Still Loving You

What is the Still Loving You guitar tone?

The Still Loving You guitar tone is a slow power ballad that builds from a calm start to power chords and a singing lead, heard on Scorpions' 1980s rock ballad recording. It is a distorted solo tone, and Scorpions reportedly tracked it with the Marshall amps that Rudolf Schenker told Guitar Player he always used for recording or live work at the time of Love at First Sting, when he recorded Rock You Like a Hurricane on a 1958 Gibson Flying V, and the 1976 Gibson Explorer that Matthias Jabs told MusicRadar was used on the band's famous songs through to the mid-1980s, though no source read here places a guitar or an amp on this take, and the song's credits give both players lead and rhythm guitars; Schenker told Songfacts that he came up with the melody and spent about six years trying to get the song onto an album, Uli Jon Roth having rejected it around 1976 as too commercial, and that when Jabs came in with the guitar part the feeling was immediately right, so Klaus Meine wanted to write something very special for it, and he once told Jimmy Page that Stairway to Heaven inspired it; Songfacts describes the song as written in crescendo, a calm acoustic start followed by power chords; the album was begun at Polar Studios in Stockholm with stand-ins on bass and drums, but nothing from those sessions made the record, and after the band's 1983 US Festival show it was started again from scratch at producer Dieter Dierks' studio in Stommeln, West Germany, recorded digitally, which Schenker now thinks made the guitars sound a little clinical; released in June 1984 as the album's second single, it reached number 64 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Songfacts says it was especially popular in France. A ballad lead has to sing over a slow band, so it needs sustain from a drive pedal or a pushed amp and room around the notes, with the mids kept in so it cuts without getting louder.

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 Scorpions use on Still Loving You?

The Marshall amps that Rudolf Schenker told Guitar Player he always used for recording or live work at the time of Love at First Sting, when he recorded Rock You Like a Hurricane on a 1958 Gibson Flying V, and the 1976 Gibson Explorer that Matthias Jabs told MusicRadar was used on the band's famous songs through to the mid-1980s, though no source read here places a guitar or an amp on this take, and the song's credits give both players lead and rhythm guitars; Schenker told Songfacts that he came up with the melody and spent about six years trying to get the song onto an album, Uli Jon Roth having rejected it around 1976 as too commercial, and that when Jabs came in with the guitar part the feeling was immediately right, so Klaus Meine wanted to write something very special for it, and he once told Jimmy Page that Stairway to Heaven inspired it; Songfacts describes the song as written in crescendo, a calm acoustic start followed by power chords; the album was begun at Polar Studios in Stockholm with stand-ins on bass and drums, but nothing from those sessions made the record, and after the band's 1983 US Festival show it was started again from scratch at producer Dieter Dierks' studio in Stommeln, West Germany, recorded digitally, which Schenker now thinks made the guitars sound a little clinical; released in June 1984 as the album's second single, it reached number 64 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Songfacts says it was especially popular in France.

Sources: Songfacts: Still Loving You, Guitar Player: Rudolf Schenker on Rock You Like a Hurricane, MusicRadar: Matthias Jabs on his Explorers, amps and solos, Louder: Rudolf Schenker on rock history and Rock Believer, Wikipedia: Still Loving You, Wikipedia: Love at First Sting

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.