Morning All,
In the run up to receiving my lunchbox, I'm doing some research into a few tones I have been chasing over the years...one of these is Victor Griffin from Pentagram / Place of Skulls.
What's pretty unique about his tone is that he plays with the tone control rolled right off on the bridge pickup. He then moves it to around 3-4 for solo's, but manages to get such a creamy/warm/perfectly saturated tone.
Here's a few choice examples -
Place of Skulls - 'Song of Solomon' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udsfSqFtyxA
Place of Skulls - 'The Fall' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…e5WQ-0mJ0LLx8IJsaH2_pEC4Y
Now, I think early on in his Pentagram days he used a Marshall, then briefly Sovtek amps - before moving onto the Laney GH100L. He's a Les Paul man, with 498t in the bridge, and super distortion from Dimarzio in the neck.
I play a LTD / ESP EC-1000 with Tonerider Rocksong pickups (alnico 2 mags) and rolling back the tone on my Eleven Rack gets me in the ball-park - say 80% there. I know a *lot* of tone is in the fingers, but there's something like an EQ/cocked wah/Q envelope filter that might be needed to get there....
It's the 'smoothness' of the distortion and simply HUGE sound he gets that grabs me - and has a lot in common with Tony Iommi when it comes to riff style...which is no bad thing.
Anyone have any ideas?
Cheers,
-Tonerider