NAD: Bogner Snorkler Mod

Beyond Black said:
I don’t get the love for his tones on the first couple AIC albums either. It’s decent but nothing great or worth chasing imo. His playing is much better than the actual tones. Would’ve sounded much better with a ripping boosted Marshall.
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This is so true for most of the coveted tones people go nuts over. More often than not it’s the playing that is making it good, rather than the tone itself
 
Beyond Black said:
I don’t get the love for his tones on the first couple AIC albums either. It’s decent but nothing great or worth chasing imo. His playing is much better than the actual tones. Would’ve sounded much better with a ripping boosted Marshall.
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I've always really liked the Facelift tone...dark and brooding, nasty. Which is a changeup to how I set up my amps lol. I didn't care that much for Dirt though.
 
Racerxrated said:
I've always really liked the Facelift tone...dark and brooding, nasty. Which is a changeup to how I set up my amps lol. I didn't care that much for Dirt though.
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That description very much fits this Bogner mod. It doesn’t sound like those ‘60’s bassmans though. Opposite of a bright, uppermid grind type sound
 
Well, that 64 Bassman boosted was dark, brooding and nasty. But not very tight. Through that 72 cab I had, very close to Facelift....
 
Racerxrated said:
Well, that 64 Bassman boosted was dark, brooding and nasty. But not very tight. Through that 72 cab I had, very close to Facelift....
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Yeah I think both are dark, brooding, but ‘60’s bassman’s IME had that American Fender-y midrange quality (more laid back, hollow, smoother) and the Bogner mod retains more of the Marshall-y euro character midrange. I think that’s biggest sound difference between the 2. The Bogner mod isn’t by default a tight sounding amp at all either, but once I turn its mid knob low enough I can actually get away with playing a lot of things unboosted except for very fast stuff, but maybe they set it looser with the mids higher up whenever they did use it (if ever). Wouldn’t be an amp I choose if I’m playing faster riffs or riffs that rely a lot on uppermids like many Ratt riffs
 
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braintheory said:
I would agree it definitely needs to be quite loud to get it where I want and also needs the mids turned almost all the way off to de-congest it, but then it becomes a beast, almost Uber-esque even. Mine isn’t particularly noisy

A Klon with a stock jcm800 may get in the ballpark, but wouldn’t have the huge low mids (not sure even if my 2 ch Recto’s do. Will have to AB), but some guys may try to dial that back anyway depending on taste. A stock jcm800 (boosted with a Klon) would also be a lot brighter, more uppermid-y. It’s mainly the big, chewy low mid quality that distinguishes its sound from my other amps. Basically, I think guys who want a fatter, darker Marshall-y sound that still has teeth, aggression would like it
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I wonder if all of those mods were the same.
Sounds like you got a good one!
Bet it sounds smooth af. Enjoy!!!
 
Racerxrated said:
After the engineer Ronnie Champagne posted here years ago, and said the Rhythm parts were all done with a modded 65 Bassman with a modded Butler tube driver in front, I felt no need to really search for a Bog Marshall. I had a 64 stock Bassman that got pretty close with a couple boost pedals.....
This was confirmed personally by Jack (New World Man) in a private email to Mr Champagne. Lead parts were all Snorkler, but Rhythm was the goosed Bassman.

And, I should add that if you go to youtube and find the demo version of We Die Young, Jerry uses his RG100 and gets an almost IDENTICAL tone to the album.....telling me that it's the sum of all he used and how he likes his tone.
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I go back and read Ronnie's comments like yearly. He has some on Gearslutz too. They're all put together somewhere. Groomed Noodlers? Can't recall
 
LPMojoGL said:
I wonder if all of those mods were the same.
Sounds like you got a good one!
Bet it sounds smooth af. Enjoy!!!
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My guess would be maybe like Cameron there’s variations but they still all have have the Cameron sound as this has a very clear Bogner flavor. Some might not like this one and if I didn’t dial back the mid knob a lot I wouldn’t like it that much. It seems, like with the early Uberschall’s, it needs a bit of non-conventional settings to get there. It does match what you said in that it needs to be loud and does sound congested with its mid knob higher than 9 o clock or so
 
LPMojoGL said:
I go back and read Ronnie's comments like yearly. He has some on Gearslutz too. They're all put together somewhere. Groomed Noodlers? Can't recall
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There's a related quote from an Alice in Chains book that I haven't seen posted online. Has some details that his posts exclude, and he certainly makes it sound like the main rhythm tone was Bogner.

