Gainfreak":30f92 said:
ok that is true but Im talking about getting a Marshall to sound like Ed's old Marshall and guys like Rockstah are doing it after they tweaked it. The point Im making is that it can be done and I watched Mark(rockstah) DO IT from scratch. If you heard Marks first clips then by most people slogic in this thread, Mark would have not ever been able to re-create that tone. The tone was definitely not in his stock Marshall and he tried a lot of things. He kept tweaking and now Im convinced that he got it. So I ask, yet again...if it was the player then why wasn't Mark able to nail that tone with his first Marshall? it's in the fingers right?
But you're making the assumption that rockstah's marshall sounds like Ed's. His amp might not sound like Ed's amp at all. His finished recorded product gets damn close to Eddie's finished recorded product, but that's all. If you are trying to connect the dots and conclude that because of that, his amp must sound like Ed's amp, you'd be guessing at best. Maybe rockstah's Marshall sounded like Ed's before he started tweaking it, but because the rest of the chain was different, it didn't sound like Ed's final product. So he tweaked and tweaked the amp to make up for other differences/deficiencies in the whole chain of gear.
Do rockstah's recordings sound great? Yes.
But does his AMP sound like Eddie's? Nobody knows for sure. But logically, actually, I would bet that it doesn't at ALL sound like Ed's marshall, if you A/B'ed just those two amps against each other. The rest of his chain is completely different than Ed's. By virtue of that fact, if his amp sounded exactly like Ed's, his final tone would NOT sound like Ed's, because the sum of all the parts is different. Guitars, pickups, cables, pedals, outboard gear, reamping, etc. etc. All different. I didn't mention fingers because rockstah is great at playing the licks with the right kind of attack and authority. He's got the finger tone covered.
Bottom line is you can chase your tail over this until pigs fly and it will never lead anywhere. For the simple fact that everyone hears things differently and interprets what they hear differently and everybody has to take different paths to get where they are going, even if where they are going is the same damn place.
Is tone in the fingers or in the gear? Both. Duh.
Was Eddie's Marshall 'magic'? Probably not. HE was. And he stumbled upon a whole combination of gear that meshed perfectly with his style, and on top of that, had a producer/engineer who captured the sound on the first albums in a way that just blew everybody's mind.
And if that wasn't enough, I've never heard anybody make any music with that tone that wasn't either a) VH himself or B) somebody trying to make music that sounds like VH. In other words, once you've climbed that mountain, you're stuck on top of a mountain with nowhere to go! Great as it is, it's the ultimate one trick pony sound.
Ok, I'm done.
