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00:00It was heard by millions. A guitar sound so amazing that it drove an entire generation
00:05of players insane trying to copy it. It wasn't a magical vacuum tube, and it wasn't a specially
00:10wired pickup. And the tonewood? Yeah, that was a guitar body that somebody threw in the trash.
00:16This is the real story behind one of the most unique guitar sounds in metal,
00:20and why almost everybody got it completely wrong.
00:32I heard Dokken for the very first time on Wednesday, May 28th, 1986 at Kobo Arena in downtown Detroit.
00:39I had no idea who the hell they were, other than the fact that they were opening up for Judas
00:43Priest,
00:43the reason I was at that show. But the second that they hit the stage with Unchained the Night,
00:47I was completely blown away. It was an absolutely unforgettable show, especially when they announced
00:53that, you might have heard this one on the radio, and then they tore into In My Dreams.
00:56And suddenly it clicked. Yeah, I had heard them on the radio, but I had no idea that
01:01the song that I liked was by the band standing right in front of me. That's just how it worked
01:05in the pre-internet days. Now, besides being an outstanding live band, the thing that really set
01:10Dokken apart in the 80s was the guitar player, George Lynch. Not only was he an incredible player,
01:16he also had a sound that nobody else could touch. And I don't mean forum hype nobody else could touch,
01:21I mean actually unreachable. Nobody could get close to the sounds that George could cook up.
01:26And of course, this being the 80s, the rumors and bullshit were rampant.
01:29Okay, let's be honest, that part hasn't changed at all. But I do remember the guitarist in my band
01:34shortly after he purchased a JCM-800 telling me,
01:37Dude, I had the perfect George Lynch tone dialed in last night.
01:40Yeah, right, Greg. Funny how you couldn't seem to get it today!
01:44Maybe the wind was right last night, or maybe you're just full of shit.
01:48Turns out you do need just a tiny bit more than a JCM-800 to nail the lynch tone.
01:52This sound was raw, it was wild, and nobody could get it. No matter how hard they tried.
01:58And I'm going to show you how to do it in just a minute.
02:00But I want to really make something clear first. Most signature guitar sounds were not
02:04created by making a pact with Satan. They're usually just simple combinations of the right
02:09gear and the right place in the signal chain. Guitar players, however, tend to really overcomplicate
02:14things. Like exhibit fucking A right here. Here's a picture of Ed Van Halen in the studio.
02:18Everything is carefully labeled, except of course what speakers are in the cabinets,
02:23because that would never matter. Right?
02:25It turns out it's really not a big mystery to nail the Van Halen sound.
02:29Just get a Plex Zero equivalent, plug it into a cab loaded with EVH greenbacks,
02:33drop a cheap Kaleen EQ pedal in front, drop the lows, boost the mids, and crank the output.
02:48Yeah, no big deal. Just don't stand in front of the amp if you value your hearing.
02:53Now, I drove myself completely insane trying to get the Clayman sound.
02:57If you want to go back about 20 years on the Andy Sneap Forum, there is a very long thread
03:01that I
03:01started about it. I learned the mic technique, I had the 5150, I even went out and dug up an
03:06angle cap,
03:07which turns out had the shitty Chinese V30s in it, but that's a story that's already been
03:11well documented on the show. But I still couldn't quite nail the grind. I got close,
03:16but never all the way there. Now, I even got to meet one of Studio Fredman's assistants who'd worked
03:20on the Inflame stuff at NAMM a couple of years back. Now to that gentleman in particular, my apologies,
03:25your name has completely eluded me, but I do appreciate you making some time to talk to me.
03:30And I did grill him about that guitar sound and his response was,
03:33well, it wasn't really anything complicated. We just biked the cab. And then I saw one of
03:37huge Valverita's videos and he's doing a piece on that kind of sound and he's absolutely nailing it.
03:43And I'm sitting here thinking, I don't get it. I'm doing everything right and I'm still missing
03:47something. And then I notice he's using a Boss Super Overdrive pedal with the tone cranked up at
03:52about three o'clock. Now me, I'd been using the Sneap Forum approved overdrive, the Maxon OD808,
03:58because of course I was. Now I mentioned this to an engineer friend of mine, Chris Rowan, and he says,
04:03could it really be that simple? Of course it is. It's so simple and so common that nobody even
04:08thought to mention it because it should have just been obvious. Remember what I said about Van Halen
04:13and EQ pedals? Same principle here. The Boss is boosting things in a different place in the midrange
04:19and a little bit higher, and it's much more aggressive. That's the secret to the snarl.
