, and I'd argue you could probably do 70s Aerosmith and Zeppelin's rockier tracks without too many eyebrows being raised as well.
) although the general rule of thumb for the 'hair metal' tag seems to be any band from the 80's that was'nt playing thrash (and apparently even if they were ..Slayer..wtf? :lmao
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