Changing their spots, the Black Keys—Pat Carney and Dan Auerbach (foreground)—embraced collaboration full-on for their new album, with the tongue-in-cheek title Ohio Players.
There are so many facets and reflections, so many angles beaming influences and ideas … and it’s clearly the product of time—a work Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney say they could not have completed earlier in their partnership, although there has been lots of groundwork along the way.
“It’s amazing to be 20 years into our career and have a new trick to be able to do, which is collaboration,” says Auerbach, when asked about the sprawl of styles and the roster of mighty contributors—including Noel Gallagher and Beck—on Ohio Players. “That’s kind of the key to most people’s success throughout musical history, but we’ve shied away from it, extremely. Now, it’s lit a fire under our asses, and the possibilities feel endless.
“Pat and I are at the point in our careers where we feel like letting other people into our space. We never used to be.”—Dan Auerbach
“We were just too insecure back in there,” he continues. “But now we’ve produced enough records, we’ve worked with enough people, so it’s really fun for us. Pat and I are at the point in our careers where we feel like letting other people into our space. We never used to be. And at the same time, our own relationship is tighter than it’s ever been.”
The Black Keys - Beautiful People (Stay High) ("Official" Video)
Revisiting the Black Keys’ first two albums, The Big Come Up and Thickfreakness, it’s hard to imagine they would become an international juggernaut and that Auerbach, their singer and guitarist, would evolve into one of the most interesting players, producers, and songwriters in modern American music. After all, the duo’s initial recordings were raw as uncooked bacon—recorded in a basement in Akron, Ohio, with mics bought on eBay—and their repertoire bridged garage rock and a style, cultivated by North Mississippi hill country rural bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, that’s so rough and thunderous that even some hardcore fans of that genre had difficulty comprehending it.
But Auerbach and Carney’s intelligence, empathy, and history as collaborators might be more apparent to their fans than it seemingly was, at least until this album got underway a few years ago, to them. Starting with 2008’s Attack & Release, they’ve worked with Danger Mouse as a producer and co-writer; Mos Def, Ludacris, Q-Tip, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, RZA, and other hip-hop luminaries on their 2009 Blakroc album; North Mississippi firebrands Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton on 2021’s blues payback Delta Kream; even Billy Gibbons and Sierra Ferrell on 2022’s raucous Dropout Boogie. And Auerbach’s co-op rock band, the Arcs, recorded two acclaimed albums and toured the world, while his second solo recording, 2017’s Waiting on a Song, was a spelunk into the heart of his adopted hometown Nashville’s studio history, drawing on a cross-generational cast of legendary session players. Then, there’s the guitarist’s football-field-long production credits, ranging from the Black Diamond Heavies to Dr. John and Grace Potter to La Luz to CeeLo Green to Marcus King to Hermanos Guitiérrez to Robert Finley and Yola.
“We got to this maturity as a band where not only can we call these friends, but we can deliver music our idols want to play on.”—Pat Carney
Sometimes, when you’re in the forest, all you can see are the trees. But now, after all that experience, the Black Keys’ omnivorous tastes, ceaseless drive, and undeniable success tilted their creative compass and comfort zone to Ohio Players, which might be poetically described as an album of peace, soul, and thunder. Also, eclectic and skillful af. Here, Auerbach and his drumming buddy have evolved what sounds like a mastery of every genre they’ve chosen to assimilate over the years: blues, jazz, country, classic pop, rock in its old and new variants, soul, hip-hop … even ambient music. Spend 20 minutes listening to the anthemic chords of “On the Game,” a co-write with Noel Gallagher; the fuzz fests “Paper Crown” and “Everytime You Leave,” the latter co-written with Beck; the psychedelic hip-hop-pop of “Candy and Her Friends;” and the period-perfect reworking of William Bell’s 1968 Stax hit “Forgot to Be Your Lover,” and you’ll get lost in the vibe—a happy time traveler through roots-informed music’s past and present.
The band’s new release was made at the same time as they were creating their last few albums, with Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney collecting the results of their collaboration wish list.
The album’s other spark plugs include hip-hop-beat brainiac and producer Dan the Automator; Memphis rap legends Juicy J (of Three 6 Mafia) and Lil Noid; producer/guitarist Angelo Petraglia, who’s made records with Kings of Leon and many others; and Nashville session hero Tom Bukovac, a truly estimable guitarist.
