Hi. I'm having massive problems because I can't get no satisfaction in dialing in tones I want...specifically rhythm tones. They always sound far too harsh around 2-3khz...far too much low end and dynamically inconsistent. Even looking sideways at the low E string on my Tele sends it off a booming. Sometimes I think I've got the sound I want...then go to listen on monitors and it's just amateur town. I have a little break and listen again in headphones later and it's like a rank beginner dialed in the tone on the cheapest practice amp he could find in the pawn shop 3 suburbs over.

I tried to do something really simple...see if I could dial in the guitar riff tone from Get It On by T Rex. Couldn't get it. Couldn't get close.

So I was wondering if anyone was up for a challenge...show me that it's possible to dial in a similar tone to the T Rex Get It On tone.

I like S-Gear. Lead tones are OK...easier to dial in...but the rhythm tones I just can't get.

And I literally have no idea what to do to get the tones I want. I can't even get tones for my own songs. I spend an hour, 90 minutes just failing. In a lot of cases I want a tone that's round and warm, creamy yet clear, slightly distorted but articulate. I don't do metal or any of those huge sounds. Those are in the presets no worries. But I'm after the kind of tone as just described.

Any tips?!

Thanks, all the best.

Are you new to amp sim plugins? Have you used others that you’ve been able to dial in successfully? It’s often a good point of reference to know if you struggle with the same things in different plugins.

Some more details of your setup (e.g. interface, monitors) can also be helpful, particularly if users here have the same equipment.

Running S-Gear in a DAW and using an EQ plugin before S-Gear may also help you figure out if lowering/raising levels on your DI signal helps get you closer to what you want.

In terms of the new drive pedal and the inbuilt presets, the recent video by the studio rats is a great reference to compare your own tone to. A Tele is used for some of the examples.

Appreciate it. Thanks.

I am not totally new to amp sims. I've had Scuffman for a couple of years and generally get decent lead tones out of it. I also have Amplitube. And same with that. But I really struggle with rhythm tones. I'm generally using either a Strat or a Tele into something like a Grace m101 or a UA LA610mkii...something like that. Then into an RME Fireface UFX II and on into Studio One.

I usually aim to make the signal peak no higher than -12db before it hits S-Gear. I generally try to use an eq and compressor to even out things after S-Gear. But yeah, generally with rhythm tones I spin my wheels for a long time never getting the sound I want. I know S-Gear has a lot of great tones...crunchy, distorted, clean but I can't seem to ever feel good about the tone for the song I'm working on.

Basically I've been playing acoustic guitar for a long time, though I've always had electrics...I was not in a situation to play them for many years...so even just in general I'm not good at dialing in tones...you know...in any situation...amp sims, real amps. I have a Fender Super Champ x2...but I really can't crank it. And so kind of dialing in tones inside headphones seems weird...you know...not being able to hear the actual amp.

I dunno man. I just find it really hard. I'm rolling with HD600 headphones, Sony MDR7506, plus Yamaha HS8 monitors and Mixcubes. I find a lot of the tones are either too distorted or too clean, ha. No middle ground. I'm after a creamy, clear, slightly distorted but articulate tone. I don't want like a mush of noise playing chords. I mean check out "Get It On"...that classic guitar riff...it's kind of distorted...but it's not...it's kind of clean...but it's not.

By the way, I've seen that vid. Nice one hey.

May be the best thing to do is to start with one of the preset similar to what you are looking for and fine tune for you. May be you could post an example of what you are looking for?