Continuing, Champagne recalled that “when he first came in to do his rhythm parts, I remember he had these Randall Amplifiers, stacks and stacks of them, and the first thing I said to him was ‘Get rid of those pieces of shit, I don’t want them in my studio,’ because they’re really really awful amps. So initially there was a really big to-do about that, before I presented him with a new amp I had just had modified by Bogner before he started his business. This particular amp was a modified Marshall 50, and its funny because originally I’d taken that amp over to him, and said ‘Reinhold, will you modify this amp EXACTLY like you did your prototype model?’ And he initially said ‘No,’ and I replied ‘I’ll give you as much money as you want because this is a Warner Bros. project, so money is no object.’ So he agreed on the condition that I keep it under wraps because he was at that time leaving to start his own company, which of course went on to become wildly successful. So we had one of the first Bogner-modified Marshall amps on the Facelift album, and he’d only done a handful of these for Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen, etc. So Jerry was sold on it immediately, to the point that he wouldn’t stop playing. On the rhythm tracks, we miced that amp with 57s, and the funny thing is I had that Bogner running from the control room out into the main live room through these stacked Randall Speaker Cabinets. So when I lined up one full-stack with the 50-Watt Bogner, the first time Jerry heard it, he flipped, and said ‘That is exactly the sound!’ And that became the sound on Facelift. Usually we would do two rhythm tracks like that on average for each song, then do the same thing as we did with the doubling on the bass, where we’d double certain rhythm guitar parts with the Telecaster, and maybe add another track just under the guitar solo, just to fill it up a little bit. Or maybe we would take parts away, depending on what it was. For any of Jerry’s acoustic rhythm parts on the album, Nancy Wilson had brought down her 12-string guitar from the ‘Dog and Butterfly’ LP, and I miced it up with a U-87, and on any of his other acoustic parts, I would have used a combo of a U-87 and a 451, pointed at where the neck joined the body, so we could get the warmth of where all the sustain was happening on the acoustic. Then the sound that’s coming off it is being picked up by an 87 a couple of feet away.

Expanding the discussion into the over-dubbing of Jerry Cantrell’s lead guitar solos, engineer Ronnie S. Champagne “after we’d done the basic rhythm tracking at London Bridge, we took the project down to Capitol Studios in Hollywood, into Studio A to finish the guitar solos and vocals. Were the first recording project in there after their million-dollar renovation, and tracked there on a Neve 1081 console. We did all of his solos through my Bogner-modified Marshall 50 Watt, and that amp was called ‘The Snorkler.’ In fact, Jerry and Layne called the sound it got the ‘Killer Fucking Love Stink’, and that is still on the amp as they signed it back in 1990. The way I set up the amplifiers for his solos was pretty funny too because Capitol Studios had a stairwell in the middle of the building that ran from the bottom all the way to the top, so guess where I put the guitar cabinets? Right in the bottom of the stairwell, which drove the staff crazy, because I stuck a 57 right in front of the cabinet, then had another 87 in the stairwell, and we just cranked it. I didn’t want to use a lot of reverb because Dave Jerden’s big thing at that time was using digital reverb, so I was trying to get as much as of a natural vibe as possible. As a lead player, Jerry’s motto was ‘Keep it simple stupid,’ to where the simpler you keep it, the more what you’re playing stands out. That was his philosophy, and I think he consciously avoided being the Dave Navarro-kind of noodley guy, he avoided that. He didn’t want to be that guy, and didn’t try to get good at doing that, because it wasn’t part of his thing. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t or wasn’t a great player, it just means he didn’t pursue that end of it. It only took us a couple of days to do all of Jerry’s guitar solo overdubs, we just went there and knocked them out.
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It's funny that Champagne contradicts Jerden who often contradicts Cantrell. This is Jerden's recollection of Facelift gear. Champagne never talks about the Morin Marshall, which was also used on Dirt for leads.

The main rhythm guitars for Facelift were recorded with a Randall 100 Watt and a Marshall 100 Super lead (left and right guitars). For the lead guitars on both albums I used my 1988 Marshall Super Lead 100 watt modified by Mike Morin.
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