Of course, the biggest surprise is Gallagher, who co-wrote three rockers for Ohio Players, lending his patently anthemic touch. As it turns out, Gallagher is a big Black Keys fan, and in 2009, the duo were invited to open for his former band, Oasis. “But we were busy,” Carney says, “and they broke up.”
Despite a four-year hiatus from 2015 to 2019, the Black Keys stayed busy—even separately, during that break. They resumed making Black Keys albums in 2018, with ‘Let’s Rock’, and while they were creating its two successive releases, Auerbach and Carney also launched the series of collaborations that yielded Ohio Players.
“We had this epiphany—we can call our friends to help us make music,” Carney says. “It’s funny because we both write songs with other people, but we got to this maturity as a band where not only can we call these friends, but we can deliver music our idols want to play on.”“Noel Gallagher was feeling inspired because he hadn’t recorded like that. It’s not really common to have zero baffles between the vocals and the drums.”—Dan Auerbach
The first call was to Beck—a major influence on Auerbach and Carney when they were growing up in Akron. “His aesthetic was incredible,” Auerbach says. “He wore his influences on his sleeve, and we learned from that. There was someone showing us a way to go.” Beck was also an early Black Keys fan, and took them on tour in 2003. He is on half of Ohio Players’ 14 tracks as a writer, vocalist, guitarist, and keys player.“
After we’d gotten Beck in the studio, we were throwing names back and forth—‘Who else would be meaningful and write big songs we like?,’” says Auerbach. “Noel was at the top of the list.” The Keys’ manager, and even Gallagher’s team, when initially approached, responded that the former Oasis co-leader simply doesn’t co-write. “But we got a message back a few days later that said he’d be down if we came to London. We didn’t know if it was going to work, but after we recorded one song the first day, it took all our nervousness away.” By the end of a week, they had three numbers for Ohio Players.
Dan Auerbach's Gear
Dan Auerbach plays one of his original Supros in concert in 2023. He has a collection of vintage guitars, including instruments owned by Hound Dog Taylor and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
Guitars
- 1960 Fender Telecaster Deluxe
- 1965 Teisco Del Rey ET-300
- Gibson J-45
- Danelectro Vincent Bell Signature Coral Firefly
Amp
- 1950s narrow-panel tweed Deluxe
Effects
- Analog Man Sun Face
- Marshall SupaFuzz
- Fulltone Octafuzz
- Vintage flanger
- Strymon El Capistan
- Xotic RC Booster
- Custom fuzz (gift from Pat Carney)
Picks, Strings, & Slides
- National metal finger pick
- Custom picks
- SIT .011 sets
- Brass slide
“That was amazing on a lot of levels,” Auerbach continues. “It was fun as hell. We’d really wanted to go to Toe Rag Studios in London and record there. Toe Rag is such an amazing studio. It’s one room, no vocal booths or anything like that—smaller than a single-car garage. [The all-analog space is where Wolf Alice, Tame Impala, the Kills, James Hunter, Hugh Cornwell, and many others have recorded.] Pat’s got a drum kit, I’m on guitar, and Noel’s playing his ES-335 most of the time, with Leon Michaels on this weird little German ’60s keyboard, and [engineer] Liam Watson behind the old, beautiful desk.”
After the sessions, Auerbach and Carney dubbed Gallagher “the chord lord.” “He would sit there and cycle through chords until he found that one that worked with mine,” Auerbach recounts. The songs they cut, “On the Game,” “Only Love Matters,” and “You’ll Pay,” were essentially recorded live, with additions—like Bukovac’s guitar—done at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. “Every time we listened to a playback, it sounded so good that it was inspiring, and Noel was feeling inspired because he hadn’t recorded like that before. It’s not really common to have zero baffles between the vocals and the drums. We were just going for it.”
“I definitely tend to classic sounds, and then it’s nice to be able to move from there, finding new ways to use them.”—Dan Auerbach
If anything, collaborators like Gallagher and Beck have amplified the Black Keys’ already impressive way with hooks and choruses—reinforced as usual by Auerbach’s guitar, which, regardless of musical setting, always seems rooted in the tones of the ’60s and ’70s.
“I definitely tend to classic sounds,” he says, “and then it’s nice to be able to move from there, finding new ways to use them. But just being able to find that classic sound has always been thrilling. It’s finding the right fuzz pedal or finding the right combination of things that make that magic that’s on all of this stuff.”
On their most recent major tour, the Black Keys hit the road as a sextet. “Our band is so capable,” says Auerbach. “The guys that we’ve been touring with sing and play percussion and keyboards, so we can recreate anything, which is awesome.”
