Today

What is the Today guitar tone?

The Today guitar tone is a clean, chiming E-flat riff that gives way to loud, layered distorted choruses, heard on The Smashing Pumpkins' 1990s alt rock recording. It is a clean riff tone, and The Smashing Pumpkins reportedly tracked it with a '57 reissue Fender Stratocaster, the guitar Billy Corgan told Guitar World in 1995 he had played on most of Siamese Dream, and his 1984 Marshall JCM800 'soul head', which he said had been used on everything the band had done, though no source read here places either on this song; Wikipedia says the song alternates between quiet, dreamy verses and loud choruses with layered, distorted guitars, that it opens with a one-bar riff on the E-flat major pentatonic, played four times before the band comes in behind feedback-driven guitars, and that the chorus is several rhythm guitar tracks of barre chords, the band's habit of overdubbing many rhythm parts; Corgan recorded most of the guitar and bass himself, kept the song in E-flat in standard tuning rather than tuning down a half step because he liked the E-flat voicing, and said the short break over the C chord is a forwards sample laid in backwards; Andertons' Sound Like feature describes the album's fuzz as an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff into the JCM800's low-gain input with the master volume cranked, and its rhythm parts as recorded four to six times; one of the first songs written for Siamese Dream, it came out in September 1993 as the album's second single and reached number 4 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart. Here the opening riff is clean and the weight arrives later in layered, distorted choruses, so the verse sound wants headroom rather than any drive.

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 clean channel on a modelling combo 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 The Smashing Pumpkins use on Today?

A '57 reissue Fender Stratocaster, the guitar Billy Corgan told Guitar World in 1995 he had played on most of Siamese Dream, and his 1984 Marshall JCM800 'soul head', which he said had been used on everything the band had done, though no source read here places either on this song; Wikipedia says the song alternates between quiet, dreamy verses and loud choruses with layered, distorted guitars, that it opens with a one-bar riff on the E-flat major pentatonic, played four times before the band comes in behind feedback-driven guitars, and that the chorus is several rhythm guitar tracks of barre chords, the band's habit of overdubbing many rhythm parts; Corgan recorded most of the guitar and bass himself, kept the song in E-flat in standard tuning rather than tuning down a half step because he liked the E-flat voicing, and said the short break over the C chord is a forwards sample laid in backwards; Andertons' Sound Like feature describes the album's fuzz as an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff into the JCM800's low-gain input with the master volume cranked, and its rhythm parts as recorded four to six times; one of the first songs written for Siamese Dream, it came out in September 1993 as the album's second single and reached number 4 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart.

Sources: Wikipedia: Today (The Smashing Pumpkins song), Guitar World: the Smashing Pumpkins on '80s Marshalls and their essential pedals (1995), Andertons: Sound Like the Smashing Pumpkins, Wikipedia: Siamese Dream

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.