Tush

What is the Tush guitar tone?

The Tush guitar tone is a raw, shuffling 12-bar riff with a slide lead, heard on ZZ Top's 1970s blues rock recording. It is a distorted riff tone, and ZZ Top reportedly tracked it with a sunburst 1959 Gibson Les Paul, Pearly Gates, which Billy Gibbons bought from a Texas rancher for $250 in 1968 and which, Guitar Player says, he was playing as usual on Tush, though no source read here names the amp on the take; on Tres Hombres, the album before, MusicRadar says Gibbons teamed a 1955 Strat with his Marshall Super Lead; Gibbons told Guitar Player the song took shape on 23 May 1974 at the Lauderdale Coliseum in Florence, Alabama, an afternoon blow-out in a rodeo arena with a dirt floor, where they hit one lick and the lighting director came rushing forward to say don't change a thing, that within three minutes they had it, a simple shuffle on the tried-and-true 12-bar blues changes, and that after playing it live, by the time they got it to the studio it was a one-take room full of noise; the title came from Tush Hog, the instrumental on the flip side of Roy Head's Treat Her Right, a Texas term for something rich and top of the line; Dusty Hill sang it, Bill Ham produced it and Terry Manning recorded and mixed it, Cash Box singled out its slide lead guitar, and the single, released in July 1975 from the half-live, half-studio Fandango!, reached number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's first real hit single. This lives right on the edge of breakup, where the volume knob on the guitar does the real work between clean and dirty.

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 ZZ Top use on Tush?

A sunburst 1959 Gibson Les Paul, Pearly Gates, which Billy Gibbons bought from a Texas rancher for $250 in 1968 and which, Guitar Player says, he was playing as usual on Tush, though no source read here names the amp on the take; on Tres Hombres, the album before, MusicRadar says Gibbons teamed a 1955 Strat with his Marshall Super Lead; Gibbons told Guitar Player the song took shape on 23 May 1974 at the Lauderdale Coliseum in Florence, Alabama, an afternoon blow-out in a rodeo arena with a dirt floor, where they hit one lick and the lighting director came rushing forward to say don't change a thing, that within three minutes they had it, a simple shuffle on the tried-and-true 12-bar blues changes, and that after playing it live, by the time they got it to the studio it was a one-take room full of noise; the title came from Tush Hog, the instrumental on the flip side of Roy Head's Treat Her Right, a Texas term for something rich and top of the line; Dusty Hill sang it, Bill Ham produced it and Terry Manning recorded and mixed it, Cash Box singled out its slide lead guitar, and the single, released in July 1975 from the half-live, half-studio Fandango!, reached number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's first real hit single.

Sources: Guitar Player: Billy Gibbons on how a soundcheck jam turned into Tush, MusicRadar: Billy Gibbons picks his standout moments with ZZ Top, Wikipedia: Tush (ZZ Top song), Wikipedia: Fandango!

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.