Lifeson Tones

[Kramerguy]

Hey guys,

There's about a billion articles online listing Alex's gear during various eras of Rush, but in trying to zero in on his tone has been especially difficult for me lately.  I'm not rich, and not buying 355's, modified strats, JC 120's and marshall stacks.. I just can't afford that.  What I am using is a GSP1101 rack, various guitars including an epiphone Dot, tele, etc.. I can duplicate the general guitar pitch.  It's the amp models, and especially the EQ, effects parameters, etc I'm having difficulty with, and I can't seem to find any truly in-depth info on how to emulate or duplicate the tones.  Like I said, mostly I just see people listing his gear and effects with no elaboration on specific settings.

Starting a tribute band and need to start nailing down pretty much every different era of tones from the beginning to the early 90's stuff.

Any advice is appreciated.

 

[rog951]

Sorry, I don't have any experience with the GSP1101 so my reply will be generic, and probably not any more helpful than the stuff you've already found on the internet! For the early stuff, keep it simple. I'd look for a Marshall plexi preset and use your Epi Dot. He played a 335 or a LP into a Marshall for pretty much the entirety of the '70s, and there are only so many parameters there. Start with everything on the amp straight up, jumper the inputs if that's available (juice the front end with a pedal if not) and crank the output volume. Since some amount of "tone is in the fingers" you can't escape a little tweaking...if it didn't sound quite right with everything straight up, I'd push the mids up slightly and maybe the presence a little for starters. Be careful with the GSP1101's speaker simulations (assuming it has them) if you're running into that Blackstar cab. Having multiple speaker coloration with screw you up quicker than anything else I know.

Wow, this is already long! I'll cut it off here, except to say that the later stuff is much more difficult to nail down IMO. Many more FX and funny EQ. He used that Palmer speaker emulator in the studio a lot and I'm not 100% sure for what periods and what effect it had. Also, there was another guy here who was doing the Rush tribute thing - can't remember who, but if you could figure that out, he might've been down this road before. Good luck!

[Kramerguy]

Thanks for the suggestions.  Yes the GSP does have cab emulations, and I've played with them as well as turned them off.  I am able to get a lot of the general sounds from the early and mid-era, but it's the details that have me perplexed.  I have 4 or 5 different chorus effects available, yet I can't seem to get any of them in the same ballpark as the sound Alex gets on Hemispheres, or even his basic chorus-y effect on all the worlds a stage.  

Getting up into permanent waves, moving pictures, much more difficult- It sounds like he's using a modulation effect on songs like spirit of radio, freewill, and limelight..  Just occurred to me maybe instead of searching by his name/ tone, maybe I should be searching by song title... I will do that, in the meantime, if any of you have had success with settings to use on chorus, flanger, phaser, let me know- it would be at least a place for me to zero in on and go from there.  Thanks guys