Photo by Debi Del Grande
Fuzz has long been an important element of Auerbach’s sound, and it expands the dimensions of “Please Me (Till I’m Satisfied),” “Paper Crown,” and others. Auerbach primarily used three fuzz pedals on Ohio Players: an Analog Man Sun Face, Marshall SupaFuzz, and Fulltone Octafuzz—sometimes in combination, mostly driving a narrow-panel tweed Deluxe when he was on home turf at Easy Eye. But there’s plenty of sweet stuff in the grooves, too. In particular, the cover of “Forgot to Be Your Lover” enjoys not only a sweeping string arrangement but a lovely, chiming phase-shifted guitar that pairs perfectly with Auerbach’s near-falsetto vocal—another element of his singing that he’s perfected over time. (“My family would sing bluegrass, with all those falsetto parts, so it never felt out of the realm of possibility for me—although I never had the balls to do that until we made the Blakroc album, and we were messing around and experimenting,” he notes.) “Forgot to Be Your Lover” was done at Valentine Recording Studios in Los Angeles, a room frozen in time, left exactly as it was after its last remodeling in 1975—a place perfect for the track’s old-school vibe.
With its intuitive intersections of locations, collaborators, and the Black Keys’ realization of the strength of their own artistry, maybe there was some Zen at work during the Ohio Players sessions. And perhaps beyond. As we end our conversation, Auerbach offers an anecdote: “I was just making a record with Early James yesterday, in a friend’s hundred-plus-years-old home. As I was getting ready to record, my friend said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this guitar in a case here. Your friend dropped it off for you a couple years ago. He couldn’t get ahold of you or something.’ It was an old Supro Res-O-Glass that I had bought in Akron and completely forgotten about. I had loaned it to somebody 10 years ago. We took it out of the case. The strings on it were prehistoric, rusty, and we plugged it into a little black-panel Champ, and James played slide guitar on it, and it’s got a little Airline pickup. God! It sounded so amazing. And it was just like all kinds of wrong—hadn’t seen a luthier in a decade. You know what I mean? But it was the perfect thing for the sound that we were looking for. The perfect thing.”
YouTube It
On October 9, 2023, the Black Keys threw a blues party at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, digging into their North Mississippi hill country sonic roots with Magnolia State ringers Kenny Brown on guitar and Eric Deaton on bass. Here, they play “Fireman Ring the Bell,” a variation on the “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” theme by the late R.L. Burnside.
The debate about where high-gain started rages on, but there’s a strong consensus that Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath had more than a little to do with it.
“The first record that really had an impact on me, with regards to that aspect of tone, was Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” says Sweetwater hard content creator and former Grim Reaper guitarist Nick Bowcott. “It was a brutal sounding record. Iommi was so ahead of his game.”
Keep in mind that there were no high-gain amps when Iommi got his start. Instead, Bowcott explains, “He was doing his thing with a modded Dallas Rangemaster (treble booster) and running into a (Laney) Supergroup while often tuning down to C#. That’s how far ahead of the curve he was.”
Iommi’s tone and Sabbath’s influence were so dramatic that guitarists worldwide adopted it while honing it into a faster, more streamlined style. It was the beginning of heavy metal, and even the world’s biggest rockers claim it’s still unmatched. “Rob Zombie said, ‘The reason there aren't any more good heavy metal riffs today is because Iommi wrote them all,’” Bowcott adds. “It reminds you of how brilliant those songs are.”
The Marshall JCM800
Introduced in 1981, the Marshall JCM800 series kicked open the doors to the high-gain amp market.
Like Iommi’s Laneys, the tube amplifiers of the time didn’t offer the quick response, tight low end, and increased distortion those players required. The closest thing on the market was Marshall’s 1959 Super Lead, aka the plexi. While definitely distorted, these amps only gave up their saturated tones when played much too loud for most performances.
Guitarists begged for an amp that gave them the tones of Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, while still being something they could use. Over in England, Jim Marshall responded. In 1981, he released one of the most iconic electric guitar amplifiers of all time, the master-volume-equipped Marshall JCM800 2203.
“To me, the (JCM)800 is a foundational piece with regard to high gain. They owned the ’80s.” —Nick Bowcott
For the first time, the famous Marshall kerrang could be had at gig-appropriate volumes. The amp was a hit, and the JCM800 quickly laid the foundation for what would come. “To me, the 800 is a foundational piece with regard to high gain,” remarks Bowcott. “They owned the ’80s.”
