Highway Tune

What is the Highway Tune guitar tone?

The Highway Tune guitar tone is a raw, bluesy E riff with a filtered-sounding intro, heard on Greta Van Fleet's 2010s hard rock recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and Greta Van Fleet reportedly tracked it with a Gibson SG plugged into one of his father's harmonica amps, the rig Jake Kiszka told Loudwire he wrote the riff on, maybe six or seven years before the single, one of the first riffs he had ever written, which came to him after five minutes, though no source read here names the guitar or the amp on the recording: Bonedo gives his main instrument as a 1961 Gibson SG Standard, with a Custom SG, an SG Classic with P-90 pickups and Strats besides, and his amps as a classic British crunch, among them hand-wired Marshall Astoria combos sent through a 4x12 Marshall cabinet; he says the song had been recorded before at a studio called Metro 37, that he brought it to the band's first lineup, and that once drummer Danny Wagner joined they formatted it, demoed it twice and recorded it in its final form at Rust Belt Studios, and Wikipedia calls it the first song the band wrote and recorded together; Bonedo puts it in E on a mostly two-bar riff whose G, the minor third, gives it a very bluesy flavour, moving to A and then B in the hook, both played around a suspended fourth, and says the intro sounds almost as if a filter or a treble booster had been used; it was used in an episode of Shameless in January 2016, released as a single on 31 March 2017 and on the Black Smoke Rising EP on 21 April, and topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart in September 2017 in 14 weeks, the fastest for a band's debut single since Tantric's Breakdown and 3 Doors Down's Kryptonite. Here the riff is a moderate British crunch, which Bonedo compares to a JTM45 or a jumpered Plexi, with an intro that sounds filtered, so the midrange carries it rather than heavy 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 Greta Van Fleet use on Highway Tune?

A Gibson SG plugged into one of his father's harmonica amps, the rig Jake Kiszka told Loudwire he wrote the riff on, maybe six or seven years before the single, one of the first riffs he had ever written, which came to him after five minutes, though no source read here names the guitar or the amp on the recording: Bonedo gives his main instrument as a 1961 Gibson SG Standard, with a Custom SG, an SG Classic with P-90 pickups and Strats besides, and his amps as a classic British crunch, among them hand-wired Marshall Astoria combos sent through a 4x12 Marshall cabinet; he says the song had been recorded before at a studio called Metro 37, that he brought it to the band's first lineup, and that once drummer Danny Wagner joined they formatted it, demoed it twice and recorded it in its final form at Rust Belt Studios, and Wikipedia calls it the first song the band wrote and recorded together; Bonedo puts it in E on a mostly two-bar riff whose G, the minor third, gives it a very bluesy flavour, moving to A and then B in the hook, both played around a suspended fourth, and says the intro sounds almost as if a filter or a treble booster had been used; it was used in an episode of Shameless in January 2016, released as a single on 31 March 2017 and on the Black Smoke Rising EP on 21 April, and topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart in September 2017 in 14 weeks, the fastest for a band's debut single since Tantric's Breakdown and 3 Doors Down's Kryptonite.

Sources: Loudwire: Jake Kiszka on Black Smoke Rising, Bonedo: Highway Tune riff workshop (German), Guitar World: Jake Kiszka's top 5 tone tips, Wikipedia: Highway Tune

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.