Barracuda

What is the Barracuda guitar tone?

The Barracuda guitar tone is a galloping, flanged hard-rock riff, heard on Heart's 1970s hard rock recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and Heart reportedly tracked it with a custom flanger that the band's equipment tech of the time, Rick Erickson, built at Roger Fisher's request in 1976 from a circuit first featured in Popular Electronics, by the account of pedal maker Ryan Dunn of TEN Effects, who says a few of the details are murky but that he spoke with all the principals involved: four were built, one each for Fisher, Howard Leese and Nancy Wilson and one that Erickson kept, the same flanger was used on Mistral Wind, and that, he says, is why no other flanger seemed to sound like the one on the record; no source read here names the guitars or the amps on the take, and in a March 2019 interview with Gear Factor Nancy Wilson called it one of those guitar tones she is still trying to figure out, hard to re-create; Wikipedia credits Fisher, the song's co-writer, with lead guitar, Leese with rhythm guitar and Mellotron, Nancy Wilson with acoustic guitar and backing vocals, Steve Fossen with bass and Michael DeRosier with drums; in the same interview she said the riff was borrowed from This Flight Tonight, a Joni Mitchell song that Nazareth, a band Heart had opened for in Europe, had a hit with, and that the Nazareth players were angry about it when they met later; it is mostly in 4/4 time, with parts in 5/4 and 7/4, the little parts that skip a beat here and there which Nancy Wilson said in 2021 make it a sophisticated song of rage; Ann Wilson wrote the first lyrics in her hotel room after a radio promoter asked her how her lover was, meaning her sister, following a Mushroom Records publicity stunt, and Nancy added a melody and bridge; Little Queen was recorded and mixed at Kaye-Smith Studios in Seattle between February and April 1977, with Mike Flicker producing and engineering, and released by Portrait on 14 May 1977, and the song, its lead single, reached number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's second top-20 entry in the United States, in 20 weeks on the chart; VH1 named it the 34th-best hard rock song of all time in 2009. This is a mid-forward sound rather than a scooped one, and it usually sits closer to the edge of breakup than to full saturation.

You do not need that exact gear to land in the same place. What carries this sound is the gain structure, the EQ curve, the pickup choice and the order of the effects, and all four can be rebuilt on equipment that costs a fraction of the original. The numbers change from amp to amp, because a high-gain head and a small practice amp reach the same voicing from different knob positions. That translation is what Tonelify works out for the rig you actually own.

What gear did Heart use on Barracuda?

A custom flanger that the band's equipment tech of the time, Rick Erickson, built at Roger Fisher's request in 1976 from a circuit first featured in Popular Electronics, by the account of pedal maker Ryan Dunn of TEN Effects, who says a few of the details are murky but that he spoke with all the principals involved: four were built, one each for Fisher, Howard Leese and Nancy Wilson and one that Erickson kept, the same flanger was used on Mistral Wind, and that, he says, is why no other flanger seemed to sound like the one on the record; no source read here names the guitars or the amps on the take, and in a March 2019 interview with Gear Factor Nancy Wilson called it one of those guitar tones she is still trying to figure out, hard to re-create; Wikipedia credits Fisher, the song's co-writer, with lead guitar, Leese with rhythm guitar and Mellotron, Nancy Wilson with acoustic guitar and backing vocals, Steve Fossen with bass and Michael DeRosier with drums; in the same interview she said the riff was borrowed from This Flight Tonight, a Joni Mitchell song that Nazareth, a band Heart had opened for in Europe, had a hit with, and that the Nazareth players were angry about it when they met later; it is mostly in 4/4 time, with parts in 5/4 and 7/4, the little parts that skip a beat here and there which Nancy Wilson said in 2021 make it a sophisticated song of rage; Ann Wilson wrote the first lyrics in her hotel room after a radio promoter asked her how her lover was, meaning her sister, following a Mushroom Records publicity stunt, and Nancy added a melody and bridge; Little Queen was recorded and mixed at Kaye-Smith Studios in Seattle between February and April 1977, with Mike Flicker producing and engineering, and released by Portrait on 14 May 1977, and the song, its lead single, reached number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's second top-20 entry in the United States, in 20 weeks on the chart; VH1 named it the 34th-best hard rock song of all time in 2009.

Sources: Effects Database: TEN Effects Barracuda, Howard Leese signature flanger, Wikipedia: Barracuda (song), Wikipedia: Little Queen

Tonelify's tone matcher reads that chain and translates it to the amp and guitar you already own, returning gain, bass, mids, treble and presence values along with a pickup position.