Wow, nice gear! Take these for what they are worth, YMMV, but I usually start debugging tone problems by removing things. Maybe just to check, try going direct guitar into channel 1 to rule in or out the preamps. Add one back in, then start turning things on and off in s-gear. Not to listen for quality since turning off the speaker cabs will sound like hell, but just to debug the boom and the 2-3 K you are hearing. Also, and this is definitely a YMMV, I usually get my input meter on s-gear around -6db. Could be worth a try to run it a little hotter with or without the pre. Mic placement on speaker cabs could make a big difference...too boomy=move away from cone. Mic choice too. I almost always go sm57 off axis just outside the center and a 121 about halfway to fully to the edge of the cone and backed away a little. Playing around with different cabs helps too since they are basically resonant filters. Could you post the preset that is giving you the problem as an attachment? Also, guitar settings, especially for a tele with stock pickups. And I will take up the challenge of trying to get the tone on Bang a gong. One of my favorite crunchy guitar riffs ever. I only have my nephew's squire bullet to work with at the moment, though. The EQ prior to the amp is a good idea. The wayfarer EQ might be enough. I have been hoping for a pre and post parametric EQ in s-gear for a while.... Actually you don't seem noobish at all, so I hope none of this comes off as too basic. The nice thing I found about all this fussing in the first place is that once you get something you like dialed in for your particular guitar/pre/interface setup, a lot of it can be used on other amp settings too, making dialing in something you like way easier.

It's not your front end (preamp), or the interface.

Try going straight into your RME to simplify as others suggest.

Every guitar needs tweaks for optimal sound, EQ is the way to get there.

Oh and T-rex sounds should be Marshall all the way I think.

Here is my preset. The "A" preset is the bassy rhythm guitar, which I got close I think, and the B is the lead, which is not there yet, but works ok. I am assuming you meant the low rhythm guitar part rather than the trebly rhythm part since for me that is the iconic tone for the song. Agree w/Dirk It should be a Marshall since its 70s England, but I gave it a go on the wayfarer cuz the EQ cures a multitude of problems even though it is just 5 band graphic. And a quick and super rough MP3 to demo the sounds I got. Had to tweak it into loops in Ableton since I forgot to hook my looper to the recorder. Apologies to Marc Bolan's ghost. recorded with my nephew's squire humbucker offset. Would prefer it on a single coil something. I am not sure how it will sound on a tele. Anyway, here ya go.

Yeah, sure. I mentioned "Get it On" by T-Rex, right? I'm looking for a tone like that to start with, I mean that's one example. But yeah, I'll try to cite some guitar tones I really like that are similar to what I'm looking for in general. "Get it On" is a specific example...I'm trying to record a song with that kind of blues riff chug thing going on. Can't manage the kind of round analogue sound I would like. But I'll keep trying.

Righto. Thanks very much. I'll try going direct into the RME. And will try the other stuff you mention. Appreciate it. By the way...a reply for your demo and preset...thanks man! I'll check those out and put them into S-Gear and have a look. By the way, I'm not restricted to a Tele...I have a Strat as well that I can try.

Yep...will try going straight into the RME. And yeah, EQ for sure. I wish S-Gear had a nice dedicated EQ module. Or a couple of different EQ modules...and a compressor module or two would be good. But anyway, yeah...I'm just a bit of an electric guitar noob. Been playing guitar...mainly acoustic for many years. Always had electrics...just never had the chance to really play them. Long story.

Thanks

rcrath wrote:

Here is my preset. The "A" preset is the bassy rhythm guitar, which I got close I think, and the B is the lead, which is not there yet, but works ok. I am assuming you meant the low rhythm guitar part rather than the trebly rhythm part since for me that is the iconic tone for the song. Agree w/Dirk It should be a Marshall since its 70s England, but I gave it a go on the wayfarer cuz the EQ cures a multitude of problems even though it is just 5 band graphic. And a quick and super rough MP3 to demo the sounds I got. Had to tweak it into loops in Ableton since I forgot to hook my looper to the recorder. Apologies to Marc Bolan's ghost. recorded with my nephew's squire humbucker offset. Would prefer it on a single coil something. I am not sure how it will sound on a tele. Anyway, here ya go.

I just tried your preset man and I have to say it's WAY closer to anything I came up with. That's pretty nicely done dude. Thanks for your efforts! Maybe a little tweak here or there...but that kind of tone is pretty bang on for what I'm trying to do with this song.

I tried to find a decent tone over 2 or 3 sessions at over an hour a time. Nothing I came up with was close to what you got.