The Mesa Engineering Mark Series
The first Boogies were created when Mesa’s Randall Smith “boosted the daylights out of a little (Fender) Princeton.”
However, Marshall wasn’t the only one pushing overdrive into the modern era. Randall Smith and Mesa Engineering’s first amps—hot-rodded Fender-style combos which Smith called “Boogies”—also marked the transition between vintage and modern with a high-gain voice of their own.
“Early on, I boosted the daylights out of a little [Fender] Princeton,” Smith notes. “It was 80 times the gain of the normal amp! It had this amazing crunch. Power chords and single-note riffs had that vocal, singing thing that made Carlos (Santana) so famous. You could go from the biggest, most amazing Fender clean sound to this level of distortion that nobody had ever heard before.”
Those first Boogies launched one of the most respected names in guitar amplification. Now known as the Mark I, Smith’s amps were soon a favorite of plenty of well-known guitarists.
The Boogie has had multiple variations and feature sets over the years. Each one was given a numeral to differentiate its designs, and the Mark II, with its tighter, more aggressive tone, is where the heavy metal world took notice.
One band, in particular, would launch themselves and the amps to incredible heights after stopping by Smith’s shop in the 1980s.
“Metallica, I remember them coming up,” laughs Smith. “They were young guys. They came up to the factory and grabbed some IIC+s. That was it. That was what they were looking for sonically. They said, ‘Okay, this is what we’ve been hearing in our heads.’”
Smith never considered his Boogie to be a heavy metal guitar amplifier,, but the enormous Mark IIC+-fueled success of Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets changed that forever.The Amp Modding Craze
Together, the JCM800 and Mesa’s Mark series kicked off a new era in guitar amplification. But, as is always the case, players still wanted more. Many players even modified their amps in search of new, heavier tones.
Before long, the amp-modding community had grown into its own industry with famed amp techs such as José Arredondo, Lee Jackson, and César Díaz squeezing the most tone and gain from the circuits as possible. Those modded amps were the go-to high-gain rigs for everyone from Steve Vai and Paul Gilbert to Alice In Chains’ Jerry Cantrell.
The modification game became so popular, and the modders so well respected, that many began producing their own amp designs. Brands like Bogner, Friedman, and Rivera are just a few that owe a lot of their early success to the mod craze. Even Mike Soldano got in on it.
“I did Marshall mods just like all those other guys,” he admits. “As I started gaining notoriety around L.A., people would bring me their Marshalls and say, ‘Hey, can you make my Marshall sound like this?’”
The Soldano SLO-100
Mike Soldano says he built his first high-gain amp for himself, but soon learned that other players wanted one too.
Soldano’s notoriety was well-earned. As the father of the Soldano Super Lead Overdrive (SLO) 100, many credit him for starting the modern high-end, high-gain tube-amp market.
As a young guitarist, he had faced the same gain-to-volume dilemma that plagued all aspiring rockers of the time. An early adopter of Mesa’s Boogie amps, he thought he had solved the issue, but while the Boogie had a high level of gain, it wasn’t a “high-gain amp.” Unsatisfied with the Mesa and wanting to avoid wrestling with a non-master volume Marshall, he built his own.
“I already knew what I wanted my guitar to sound like,” he says. “I heard it on records, but I knew they were getting that with post-effects and using plexis and big, giant rooms with the volume cranked to 11. I was determined to create an amp that would give me that sound at any volume, at any time, in any place.
“I got a bunch of old radio manuals from the ’40s and ’50s, and every night when I’d come home from work, I’d sit in my room and tinker around, build circuits, and try different things out.”
Soldano was excited about his new creation, but it was other guitarists’ reactions to the amp that told him he was onto something special.
“In order to crank the thing up, I needed to take it down to my friend’s rehearsal space. Every time I did, everybody in the place would start flocking to the room, and they’d be like, ‘What are you guys playing in there? I want to try it!’ I realized then that that sound wasn’t just the sound I wanted. There were other people who wanted it, too.”
“I already knew what I wanted my guitar to sound like…. I was determined to create an amp that would give me that sound at any volume, at any time, in any place.” —Mike Soldano
It took a while, but eventually, Soldano’s new amp started turning the heads of all the right people. “When I first got to L.A., I met Howard Leese,” he remembers. “The next morning, I shot out to meet him at Rumbo Recorders and took my amp with me. He plugs it in, plays about two notes, and he’s like, ‘This is awesome, I'm buying this.’ Then, this guy Tony managed to get an amp in front of Steve Lukather, and Steve went nuts for the thing. Then, I was checking my message machine one day, and there were calls from Lou Reed, from Vivian Campbell, and from Michael Landau. They all were asking about that SLO!”