04:23These days, I just hit the GBG switch on the Zuta amp and I get this.
04:35The lesson here is that if I had just tried something different instead of doing exactly
04:40what everybody else on the forum did, I probably could have saved myself an awful
04:44lot of time by experimenting with things that other people weren't using.
04:50So how the hell did George Lynch craft a tone that nobody could ever replicate?
04:54Was it a magical set of pickups? No, of course not. Although I'm absolutely certain somebody made
04:59an awful lot of money selling signature pickups to kids who thought a screaming demon was going
05:04to magically make them sound like Lynch. Because that's how this works, right? Swap a pickup,
05:09instantly become a guitar gun. I mean, just listen to all of those records out there,
05:13absolutely loaded with perfect George Lynch sound-alike tone. Yeah, exactly. And of course,
05:20it must be George's magical hands, right? After all, we keep hearing the same bullshit,
05:24the sound is in the hands. That's the one line everybody loves. Funny thing about that though,
05:29go put on the original version of It's Not Love from the album Under Lock and Key. That is the
05:35signature George Lynch sound. Now go listen to the 2010 re-recorded version. Same player, same hands,
05:40definitely not the same sound. Yeah, it still sounds like George, but it's watered down,
05:46it's polite, it's sanitized. That dangerous, instantly recognizable tone that made everybody
05:51lose their minds in the 80s? Gone. Vanished without a trace. Because apparently, the hands forgot how to
05:57do it? So what happened? What was going on with those early Dokken records that made them so special?
06:02Because this wasn't about talent. George has that in spades. And it wasn't about boutique gear either.
06:08The sound came from the absolute last place any guitar player would even think to look.
06:13And to tell this story properly, I'm going to quote the guy who actually made those records,
06:17Michael Wagner. George mentioned that he always gets a great tone with his Fostex
06:214-track recorder when it's in total overdrive. So I asked him to bring it in. So after the 530
06:26EQ,
06:27everything was sent to the Fostex 4-track, which lived under a packing blanket under the console so
06:32nobody could see it. The Fostex was on stun, completely overdriven and then sent onto the
06:373-on 32-track digital machine from there. Let that sink in for a second. One of the most iconic
06:43guitar sounds in metal history didn't come from some rare amp, secret pickup or mythical tonewood.
06:50It came from a shitty little Fostex 4-track cassette recorder, abused so hard it was basically crying for
06:57help and literally hidden under a blanket so nobody would know it was even there.
07:01Now, here's where it gets even better. I mentioned this to my very good friend Steve Chason,
07:05who helped me build this studio and has made a bunch of guest appearances on the show.
07:10And without missing a beat, his response was, hmm, I think I've got one of those.
07:16Now, I don't exactly have the space to set up the 16 mics and multiple cabinets like they did for
07:21under lock and key, which honestly kind of sucks because with this console back here,
07:25I could absolutely do it, no problem whatsoever. Maybe, just maybe, I'm going to get lucky this
07:30year and finally get to build a bigger studio. We'll see. What I do have though are two pieces of
07:35gear that actually matter for this experiment. First of all, a Yuri 530 EQ, a stereo 9-band graphic
07:41EQ that Michael Wagner swears is the best guitar EQ ever made. Not vibey, not mojo, just brutally
07:47effective at putting guitars exactly where they need to live in a mix. And second, Steve's dad's
07:52Fostex X26 cassette 4-track. Now this thing is ancient, it's beat to hell and barely works,
07:58and if it were a car, it'd be failing emissions and leaking oil in the driveway. And yet, when you
08:03abuse it just the right way, it does exactly what modern gear tries really hard not to do. And when
08:09you mix that Fostex in with the Zuta amp on channel one, with everything cranked all the way,
08:14this is where things stop being polite and start getting interesting. Now this isn't about replacing
08:20the amp. This isn't about some magic distortion box. This is about adding a layer of pure wrong,
08:25completely unintended chaos underneath a perfectly good guitar sound. The same way that they did it
08:31back then. Stick around to the end of the video and I'm going to show you how you can add
08:35this to
08:35your own guitar sound. All right, all right, all right. I don't want to bore you guys and I don't
08:48want George getting mad at me like, no, you're playing it wrong, you fucking idiot! Anyway, close enough,
08:53just for demonstration purposes. So what we got going on right here is the Zuta amp, I mean channel
08:58one with everything just dimed, except for the main output. And I've got a couple of things going on