I have to ask you...I notice a lot of settings there which don't seem intuitive to me at all. In fact...most of the attempts I made to create this sound were the opposite of what you did in many ways. For example on the EQ you have the 2khz area cranked by +3 or something. I was chopping this way out. On the amp setting you had the bass cranked and the treble cranked all the way. I had the bass way off and the treble off by half compared to you. You have the middle way lowered...same here but not as much as you. You had the 240hz slightly raised...I had it scooped.

So, in quite a few areas...what my feeling is about dialing in a sound is way off compared to you. Your results are 100x better than mine. So that shows me that I don't have much of an instinct or feel for settings. What I'm doing is taking me further and further from the sound I want...what you're doing is getting closer and closer to the sound.

Pretty interesting! I have a lot to learn about dialing in tones.

out of town for a while so missed this, if you are still there...thanks for the compliment! here si pretty much my whole tweaking philosophy in a paragraph.
All of the below responds to the hotness of the signal going in, so worth listening at various levels. .100-200 low end, can get in the way in the mix but gives some oomph to the guitar/ 200 to 400 hz= boxy. gets in the way of male vocals, and unless you are going for a really early really distorted black sabbath kind of thing, seldom useful as a large boost, but still needs to be there in the tone. 400-to 1000= heart of the tone for me. Push it for crunchy biting lead, with lots of different tones by moving the frequency around in here: lower is creamy moving toward mud and responds well to heavy overdrive and higher is more biting and good for clean to crunch. zappa hendrix, and now the guy from Khraugnbin use a cocked wah to get the sweet spot and just leave it to fit the task instead of wah-ing about. the wayfarer EQ is good for this too, Cuts in this zone give a crunchy scoop great for rhythm, key to the bang a gong thing. Often pushing the mids on a lead guitar makes a nice complement. 1.2k boost is the bite, a little lower for marshall, a little higher for fendery. broadened out and saturated for vox-ish, here I finessed the treble and the 2k eq. 5k is articulation but too much is icepick land, need it for clarity but can get painful. Speakers roll off most everything above 7-10k so broad shelf boost and cut somewhere about 7k is nice for sheen or rolling off to sit inside a mix better. marshall-fender tone stack is completely passive, cut only, no boost, very interactive, so bass and treble need to be way up to make the mid scoop noticeable. The eq helps here cuz it can actually boost as well as cut, which is why Santana sounded so distinctive on the early boogie mark whatevers with the gain cranked and the low mids pushed..10 inch open backs can sound crap in some circumstance, but for crunchy rock and roll they tighten things up and crunch way better than 12 inch. Open backs preferable for tens or they get boxy sounding. Four 10s in an open back combo is my thing S-gear is still my fave for cleanish to growly stuff. Some of the Neural amps gives it a run for the money but they are really resource heavy even on a newish laptop.
Cheers, hope you enjoy my ear/brain dump, lol

In the horrible staged video of Get It On, Bolan has a Sound City amp and Cab. Sound City was the precursor to HiWatt. I think the Stealer would be the closest. You could get away with the Wayfarer, but S-Gear also doesn't include Fane speakers IR's. Those Fanes were a pretty flat and full-sounding speaker with strong deep bass. I had a HiWatt Custom 100 combo with a 100W Fane speaker in the early '80s. The tone stack in a HiWatt is similarly scooped when set flat like a JTM45 or Fender Blackface, but with less bass and more treble. The Middle knob can shift the upper-mid peak around when the Treble is way down, but there's no telling how Bolan set up the amp, ect for the recording, and the Sound City TS may have been more conventional like the Stealer with the Bass Shift switch off.

For either amp model, I'd set the Bass Shift switch off to somewhat match the Sound City TS curve. I'd also reduce the Sag a good bit, and maybe reduce the High Cut -- assuming the transformers in Sound City amps were top notch and full range like the Partridges in HiWatts. That's one reason to use Fane speakers, but there's something about the muted high-end of the Fane in my 100w combo I didn't like, and Fanes don't have a harshness reducing ~3kHz dip like Celestion GB types have. I suppose you could use more High Cut with some brighter Celestion speakers to compensate.