If the JCM800 started high-gain amps, the SLO-100 was the first tube amp designed for the job. It completely changed the amp industry, and, like Leo Fender’s Telecaster, it remains an industry standard that's largely unchanged today.
The German High-Gain Explosion
Inspired by the SLO’s searing gain, sustain, and versatile volume control, manufacturers began cranking up their amps’ performance worldwide. Builders were finally delivering all the gain and control players wanted.
German makers like ENGL, Diezel, Hughes & Kettner, and L.A.-based Bogner made names for themselves with legendary high-gain heads like their Savage, VH4, TRIAMP, and Uberschall. For European metal guitarists, this was the dawn of a new era.
“The ENGL Savage was my main live amplifier for maybe seven years,” says Haunted guitarist, YouTube personality, and Solar Guitars owner Ola Englund. “Not too many other brands at that time could give you this insanely tight, modern metal sound without using a boost. You just hook up your guitar, and it sounds incredible.”The Mesa Rectifier Series
“The Dual Rectifier just completely proliferated all of the grunge years,” says Mike Soldano.
Between the Marshalls, Mesas, a flood of modded amps, and the amps coming out of Germany, the late ’80s and 1990s had a lot of high-gain to offer. Still, a new amp from a familiar face defined the next couple of decades.
“The (Mesa) Rectifier was the one in the ’90s,” Bowcott says, point blank. “The ’80s were the JCM800, and the ’90s were the Rectifiers.”
“The Dual Rectifier just completely proliferated all of the grunge years,” echoes Soldano. “There wasn’t a band out there that wasn’t playing a Rectifier.”
“We had no expectation that the Rectifiers would end up being so popular.” —Randall Smith
Today, Randall Smith’s Mesa Rectifiers are definitive high-gain amps. Everyone from Metallica and Korn to Soundgarden and Cannibal Corpse uses them to create the heaviest tones in rock history. So it’s surprising they were designed by someone more Santana than Sepultura. According to Smith, he was as surprised as anyone.
“We had no expectation that the Rectifiers would end up being so popular,” he said. “It was to the point that we had to fight that image. Players are like, ‘Mesa, those are the high-gain metal guys. I’m not interested in that.’ But it was only one product! (Laughs)”
The Peavey 5150 And Beyond
The Peavey 6505 and EVH 5150 are both descendants of the original Peavey 5150 designed by Eddie Van Halen and amp designer James Brown.
While Mesa’s Rectifiers had no equal in terms of popularity, one amp did give it a run for its money in impact and aggression: the Peavey 5150. Created by amp designer James Brown and Eddie Van Halen—who had been playing SLO-100s—the 5150 quickly transcended classic-rock heroics and laid the foundation for a new breed of extreme high-gain tone.
Machine Head’s Burn My Eyes was arguably the first release to put the amp on the metal map, while producer/engineer Andy Sneap’s legendary use on countless records cemented it in place. Bands like In Flames, Killswitch Engage, and Arch Enemy also used the amps to great effect.
“The 5150 was probably the most aggressive amplifier out there,” says Englund. “I remember it was either the 5150 or the Rectifier, (those were) the ’90s choices right there. If you played in a serious metal band, it’s one of these.”
Like the Rectifier, the 5150 has seen multiple tweaks and changes since its inception. The most notable came when Eddie took his 5150 trademark to Fender to launch EVH and the 5150 III amp line. Not wanting to drop one of the most popular high-gain amps ever, Peavey gave theirs a facelift and renamed it the 6505. The world lost a hero when Eddie passed away in 2020, but he left us with two amp lines that will go down in high-gain history.
Solid-State High Gain and Dimebag Darrell
The ’90s and 2000s were all about high-gain tube heads. But a handful of solid-state and hybrid amps also drove some of the era’s most intense music. The most famous of these amps was the Marshall Valvestate 8100. While many players denounced its cold, toothy voice, Bowcott says others built a career around it.
“Marshall came out with Valvestate in the early ’90s, and people like (Prong guitarist and singer) Tommy Victor adopted that amp. It was his sound on ‘Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck.’”
Victor wasn’t the only one using the 8100; it’s also the sound of Static-X's Wisconsin Death Trip and, reportedly, shaped the sound of early Meshuggah. No other 8100 player, however, is credited with having the influence and savagery of Death’s Chuck Schuldiner. Plugging into his 8100, he’s widely regarded as creating death metal.
