Tom Sawyer

What is the Tom Sawyer guitar tone?

The Tom Sawyer guitar tone is a tight, punchy rock riff with a nasal, wah-filtered solo, heard on Rush's 1980s prog rock recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and Rush reportedly tracked it with a Gibson Howard Roberts Fusion, the guitar that Alex Lifeson told Premier Guitar in 2009 he thinks all of Tom Sawyer is on, solo included: he had ordered a Howard Roberts Standard from Gibson in 1978 or 1979 after Paul Northfield, who engineered Moving Pictures, had one in the studio, and when the Fusion came out a year or so later it seemed to him the perfect guitar, a hollowbody that looked like an oversized Les Paul and had a nice balance to it, still one of his favourite guitars to play; no source read here names the amp on the song, though for Hemispheres in 1978, two albums before it, he told Guitar World that he had his Marshall, a Fender Twin and two Hiwatts in the studio, with the Marshall his real workhorse; he told MusicRadar in 2011 that the solo was him stepping on the wah-wah pedal and easing back on it a little, so that it acted like a filter, which is how he got that nasal kind of sound, the way he had tried to get Jeff Beck's tone when he was younger, that it is pretty quirky but did not take long, maybe five or six takes, and might be a comp of a few, and that it is probably his favourite of anything he has done, while in a 2007 interview he said he winged it, did five takes and went off for a cigarette, and that the solo you hear is composed from various takes; the song grew out of Louis the Warrior, a poem by Pye Dubois of Max Webster that Neil Peart modified and expanded before Geddy Lee and Lifeson set it to music, and Lee switched from his Rickenbacker 4001 to a Fender Jazz Bass bought from a pawn shop for it; Moving Pictures was recorded at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec, in October and November 1980 with co-producer Terry Brown, the band's first time on 48 tracks, and came out on 12 February 1981 with Tom Sawyer as its opener, and the song reached number 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number eight on the Top Tracks chart. Sustain and ambience carry these parts, so the delay and modulation settings shape the sound as much as the amp does.

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 Rush use on Tom Sawyer?

A Gibson Howard Roberts Fusion, the guitar that Alex Lifeson told Premier Guitar in 2009 he thinks all of Tom Sawyer is on, solo included: he had ordered a Howard Roberts Standard from Gibson in 1978 or 1979 after Paul Northfield, who engineered Moving Pictures, had one in the studio, and when the Fusion came out a year or so later it seemed to him the perfect guitar, a hollowbody that looked like an oversized Les Paul and had a nice balance to it, still one of his favourite guitars to play; no source read here names the amp on the song, though for Hemispheres in 1978, two albums before it, he told Guitar World that he had his Marshall, a Fender Twin and two Hiwatts in the studio, with the Marshall his real workhorse; he told MusicRadar in 2011 that the solo was him stepping on the wah-wah pedal and easing back on it a little, so that it acted like a filter, which is how he got that nasal kind of sound, the way he had tried to get Jeff Beck's tone when he was younger, that it is pretty quirky but did not take long, maybe five or six takes, and might be a comp of a few, and that it is probably his favourite of anything he has done, while in a 2007 interview he said he winged it, did five takes and went off for a cigarette, and that the solo you hear is composed from various takes; the song grew out of Louis the Warrior, a poem by Pye Dubois of Max Webster that Neil Peart modified and expanded before Geddy Lee and Lifeson set it to music, and Lee switched from his Rickenbacker 4001 to a Fender Jazz Bass bought from a pawn shop for it; Moving Pictures was recorded at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec, in October and November 1980 with co-producer Terry Brown, the band's first time on 48 tracks, and came out on 12 February 1981 with Tom Sawyer as its opener, and the song reached number 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number eight on the Top Tracks chart.

Sources: Premier Guitar: Alex Lifeson, Modern Day Tone Warrior (2009, archived), MusicRadar: Alex Lifeson talks Moving Pictures track by track, Guitar World: Alex Lifeson on 11 landmark Rush tracks, Wikipedia: Tom Sawyer (song), Wikipedia: Moving Pictures (Rush album)

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.