P.S. I've created a modified version of the Stealer preset I previously created to somewhat mimic a HiWatt. I used the S12-65 and S12L ported cabs to get the softened highs and big bass of a Fane cab. It's actually a bit less harsh because the Celestion G12-65 does have a 3kHz dip. There's a ~6dB dip in the 200Hz region in those cab IR's, but it still has good warmth and punch. I have the S-Gear input up high on the preset because of my AI input level. Hopefully, you can get enough smooth crunch for what you want without having to boost your input. The Amp B version has a default Pres Freq setting. You might prefer it. I set the Treble down on both amps because the Presence is maxed. The Bass knob may be too high, but it sounds nice. Notice the High Cut is at 0, and the Bright Contour is at noon to start with.

The 100W Fane speaker in my HiWatt combo had a wide-cloth dust cap. It's likely the speakers in Marc Bolan's Sound City cab were these:
reverb.com/item/57821920-matching-pair-o...qXCl7PwaAtklEALw_wcB

My Fane speaker did have the deep punch of a Pulsonic cone, but the cloth dust cap absorbed some highs. The Aluminum cap cones would have certainly had better chime. Perhaps you can find an IR of those, or just use the EVM12L. The high end of the Celestion G12-65 is notably softer.

rcrath wrote:

out of town for a while so missed this, if you are still there...thanks for the compliment! here si pretty much my whole tweaking philosophy in a paragraph.
All of the below responds to the hotness of the signal going in, so worth listening at various levels. .100-200 low end, can get in the way in the mix but gives some oomph to the guitar/ 200 to 400 hz= boxy. gets in the way of male vocals, and unless you are going for a really early really distorted black sabbath kind of thing, seldom useful as a large boost, but still needs to be there in the tone. 400-to 1000= heart of the tone for me. Push it for crunchy biting lead, with lots of different tones by moving the frequency around in here: lower is creamy moving toward mud and responds well to heavy overdrive and higher is more biting and good for clean to crunch. zappa hendrix, and now the guy from Khraugnbin use a cocked wah to get the sweet spot and just leave it to fit the task instead of wah-ing about. the wayfarer EQ is good for this too, Cuts in this zone give a crunchy scoop great for rhythm, key to the bang a gong thing. Often pushing the mids on a lead guitar makes a nice complement. 1.2k boost is the bite, a little lower for marshall, a little higher for fendery. broadened out and saturated for vox-ish, here I finessed the treble and the 2k eq. 5k is articulation but too much is icepick land, need it for clarity but can get painful. Speakers roll off most everything above 7-10k so broad shelf boost and cut somewhere about 7k is nice for sheen or rolling off to sit inside a mix better. marshall-fender tone stack is completely passive, cut only, no boost, very interactive, so bass and treble need to be way up to make the mid scoop noticeable. The eq helps here cuz it can actually boost as well as cut, which is why Santana sounded so distinctive on the early boogie mark whatevers with the gain cranked and the low mids pushed..10 inch open backs can sound crap in some circumstance, but for crunchy rock and roll they tighten things up and crunch way better than 12 inch. Open backs preferable for tens or they get boxy sounding. Four 10s in an open back combo is my thing S-gear is still my fave for cleanish to growly stuff. Some of the Neural amps gives it a run for the money but they are really resource heavy even on a newish laptop.
Cheers, hope you enjoy my ear/brain dump, lol

Thanks very much for that run-down. And again, appreciate your preset. I ended up using it with some tweaks in a song I did. I might post it here if anyone is interested.

