Randy Rhoads Tonestack preset

Coloobar

You either love Randy Rhoads' guitar tone or hate it. I'm in the 'love' camp. Recently I've scoured the internet looking for people who have tried to emulate his tone, and everything that I've seen/heard has fallen well short of the mark. Many years ago I read a 1982 interview by Max Norman, the studio engineer behind the Blizzard of Ozz album. He talked in great depth about how he got 'that' signature sound. I gleaned enough information to figure out that the signature tone was due to a deliberate comb filter effect from a rack mounted delay unit (AMS 15-80s) that gave it the 'scooped' sound. After reading about Randy's other equipment that he used, I spent several hours and was able to come up with a very close facsmile of his guitar tone in Tonestack, using the Duplicator effect in place of the AMS 15-80s that they used in the studio to get the effect.

Here's the preset: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r2hywxdt21ijihp/Randy Rhoads.tpat?dl=0

If you're interested in reading the interview, it's located here: http://jasobrecht.com/randy-rhoads-max-norman-interview/

mrufino1

Going to read it now, 2 amazing albums with Randy on them.

Coloobar

I should add that The Duplicator is a truly amazing effect to have at our fingertips. Real rack mounted units like the AMS 15-80s cost upwards of $3,000, if you can find one that works at all. Many of them were made in the 80s and require repair. There's few if any digital plug-ins out there that emulate this effect, and it's right there within Tonestack along with a ton of other amazing effects.

Here's a description of it (from http://performermag.com/best-instruments/best-guitar-picks-accessories/flashback-80s-ams-dmx-15-80s-digital-delay/:

One of the main uses of this device was as a stereo widening effect on vocals. Here, essentially the unit is acting as a mono-to-stereo pitch-shifter/delay. On both the left and right channels, the signal is delayed different amounts between 5 and 30 milliseconds so one channel is a little ahead of the other, and then one side is pitch-shifted down a few hundredths of a semitone and the other is shifted upwards. The delayed left and right signals then appear hard left and hard right and the vocal will appear to be spread across the stereo image. The unit is also great for adding width on an entire mix.

I'm pretty sure they did this with Ozzy's voice on the records. With Randy's tone they squashed all three repeats down to a mono signal, and that's how the 'magic' happens. When the repeats are a few milliseconds apart, one predominant interference 'notch' forms in the frequency spectrum. Once I made that realization, it was just a matter of trial and error to match Randy's guitar tone by slightly varying the ms of the two delays.

I'm running from tonestack into a 50W tube amp, so I gain a lot of warmth and harmonic overtones from that, The preset is a "works for me" kind of deal. If you're running straight into headphones or DAW or something, ymmv. Also, they only used this effect certain songs on Ozzy's first two albums such as I Don't Know, Crazy Train, Flying High Again, Believer, etc. For some of the other songs on the albums, you'll want to change the Duplicator to the stock settings to get the more usual stereo widening effect.

fprintf

This is really very well done, thank you! As a Tonestack user I'm always on the hunt for new presets because I am so lousy at figuring out how all these effects pedals and amp choices actually work. You put in some real effort to get this close to original.

In addition to the amp vs. headphones I'll add that the sound out of Tonestack seems to be contingent upon pickup selection, as you'd expect. So trying to get this sound out of a single coil, when it was humbucker originally or vice versa. Neck vs. Bridge etc. seems to make a difference also. For example I have difficulty getting a decent David Gilmour sound out of my Ibanez RG570, a shredder guitar type with H:S:H pickups even though @Flo26 made the preset and makes it sound so magical... well his fingers are magical too.

I've asked Yonac via Twitter if they'd consider a looping pedal because the nicest thing to do with what you've created is to strum a chord or play a few notes and then have it loop over and over again while twisting knobs until the sound is just right for your whole setup of guitar, pickups, and amp/headphones.