This Love

What is the This Love guitar tone?

The This Love guitar tone is a savage, staccato groove metal chorus riff, heard on Pantera's 1990s groove metal recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and Pantera reportedly tracked it with a Dean ML with a floating Floyd Rose vibrato, which MusicRadar names as Dimebag Darrell's guitar of the time, into the solid-state Randall RG100ES heads and cabinets that he relied on throughout his Pantera years, insisting that only they gave him enough buzz-saw gain at a time when everybody in metal was moving to the Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier, with the mids scooped out by a Furman PQ3 parametric equalizer and a pair of Rocktron Hush noise gates keeping the sound in check; that is his rig of the era rather than one placed on this song, but MusicRadar says that on This Love he notably used a rack-mounted MXR 126 flanger/doubler for the seasick queasiness in the clean rhythm parts, and a Vox wah to add more talk to his solo; he told Guitar World in 1994, as Mixdown reports, that his blue 1981 Dean with the Kiss stickers was his main guitar for all the songs in standard tuning, with a brown tobacco-burst Dean for the songs tuned down to D, though no source read here says which tuning this song uses; MusicRadar calls it the darkest song on the record, closing side A by slowing everything down with haunting clean arpeggios before building to a savage staccato chorus, and Dime wrote in his Riffer Madness column that the long, slow outro solo, from 6:21 on the CD to the very end, is one of his best examples of natural harmonic squeals, his way of singing out with the guitar instead of his throat; Vulgar Display of Power was recorded at Pantego Sound Studios in Texas, owned by Dime and Vinnie Paul's father, the country singer-songwriter Jerry Abbott, with producer Terry Date, written and recorded in weeks rather than months, and released in 1992; Vinnie Paul said the song was about a relationship Phil Anselmo had been in, and Guitar World ranked it fifth in its list of the 25 best Pantera songs. The character here comes from a hard upper-midrange attack and a fast note decay, which is why solid-state rigs suit it better than most players expect.

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 Pantera use on This Love?

A Dean ML with a floating Floyd Rose vibrato, which MusicRadar names as Dimebag Darrell's guitar of the time, into the solid-state Randall RG100ES heads and cabinets that he relied on throughout his Pantera years, insisting that only they gave him enough buzz-saw gain at a time when everybody in metal was moving to the Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier, with the mids scooped out by a Furman PQ3 parametric equalizer and a pair of Rocktron Hush noise gates keeping the sound in check; that is his rig of the era rather than one placed on this song, but MusicRadar says that on This Love he notably used a rack-mounted MXR 126 flanger/doubler for the seasick queasiness in the clean rhythm parts, and a Vox wah to add more talk to his solo; he told Guitar World in 1994, as Mixdown reports, that his blue 1981 Dean with the Kiss stickers was his main guitar for all the songs in standard tuning, with a brown tobacco-burst Dean for the songs tuned down to D, though no source read here says which tuning this song uses; MusicRadar calls it the darkest song on the record, closing side A by slowing everything down with haunting clean arpeggios before building to a savage staccato chorus, and Dime wrote in his Riffer Madness column that the long, slow outro solo, from 6:21 on the CD to the very end, is one of his best examples of natural harmonic squeals, his way of singing out with the guitar instead of his throat; Vulgar Display of Power was recorded at Pantego Sound Studios in Texas, owned by Dime and Vinnie Paul's father, the country singer-songwriter Jerry Abbott, with producer Terry Date, written and recorded in weeks rather than months, and released in 1992; Vinnie Paul said the song was about a relationship Phil Anselmo had been in, and Guitar World ranked it fifth in its list of the 25 best Pantera songs.

Sources: MusicRadar: the story of Pantera's This Love, Mixdown: gear rundown, Dimebag Darrell, Wikipedia: This Love (Pantera 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.