GCKelloch wrote:

In the horrible staged video of Get It On, Bolan has a Sound City amp and Cab. Sound City was the precursor to HiWatt. I think the Stealer would be the closest. You could get away with the Wayfarer, but S-Gear also doesn't include Fane speakers IR's. Those Fanes were a pretty flat and full-sounding speaker with strong deep bass. I had a HiWatt Custom 100 combo with a 100W Fane speaker in the early '80s. The tone stack in a HiWatt is similarly scooped when set flat like a JTM45 or Fender Blackface, but with less bass and more treble. The Middle knob can shift the upper-mid peak around when the Treble is way down, but there's no telling how Bolan set up the amp, ect for the recording, and the SounCity TS may have been more conventional like the Stealer with the Bass Shift switch off.

For either amp model, I'd set the Bass Shift switch off to somewhat match the Sound City TS curve. I'd also reduce the Sag a good bit, and maybe reduce the High Cut -- assuming the transformers in Sound City amps were top notch and full range like the Partridges in HiWatts. That's one reason to use Fane speakers, but there's something about the muted high-end of the Fane in my 100w combo I didn't like, and Fanes don't have a harshness reducing ~3kHz dip like Celestion GB types have. I suppose you could use more High Cut with some brighter Celestion speakers to compensate.

P.S. I've attached a modified version of the Stealer preset I previously created to somewhat mimic a HiWatt. I used the S12-65 and S12L ported cabs to get the softened highs and big bass of a Fane cab. It's actually a bit less harsh because the Celestion G12-65 does have a 3kHz dip. There's a ~6dB dip in the 200Hz region in those cab IR's, but it still has good warmth and punch. I have the S-Gear input up high on the preset because of my AI input level. Hopefully, you can get enough smooth crunch for what you want without having to boost your input. The Amp B version has a default Pres Freq setting. You might prefer it. I set the Treble down on both amps because the Presence is maxed. The Bass knob may be too high, but it sounds nice. Notice the High Cut is at 0, and the Bright Contour is at noon to start with. That might be the first thing to adjust for your guitar.

Very interesting and thanks for the preset. I'll dl it and give it a look. All your info and ideas are very handy since I really have uber noob amp tone dial skills.

I think I once discussed with Mike as to whether the S-Gear input level has a different effect than the Gain knob. I'm pretty sure it does. I assume the input level drives the signal into the first virtual tube gain stage, and the Gain knob drives the signal after that. Increasing the Input makes for a more crisp/forward attack. I'd experiment with it and the Gain knob first, and THEN adjust the Bright Contour for the tonal balance you want.

For both the amp A and B slots I found that I prefer the S12L cab with the Rbn 160 mic set to Axis: 1", Dist: 2". The high end lacks chime with the Axis at 2". The bass proximity boost and high-end level is about the same as the Dynamic 57 mic set to Axis: 2", Dist: 1". It loses the deep punch and some high end detail (dynamic mics react slower to transients and smooth off square waves), but that can be better in a mix.

I also decreased the Gain knob to 8 and increased the Level knob to 5 (the volume level was much lower than my other presets). I like the more dynamic/gritty midrange of Amp A. The Middle knob is up higher on Amp B, but it's tighter/smoother due to the higher Pres Freq setting. Again, it depends on what you prefer in a mix.

Ok, so my OCD is kicking in on this. I've attached an updated preset. I experimented with various stock cab and mic combinations. The S12L cab w/Rbn 160 mic and S12M20 LR cab w/Dyn 57 mic is really nice. The high-end now comes from the S12M20 LR cab. It's softer, but not darker. You can compare by clicking the On/Slave switch for that cab to red and back to green. The S12M20 LR cab also fills in the mid-bass. To clarify, the bass proximity effect of the Rbn 121 is ~2x that of the Rbn 160, which is ~2x that of the Dyn 57. So, a respective 4", 2" and 1" distance will have roughly the same bass boost. Coincidentally, the respective high-end lift is also roughly ~2x for each mic -- with the SM57 rising to 6dB from 3 - 6.4kHz. Hope you can use it.

Nice to hear from you again Greg. Great advice.

I still haven't had a chance to check these out yet...but I will. Thanks again!

By the way, for anyone interested, here's the song I did using the basic preset (tweaked) that rcrath made for me.

soundcloud.com/user-186908625/halloween-...paign=social_sharing