Dokken Guitar Tone

I is a real electric guitar through a Tascam US-144.

I realize that real vacuum tubes can only be approximated with computers.

Oh, yes, I understand completely the value of the playing. I never met Mr. Lynch, but did spend about a month in Amigo studios where Dokken recorded in the 80's. In fact my friends had Michael Wagoner produce their album also.

The band that I was friends with had two guitarists and one had this awesome tone with a Strat, a Marshall Stack and a Rat pedal. The other one had $5000 of Alesis equipment in a rack and still didn't have the tone. Little by little the equipment left the rack and little by little is tone got better and better, until both guitarists has the same rigs.

I have a track that is recorded straight through the Tascam into Garage Band. Being a novice user to Garage Band, I don't know how to approach the tone thing. Right now, I started with the Big Hair Band on the one track, but it sounds fuzzy and doesn't have much umph to it. I duplicated the track and used Memphis clean, but have it lower in the mix just to fatten it out.

Would it be prudent to duplicate the track with the same basic rig and put one track all the way right and the other all the way left and change the settings slightly on the compressor and/or amp?

I am just looking for some ideas to play with to get better guitar tones. I know that I won't duplicate George Lynch, but am striving for a better tone than using the preset and tweaking it.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

Kirk

{quote:title=JKSBass wrote:}I remember way back in the day you could read in Guitar Player magazine the entire gear setups and configurations of guys like George Lynch. I think with a little research you could find and replicate pretty closely what he was doing then. You might even be able to ask him directly via MySpace - you never know: it's a lot easier to do that kind of thing these days.

{quote}

JKSBass,

You will find this interesting. It was written by Michael Wagener himself.
I found it here: http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/77436-george-lynch-tone.html

{quote}Obviously George's tone is coming from the way he plays, out of his hands, but since you asked:

The setup for George's guitar tone on "Under Lock And Key" was as follows:
We had two Marshall heads and two Laney heads, not sure which models, but one of them was a Plexi. We had cabs in three different rooms: two cabs were placed in the big room at Amigo, one connected to a Marshall, the other connected to the Laney. The Marshall was responsible for the high end part of the sound and the Laney was set to take care of the low end. There were 14 (fourteen) mics set up in that room in various psoitions around the cabinet and some further away to get some room tone. The second Laney was sent into a very dead room and had a Boss chorus pedal in front of it, set to very slight chorus. The second Marshall was sent into a small, tiled bathroom, to add a different room tone. Those 16 mics came in on the MCI 500 console mic pres. They were bussed to one bus and that bus had a UREI 530 EQ on it (best guitar EQ ever). George mentioned that he always gets a great tone with his Fostex 4track recorder when it's in total overdrive, so I asked him to bring it in. So after the 530 everything was sent to the Fostex 4track, which lived under a packing blanket under the console, so nobody would see it. The Fostex was on stunn, completely overdriven and was sent on to the 3M 32 track dig machine from there.

No, I am NOT kidding!!!
________________
Michael Wagener
http://www.michaelwagener.com
{quote}

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have found out that the presets are only suggestions and that I can switch/add/change amps, pedals, et. al. Just am not doing the right things yet to get a tone that I like.

Kirk

JKSBass wrote:
but at least that is one link in the chain that can be very closely replicated with modern hard/software.

So how do I start to duplicate that in software/hardware? I have seen some of the POD effects things that look pretty cool.