Recording - July 2019 - 53

MP: The Tube Screamer is Howard's
own box, the original model from Ibanez,
which has a very different tonality than all
of the reissues that came later. We wanted
that sound, so there was no alternative to
modeling that one particular pedal.
HB: I can tell you the first record that
pedal was ever used on: it was the first
record I ever produced, "Hit And Run"
by TSOL. The engineer had this little
green box laying around, and we tried
it out-and that was it! There's something about the op amps in that thing,
we use it on every record.

And the reverb?

MP: That's a little different. Sonny and I discussed what we wanted
the reverb to be, and I was leaning
toward the Lexicon sound because of
its shimmer. There's something about
rackmount reverbs that just gets lost in
plug-ins; they're clean and clear, but
that special shimmer gets lost. I told
Sonny, "Can you get me something
that has that shine? I want to stay
away from that muddy low-mid reverb
that doesn't stack well."

Based just on that, he went off, and
when he came back and I heard it, he'd
nailed it! I didn't think it was even possible in a plug-in, because nobody'd done
it until that point. I even use it on vocals
sometimes, it's amazing on voice. The
delay's a similar story; I just gave Sonny and the programmer some direction,
and I have to give them all the credit for
how those two effects turned out.

Any insider information
worth sharing about the
amps or cabs?

MP: Amp 1, the Bogner, was intended
to be a sound that would work on anything from pop to metal, and be ready
to go right out of the box without a lot
of fuss. Howard and I like to work with
speed, so while there's a place for really
dialing in sounds, often you just want to
get a great sound and go. Amp 1 was
meant for that.
HB: The Fender amp was rebuilt with
point-to-point wiring. It makes a difference to the tone, and we wanted to be
sure that we captured that. We didn't
include the MESA Boogie amp we

used on the My Chemical Romance albums-yet. But we may... after it's been
dropped off a truck and run over by a
car, I think. Builds character. [laughs]
MP: One of the cabs, Cab 5 I think, is
a model of Howard's Bassman. You can
get some gain out of it, but it's our go-to
clean cab.
HB: I want to come back to something
Mike touched on earlier. We believe that
it's critical to have the shortest possible
amount of time between when you open a
plug-in and when you start to write music.
A lot of artists open a plug-in and instantly
stop being an artist and start being an engineer. We want to avoid that-we want
them to take the least amount of time to
get a guitar tone so they can write songs.
The goal here is to write music, not twiddle
knobs. I know that sounds simple, but if
you go into a lot of sessions, especially
with younger artists, they take a half hour
to get a guitar tone, but they can't write a
guitar riff. Let's get to the guitar riff faster-
that was a big goal of the plug-in, actually.
MP: Even for an engineer or a producer working with an artist, when we're in
the studio and the artist says, "I want to
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