More Than a Feeling

What is the More Than a Feeling guitar tone?

The More Than a Feeling guitar tone is a thick, sustaining Les Paul crunch with a midrange push, heard on Boston's 1970s hard rock recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and Boston reportedly tracked it with the 1968 Gibson Les Paul that Tom Scholz played on Boston's debut album, which MusicRadar and the Music Zoo call a Goldtop, Vintage Guitar a Les Paul Standard and Songfacts a Les Paul Deluxe: the Music Zoo says that before the first Boston album he stripped its gold finish down to the natural maple and added a DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker in the bridge position, keeping the original P-90 in the neck, and Vintage Guitar says Gibson's replica of it represents the one heard on the record; MusicRadar says the acoustic on the song was a $100 Yamaha 12-string and that for amps he used an Ampeg V4, an old 100-watt Marshall head and one of his own prototype Power Soak attenuators, and Mix says he recorded his guitars through a Marshall and the Power Soak prototype, which then used a massive resistor taken from a theatrical lighting system and was the size of a briefcase; Scholz told Guitar World in 2006 that the album's guitars were never recorded direct but always at low volume through the Power Soak prototype into a standard cabinet close-miked with an Electro-Voice RE16, mostly with a Marshall head that sounded like doo-doo on its own but really good with a Crybaby wah pedal, an EQ and old Maestro Echoplex tape delays in front of it, noisy enough that he was sure he was getting some preclipping, and that he had two Gold Top Les Pauls that sounded very similar; Songfacts, alone among the sources read here, adds a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, a wah pedal fixed in one position as a midrange equalizer and an Eventide 910 Harmonizer; Scholz spent five years on the song in the basement of his apartment house on School Street in Watertown, recording on a 12-track Scully, and played all the guitars and all the bass lines, while the drum parts were developed by Jim Masdea and played on the record by Sib Hashian; producer John Boylan hired a remote truck from Providence to transfer the tracks to a 3M 24-track deck, Brad Delp sang the song at Capitol Studios' Studio C with Warren Dewey engineering, and the hand claps, Vintage King says, owe their sound to the natural reverb of the men's room at Capitol; Scholz credits Walk Away Renée by the Left Banke as the song's main inspiration, Andy Aledort points out that its G, D/F#, Em7, D progression after the line about Marianne walking away comes from that song, and the solo is reminiscent of Telstar; Scholz wanted it to fade in on the acoustic guitars, which, Boylan told Mix, fools radio station compressors into thinking it is a quiet song; it came out in August 1976 as the lead single from Boston, on Epic, and reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Here the drive comes from a Marshall pushed by a wah and an EQ in front of it and turned down to a low volume by an attenuator, so the midrange and the sustain matter more than the gain knob.

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 Boston use on More Than a Feeling?

The 1968 Gibson Les Paul that Tom Scholz played on Boston's debut album, which MusicRadar and the Music Zoo call a Goldtop, Vintage Guitar a Les Paul Standard and Songfacts a Les Paul Deluxe: the Music Zoo says that before the first Boston album he stripped its gold finish down to the natural maple and added a DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker in the bridge position, keeping the original P-90 in the neck, and Vintage Guitar says Gibson's replica of it represents the one heard on the record; MusicRadar says the acoustic on the song was a $100 Yamaha 12-string and that for amps he used an Ampeg V4, an old 100-watt Marshall head and one of his own prototype Power Soak attenuators, and Mix says he recorded his guitars through a Marshall and the Power Soak prototype, which then used a massive resistor taken from a theatrical lighting system and was the size of a briefcase; Scholz told Guitar World in 2006 that the album's guitars were never recorded direct but always at low volume through the Power Soak prototype into a standard cabinet close-miked with an Electro-Voice RE16, mostly with a Marshall head that sounded like doo-doo on its own but really good with a Crybaby wah pedal, an EQ and old Maestro Echoplex tape delays in front of it, noisy enough that he was sure he was getting some preclipping, and that he had two Gold Top Les Pauls that sounded very similar; Songfacts, alone among the sources read here, adds a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, a wah pedal fixed in one position as a midrange equalizer and an Eventide 910 Harmonizer; Scholz spent five years on the song in the basement of his apartment house on School Street in Watertown, recording on a 12-track Scully, and played all the guitars and all the bass lines, while the drum parts were developed by Jim Masdea and played on the record by Sib Hashian; producer John Boylan hired a remote truck from Providence to transfer the tracks to a 3M 24-track deck, Brad Delp sang the song at Capitol Studios' Studio C with Warren Dewey engineering, and the hand claps, Vintage King says, owe their sound to the natural reverb of the men's room at Capitol; Scholz credits Walk Away Renée by the Left Banke as the song's main inspiration, Andy Aledort points out that its G, D/F#, Em7, D progression after the line about Marianne walking away comes from that song, and the solo is reminiscent of Telstar; Scholz wanted it to fade in on the acoustic guitars, which, Boylan told Mix, fools radio station compressors into thinking it is a quiet song; it came out in August 1976 as the lead single from Boston, on Epic, and reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Sources: Guitar World: Tom Scholz on Boston's debut album (2006), MusicRadar: Tom Scholz on More Than a Feeling, Mix: Classic Tracks, Boston's More Than a Feeling, Vintage Guitar: Gibson Custom Shop's Tom Scholz Les Paul Standard, The Music Zoo: Gibson Collector's Choice 10, Tom Scholz, Vintage King: the making of Boston, Songfacts: how Boston recorded their debut album in a basement, Wikipedia: More Than a Feeling, Wikipedia: Boston (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.