Like a Stone

What is the Like a Stone guitar tone?

The Like a Stone guitar tone is a soaring, two-octave Whammy-pedal solo over melancholy chords, heard on Audioslave's 2000s hard rock recording. It is a distorted solo tone, and Audioslave reportedly tracked it with the Fender Stratocaster that Tom Morello calls Soul Power, which he took off the wall at a Guitar Center in Hollywood around the time Audioslave was forming and which he told Guitar World he used on songs like Cochise, Like a Stone and I Am the Highway, the guitar of all three Audioslave records, fitted within 72 hours with a kill switch, Seymour Duncan Hot Rails pickups and an Ibanez whammy bar; his amp is the Marshall JCM800 he has played since 1988, bought in a hurry with a Peavey cabinet after his gear was stolen from his van, and in a 2008 Premier Guitar interview quoted by Ground Guitar he says the knob positions he marked at a rehearsal in 1988 or 1989 are the ones he used at every show and on every record he has made; Neural DSP places his DigiTech Whammy WH-1 on the solo, and Bonedo's transcription starts it on the low E string at the 15th fret with the pedal throwing the note two octaves up, which is why it does not sound like a low string, its recreation ending in a delay with a high effect level that it says makes the typical sound; Morello told eonmusic he came up with the chord progression late at night on an acoustic guitar, and that the first time the band rehearsed it Chris Cornell sang the melody you hear on the record and he played the solo you hear on the record; Cornell said the lyric is about concentrating on the afterlife you would hope for, while Tim Commerford heard an old man waiting for death; the band wrote 21 songs in 19 days of rehearsal and started recording the album in late May 2001 with producer Rick Rubin, and Like a Stone, its second single, went to number one on Billboard's Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock charts, reached number 31 on the Hot 100 and was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 46th Grammy Awards. Here the solo is a DigiTech Whammy throwing each note two octaves up into Morello's Marshall, so the pedal's sweep and a wet delay carry it rather than extra amp 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.

Published settings

What amp settings did Tom Morello use on Like a Stone?

Presence 7, bass 10, middle 10, treble 7, reverb 7 and gain 9 on his Marshall JCM800 2205, with one volume control at 6 and the other at 0. That is the panel Neural DSP, which models the amp in its Archetype: Tom Morello plugin, gives as the settings he ended up with after buying the amp in 1988 and has used ever since. Morello has said he marked those positions after spending hours on them at a rehearsal, and used the same settings at every show and on every record, so they reach this song too. He uses only the amp's boost channel and rolls back his guitar's volume for cleaner sounds.

Source: Neural DSP: Tom Morello's pedalboard and amp settings

What gear did Audioslave use on Like a Stone?

The Fender Stratocaster that Tom Morello calls Soul Power, which he took off the wall at a Guitar Center in Hollywood around the time Audioslave was forming and which he told Guitar World he used on songs like Cochise, Like a Stone and I Am the Highway, the guitar of all three Audioslave records, fitted within 72 hours with a kill switch, Seymour Duncan Hot Rails pickups and an Ibanez whammy bar; his amp is the Marshall JCM800 he has played since 1988, bought in a hurry with a Peavey cabinet after his gear was stolen from his van, and in a 2008 Premier Guitar interview quoted by Ground Guitar he says the knob positions he marked at a rehearsal in 1988 or 1989 are the ones he used at every show and on every record he has made; Neural DSP places his DigiTech Whammy WH-1 on the solo, and Bonedo's transcription starts it on the low E string at the 15th fret with the pedal throwing the note two octaves up, which is why it does not sound like a low string, its recreation ending in a delay with a high effect level that it says makes the typical sound; Morello told eonmusic he came up with the chord progression late at night on an acoustic guitar, and that the first time the band rehearsed it Chris Cornell sang the melody you hear on the record and he played the solo you hear on the record; Cornell said the lyric is about concentrating on the afterlife you would hope for, while Tim Commerford heard an old man waiting for death; the band wrote 21 songs in 19 days of rehearsal and started recording the album in late May 2001 with producer Rick Rubin, and Like a Stone, its second single, went to number one on Billboard's Mainstream Rock and Modern Rock charts, reached number 31 on the Hot 100 and was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 46th Grammy Awards.

Sources: Guitar World: Tom Morello on the origins and mods of his Soul Power Strat, Ground Guitar: Tom Morello's Marshall JCM800 2205, Neural DSP: Tom Morello's pedalboard and amp settings, Bonedo: Audioslave's Like a Stone solo in notation and tab, eonmusic: Tom Morello says Like a Stone was unearthed almost complete, Wikipedia: Like a Stone, Wikipedia: Audioslave (album)

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.