Of course, there was one other high-gain hero who more than deserves a mention when it comes to ’90s solid-state. Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell and his Randall RG100 and Century 200 amps sounded so heavy, singular, and next-level that few have even tried to cop his sound.
“Dimebag had the most distinctive metal tone, and I don’t think anyone has managed to break that,” comments Englund. “It was his and no one else’s. He would just overdrive it to hell and back and add all these doublers and flight flangers and stuff. That was a solid-state tone right there.”
The Rise of Digital Modeling
The legacy of the Line 6 Pod lives on, elevated to stages everywhere, in the Helix.
How guitarists get their high-gain tones has changed drastically over the years, and that’s never been more true than in the last couple of decades. Instead of walls of amps and 4x12 cabinets, these days, we get remarkably similar sounds from compact digital rack and floor processors. Evolving from the original Line 6 POD, digital modeling now defines this era of guitar.
Initially relegated to practice tools for home use, starting in the late 2000s, bands like Periphery and Animals As Leaders have increasingly embraced modeling units like the Fractal AXE-FX, the Kemper Profiler, the Neural QuadCortex, and Line 6’s flagship Helix. The bands’ pristine tones, impressive musicianship, and pummeling riffs opened the floodgates of high-gain for a new generation. They’ve established modeling as a legitimate tone tool for professionals and even won over old-school rockers like Bowcott. “There’s some amazing stuff out there,” he says. “You can argue that there’s never been a better time to be a guitar player, apart from maybe decision paralysis.”
The impact of digital amp modeling can’t be overstated. Whether a physical unit or the countless inexpensive software amp sims, they all sound realistic, respond remarkably well, and open a world of routing and control options. They’re so prevalent that many younger guitarists have never even owned a tube amp.
Tube Amps and Impulse Responses
The Revv G20 is one of a growing number of modern lunchbox-style heads with IR capabilities combining portability and high-gain tone.
So, will digital modeling actually kill high-gain amplifiers? The consensus is probably not, but tube amps do have to evolve. The answer may lie in impulse responses (IRs).
Impulse responses are digital snapshots of real speaker cabinets and microphones loaded onto a modeler or computer. They let you hear a well-recorded cab without plugging into an actual speaker.
More and more brands are adding IR capabilities to smaller, lunchbox-style tube amps. Heads like the Revv G20 and ENGL Ironball Special Edition are pioneering this approach and striking the perfect balance of tradition and convenience. Randall Smith is a fan, and Soldano even joined the party with his Astro-20.
“I think it’s a great evolutionary step. That’s ultimate if you ask me,” says Smith. “The important thing is that you have your tube amp. You’re not sacrificing that in order to get the virtues of digital and modeling.”
Soldano echoes Smith’s enthusiasm, saying, “I think for home recording, it’s going to completely take over. It’s a perfect recording amp. You can set this thing on your desktop. You don’t even have to plug in a speaker cabinet. You can run it straight into your digital mixing world, and you can bring up these different IRs. You can do amazing stuff without even a single dB of sound in the room.”
Long Live High-Gain Tube Amps
Hybrid tube designs are helping ensure a bright future for high-gain tube amps. Still, Soldano, Smith, Englund, and Bowcott agree that tube rigs weren’t going anywhere anyway.
“On any Friday night, in any bar in any town, you’re still going to see some guy up there or some gal with a 50-watt half stack rocking it out,” says Soldano.
“The metal community, they still want moving air,” adds Englund. “That's something that can’t be modeled. You can’t explain it, but when you stand in front of an amplifier, it’s so easy to justify.”
Bowcott also agrees but says the experience extends beyond plugging in. “I remember, back in the day, going to see Diamond Head and Judas Priest. They had that huge wall (of amps) that, before they played a note, you’re like, ‘This is going to be cool!’ There was something visually visceral.”
High-gain tone has taken many forms over the decades. From Iommi’s influence to the tech-death insanity of bands like Archspire, it’s forever part of the electric guitar lexicon. As it evolves, so do the tools we use to achieve it.
Nothing will replace the physical interaction of a cranked tube head. At the same time, nothing today matches the convenience and possibilities of digital modeling. Then again, maybe the hybrid approach is the future. Whatever's next for our favorite heavy sounds, there are still plenty of legendary builders, technological innovators, and boundary-pushing players working hard to ensure high-gain guitar tone is here to stay.