No One Knows

What is the No One Knows guitar tone?

The No One Knows guitar tone is a dry, mid-heavy riff in C standard built on an oompah rhythm, heard on Queens of the Stone Age's 2000s hard rock recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and Queens of the Stone Age reportedly tracked it with a guitar tuned to C standard, which Josh Homme told Tom Power makes it a pop song with drop tuning, strangely, on a rig no source read here places on this song: Mixdown says that for Songs for the Deaf he combined his Ampeg VT-40 with rare amps, mostly solid-state, among them a Peavey Series 260 Standard PA amp and a 10-watt Peavey Decade, and that he played an Ovation Ultra GP almost exclusively for twenty years before retiring it around Lullabies to Paralyze, while Gearnews says that after building guitar tones on an Ampeg VM-4, the VT-40 2x12 and vintage Peavey Standard amps he fetched his old Tube Works RT-2100, a turning point for the album, and that they settled on two amp sources and a room mic; Bonedo describes his trademark as a dry distorted sound with hardly any modulation, the distortion mostly from pedals driven into a big amp; the bass is better documented: producer Eric Valentine said in a video, as Guitar World reports, that a Peavey Decade practice amp ended up being the majority of the bass sound, and Gearnews adds a Coles ribbon mic on it with an Ampeg SVT and an Acoustic 360; Homme said the song was over five years old by the time of the album, Dave Grohl played the drums and Dean Ween guitar, and the liner notes credit Homme and Valentine as producers, though Homme credits Valentine only with recording the start of the album; it was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance, losing to Foo Fighters' All My Life, and Q called it possibly the only great guitar track based around a rhythm that goes oompah-oompah. Here the riff is tuned down to C standard and kept dry, with the drive coming from pedals into a big amp and the mids pushed, so it wants a thick midrange rather than a scooped high-gain sound.

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 Queens of the Stone Age use on No One Knows?

A guitar tuned to C standard, which Josh Homme told Tom Power makes it a pop song with drop tuning, strangely, on a rig no source read here places on this song: Mixdown says that for Songs for the Deaf he combined his Ampeg VT-40 with rare amps, mostly solid-state, among them a Peavey Series 260 Standard PA amp and a 10-watt Peavey Decade, and that he played an Ovation Ultra GP almost exclusively for twenty years before retiring it around Lullabies to Paralyze, while Gearnews says that after building guitar tones on an Ampeg VM-4, the VT-40 2x12 and vintage Peavey Standard amps he fetched his old Tube Works RT-2100, a turning point for the album, and that they settled on two amp sources and a room mic; Bonedo describes his trademark as a dry distorted sound with hardly any modulation, the distortion mostly from pedals driven into a big amp; the bass is better documented: producer Eric Valentine said in a video, as Guitar World reports, that a Peavey Decade practice amp ended up being the majority of the bass sound, and Gearnews adds a Coles ribbon mic on it with an Ampeg SVT and an Acoustic 360; Homme said the song was over five years old by the time of the album, Dave Grohl played the drums and Dean Ween guitar, and the liner notes credit Homme and Valentine as producers, though Homme credits Valentine only with recording the start of the album; it was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance, losing to Foo Fighters' All My Life, and Q called it possibly the only great guitar track based around a rhythm that goes oompah-oompah.

Sources: Guitar.com: why Josh Homme began downtuning his guitars, Mixdown: a history of Josh Homme's unique arsenal of gear, Gearnews: the sound of Queens of the Stone Age, Bonedo: effects pedals for the sound of Josh Homme, Guitar World: Josh Homme's secret weapon, the Peavey Decade, Wikipedia: No One Knows

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.