09:04here. We've got the rev cap with those wonderful Celestion EVH speakers, the Eddie Van Halen speakers,
09:09and mic'd up with that, I've got an SM57 and a Beyerdynamic M160s, fast becoming my combination of
09:16choice. And then we've got things kind of routed through the console to here and those, those two
09:22are going to one fader here and then here, the second fader there, that's looping in the Fostex. And let
09:28me show you the difference of what this is doing. Take it out, put it back in, it's one of
09:43those
09:44things you're not going to notice until it's gone. Let me go over to the desktop and show you exactly
09:49what's going on. Oh yeah, don't forget to stick around to the end of the video and I'm going to
09:52show you how to get a neural amp modeler capture this for absolutely free. Okay, so I did this clip
09:57with Christian Vey a few weeks back and Christian's not exactly what he'd call a metal player, but
10:02even then this whole system actually works and works pretty damn well. We're using the carnivore
10:09speaker, we're using one of those EV12Ms or Ls or whatever the hell they are, the really heavy ones,
10:13and we had a Roswell cab mic in front of that and then we had the Fostex going as well
10:17and here's what
10:18we got. So here's 57 and the cab mic and then the Fostex and underneath it.
10:31Now what we're doing is we're taking the signal from the 57 and then we're routing it through the
10:36Fostex and then back into the board onto its own track and once we combine all of those,
10:41this is where it gets interesting.
10:57So we weren't trying to get George Lynch's tone, but we're definitely getting a really cool effect. This is
11:02one of those things where if you mute it you're going to notice it's missing, but if you solo it
11:05up
11:06it's just not a pretty thing to listen to. But damn does it ever work great
11:17when you mix it with other mics. Very cool indeed.
11:28Once again, it's just one of those things that if it's not there you're going to notice it's not there.
11:44And all it is is right there. So just real quick I've got two NIM universals going on. The first
11:49one
11:49This is my amp sim. It's got the bong ripper and those wonderful black back impulse responses.
11:54Those are all available through the home studio cheat code. And then in parallel
11:58I've got that whole thing being sent to a second track right here with the name universal running
12:03Mr
12:04Even less friendly and that's going into an eq and yeah without that eq
12:08It is a little bit nasty like it should be
12:15But if we take a little bit of subtractive eq and take some of that fizz out and then
12:19blend it in with the other amp we get something really cool
12:31Do yourself a favor download it check it out for yourself
12:37Of course the whole point of this isn't to geek out about gear in solo mode
12:41The whole point is what this does in a mix because that is the sound that inspired an entire generation
12:46of players
12:47To pick up a guitar in the first place. Is it going to be exact? Hell no
12:51It's not the same Fostex model and it's not the same room
12:54And I've only got space for two mics instead of an entire science experiment, but that's not the point
12:59Let's listen to what this actually does to a full mix
13:33That's the entire argument
13:37The reason George lynch's sound stood out is simple. He wasn't doing what was pre-approved
13:43He didn't follow the rule book
13:44He didn't chase what everybody else was chasing and he didn't care what gear was supposed to be used for
13:49guitar
13:49He took something that was meant to make shitty home recordings and use it in a completely unintended way
13:55And that sent everybody off on a wild goose chase for decades
13:58Now I can only imagine that this video is going to make the prices of those old
14:01Fostex 4 tracks skyrocket on the used market because the internet is absolutely riddled with greedy bottom feeders
14:08Looking to make a fast buck off gullible morons block letter 5151 anybody?
14:13So before this turns into yet another round of stupid
14:16Let's nip that shit right in the butt because i'm going to give away a free neural amp modeler capture
14:21that I did at the Fostex
14:22Once again, that's absolutely free now in honor of george lynch and his signature guitar track, mr
14:28Scary i'm gonna call this one mr
14:30Even less friendly download it, but let me be very clear about something
14:35Do not use this on its own because it will sound like shit remember this is not an amp
14:40It's a texture blend it with another amp capture use it underneath use it sparingly
14:45But make sure you abuse it because the whole point isn't to sound like george lynch
14:50The point is to stop copying what everybody else is doing and break the rules of it
14:54And maybe just maybe you'll find something that's actually yours now, you know and knowing is half the battle
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