After a lot of digging and listening to hundreds of youtube videos, this is what I came up with:
- As far as the genre is concerned, there really doesn't appear to be an encompassing label for what they play other than keywords -
lead
, solo
, instrumental
.
- The magical tone here is that of
power tube distortion
. The harshness, fizz and noise I was referring to comes from preamp distortion
.
- The beginners with the expensive gear and 100W heads sounding nothing like the gods is in big part due to
preamp gain
at 10/10 and master volume
at 1/10. The settings to get the tone from a modern amp, are in the preamp gain
at 2/10 and master volume
at 10/10 ballpark area.
The key components of the liquid lead tone would be:
- Power tube distortion
- Feedback and speaker distortion (e.g. volume)
- Delay (or better yet dual-delays at 375ms and 500ms or similar) for sustain
- Subtle Reverb to make up for a stage/hall, etc
A noise reduction system
, pedal or rack unit is also often necessary.
Power tube distortion
basically smoothen and even out the harshness, fuzziness of preamp distortion
. The cabinet and the speaker also plays a big role in that.
A low volume setup for getting as close as possible to this sound would involve either one of:
- A high quality attenuator + EQ to tweak the frequencies
- A loadbox + cabinet simulator with IRs + powered studio monitors
- A loadbox + a amplifier to reamp + guitar cab + some EQ
- A roomy Isolation box + preferably multi mics to remove harshness of SM57 + PA system
From what I can tell the type of tubes doesn't matter as much as simply getting power tube distortion in the first place. I prefer EL34s - tubes in Joe Satriani signature marshall head and tubes used in Bogner XTC - the Steve Vai amp on Tender Surrender track.
I hope this helps out someone. There's a lot of mis-information on this subject. I'll confirm this as an answer once I have confirmed that this works well in practice.