Scholz: One Amp No Good?

Does Boston’s Tom Scholz have WoodyTone? Remember, we’re not talking about the songs here. We’re talking about his Les Paul >> NASA effects rack >> Marshall tone — though Marshalls are only used in the studio. Otherwise it’s all Rockman stuff. Anyhow, it’s the NASA part that might drop him out of the WoodyTone pantheon.

Gibson.com recently had an interesting interview with Scholz, in which he said he can’t just use one amp to get through one Boston song. Below are the applicable excerpts. (I’ll point out that the interviewer at one point prefaces a question with this statement: “Every great guitar player has an immediately recognizable tone.” Yes!)

Our live stuff is all Rockman gear. I have added some tweaks, which make my amps sound a little bit more like a tube stack. The Rockman sound is a smooth distortion so I added a couple of boxes that allow me to dial in the amount of buzz-saw roughness that I want. I’ve been using those distortion boxes in the studio and just started using it in the live gear. In the studio I use my live rig in combination with some tube amps. I use Marshalls. I’ve used Mesa-Boogies over the last few years that I really like. And sometimes I’ll try an old Fender. I have a couple of old Rockman prototype amps and speakers that I like to use. It’s a collection of junk.

It would be impossible to present a Boston performance without amps you can repeatedly make instantaneous changes in tone, sound and effects on. I could plug into a regular guitar amplifier and play you the lead part to “Peace of Mind” or the rhythm to “More Than a Feeling,” but to play the whole song would be impossible. You’d have to make a half-dozen changes in EQ, gain, output level, and effects, and there’s no way to do that with standard amps. With the Rockman stuff, we can do anything we want. It’s all programmable and you can run through every sound you need while you play each song. It becomes second nature after a while.

That’s why when people say, “Why don’t you come down to our party and play a couple songs? We’ve got an amp here,” we just can’t do it. There’s no way it would sound like a Boston song unless you had three engineers in the house running a mixing board to change all these settings.

Whoa. That doesn’t sound Woody to me. Thoughts?

Category: Marshall, Tom Scholz/Boston