Cherub Rock

What is the Cherub Rock guitar tone?

The Cherub Rock guitar tone is a wall of layered Big Muff fuzz over a Marshall, with a tape-doubled solo, heard on The Smashing Pumpkins' 1990s alt rock recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and The Smashing Pumpkins reportedly tracked it with a '57 reissue Fender Stratocaster, the guitar Billy Corgan told Guitar World in 1995 he had played on most of Siamese Dream, into the 1984 Marshall JCM800 head he called the 'soul head' and said had been used on everything the band had done; Andertons' Sound Like feature on the band says Corgan and James Iha used JCM800s heavily on Gish and Siamese Dream, that Corgan's was modified with KT88 valves, and that for the fuzz he plugged an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, the late-1970s op-amp version, into the amp's low-gain input with the master volume cranked and used the preamp volume to find the sweet spot; the same feature says the rhythm parts were not simply double tracked but recorded four to six times for the thick, layered sound, and that Corgan used an MXR Phase 90 with its speed all the way down on his leads; producer Butch Vig told Guitar.com that a small distortion unit taken out of the studio engineer Mark Richardson's lap steel was used on a lot of the album's lead solo parts, though neither source places a unit on this song; Wikipedia says the solo's prominent effect came from recording it to two tapes run together with the speed of one slightly altered, that the song is in standard tuning with an E octave at the seventh fret that Corgan called the Pumpkin Chord, and that its overdubs draw on shoegazing and 1970s arena rock; Corgan played lead guitar and bass on the session and Iha rhythm guitar; one of the last songs written for Siamese Dream, recorded with Vig at Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia, mainly between December 1992 and March 1993, it opens the album, came out as its first single and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. Here the wall is a Big Muff into a Marshall with its own preamp kept low, recorded four to six times over, so the size comes from the fuzz and the layers rather than from the amp's gain.

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 The Smashing Pumpkins use on Cherub Rock?

A '57 reissue Fender Stratocaster, the guitar Billy Corgan told Guitar World in 1995 he had played on most of Siamese Dream, into the 1984 Marshall JCM800 head he called the 'soul head' and said had been used on everything the band had done; Andertons' Sound Like feature on the band says Corgan and James Iha used JCM800s heavily on Gish and Siamese Dream, that Corgan's was modified with KT88 valves, and that for the fuzz he plugged an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, the late-1970s op-amp version, into the amp's low-gain input with the master volume cranked and used the preamp volume to find the sweet spot; the same feature says the rhythm parts were not simply double tracked but recorded four to six times for the thick, layered sound, and that Corgan used an MXR Phase 90 with its speed all the way down on his leads; producer Butch Vig told Guitar.com that a small distortion unit taken out of the studio engineer Mark Richardson's lap steel was used on a lot of the album's lead solo parts, though neither source places a unit on this song; Wikipedia says the solo's prominent effect came from recording it to two tapes run together with the speed of one slightly altered, that the song is in standard tuning with an E octave at the seventh fret that Corgan called the Pumpkin Chord, and that its overdubs draw on shoegazing and 1970s arena rock; Corgan played lead guitar and bass on the session and Iha rhythm guitar; one of the last songs written for Siamese Dream, recorded with Vig at Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia, mainly between December 1992 and March 1993, it opens the album, came out as its first single and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance.

Sources: Guitar World: the Smashing Pumpkins on '80s Marshalls and their essential pedals (1995), Andertons: Sound Like the Smashing Pumpkins, Guitar.com: Butch Vig on the effects box used on Siamese Dream, Wikipedia: Cherub Rock, Wikipedia: Siamese Dream

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.