Smooth

What is the Smooth guitar tone?

The Smooth guitar tone is a singing, sustained humbucker lead that trades phrases with the vocal, heard on Santana's 1990s Latin rock recording. It is a distorted solo tone, and Santana reportedly tracked it with a PRS Santana II that he calls his Red Coral guitar, which arrived just as he began work on Supernatural and which Guitar Player's tour of his guitars quotes him saying he played most of the album's songs on, into two amps: engineer David Thoener told Mix that Santana's own pedal shifts the sound from one amp to the other, with two different sounds on each, and that he put a 57, a 421 and an 87 about three feet back on both amps, with light compression from 1176s; Santana told Guitar Player in August 1999 that he used Marshalls, Boogies and Twins on the record, keeping only the most consistent of his six Marshalls, and that he places one microphone at the amp and another farther back for what he calls the ghost sound; Bonedo's transcription says the PRS Santana II, a guitar with two humbuckers, was used on almost every song on the album, puts the song in A minor over Am, F and E7, with Santana turning the scale's G into G sharp over the E chord, and describes a solo that builds from lyrical melodies through denser, faster blues licks to a rising octave tremolo that ends on the root; Santana told Billboard he purposely did not practice the part, so that it would keep its innocence, and producer Matt Serletic told Rolling Stone that the guitar generally does not play while Rob Thomas sings; Thoener says the band recorded it live at Fantasy Studios, which the album credits place in Berkeley, in about five takes, with Santana fine-tuning his solo the next day and the horns added on the third, though Rolling Stone's oral history sets the session at the Record Plant in Sausalito; written by Itaal Shur and Rob Thomas and produced by Serletic, it went to radio on 15 June 1999 as the lead single from Supernatural, spent 12 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Latin rock leads sit over organ and a full percussion section, so they need sustain and a strong midrange more than raw gain, with the notes held long enough to sing.

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 Santana use on Smooth?

A PRS Santana II that he calls his Red Coral guitar, which arrived just as he began work on Supernatural and which Guitar Player's tour of his guitars quotes him saying he played most of the album's songs on, into two amps: engineer David Thoener told Mix that Santana's own pedal shifts the sound from one amp to the other, with two different sounds on each, and that he put a 57, a 421 and an 87 about three feet back on both amps, with light compression from 1176s; Santana told Guitar Player in August 1999 that he used Marshalls, Boogies and Twins on the record, keeping only the most consistent of his six Marshalls, and that he places one microphone at the amp and another farther back for what he calls the ghost sound; Bonedo's transcription says the PRS Santana II, a guitar with two humbuckers, was used on almost every song on the album, puts the song in A minor over Am, F and E7, with Santana turning the scale's G into G sharp over the E chord, and describes a solo that builds from lyrical melodies through denser, faster blues licks to a rising octave tremolo that ends on the root; Santana told Billboard he purposely did not practice the part, so that it would keep its innocence, and producer Matt Serletic told Rolling Stone that the guitar generally does not play while Rob Thomas sings; Thoener says the band recorded it live at Fantasy Studios, which the album credits place in Berkeley, in about five takes, with Santana fine-tuning his solo the next day and the horns added on the third, though Rolling Stone's oral history sets the session at the Record Plant in Sausalito; written by Itaal Shur and Rob Thomas and produced by Serletic, it went to radio on 15 June 1999 as the lead single from Supernatural, spent 12 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Sources: Mix: David Thoener on recording Smooth, Guitar Player: Carlos Santana on Supernatural (August 1999), Guitar Player: Carlos Santana pulls out his favorite PRS, Gibson and Fender guitars, Rolling Stone: the oral history of Smooth, Billboard: Smooth at 15, Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas look back, Bonedo: Santana's Smooth in notation and tab, Wikipedia: Smooth (song)

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.