Lempface
The Guide
I'm new here, so I'll give a quick introduction.
29 years old been playing guitar since I was 12 because of Powerslave. My dad brought the disc home for me from a used record shop, and I still to this day have no idea why because he never listened to anything metal, and neither had I before this record. I'm pretty certain he had never heard an Iron Maiden song, so this happenstance truly became an epiphany for me.
I immediately had to check out their whole catalogue and was just stunned.... just completely shocked at what I was hearing. The dueling guitar harmonies and beautiful guitar solos truly inspired me like nothing in music had before. I begged my dad for an electric guitar and he provided a Fender Strat and a nice vox amp for Christmas. For the next four years I basically lived in my bedroom trying to learn to play these songs on guitar without any instruction, but I had more fun doing this than anything else I had ever dabbled in.
I ended up picking up every album and had purchased Brave New World on its release. Shortly after that I finished High School and I moved outta state away from my band mates and friends and music really disappeared for me. I rarely played guitar after this with any serious ambition, and when I did play it was usually acoustic folky/bluegrassy type music that I had been enjoying listening to.
Well about a month ago I had an old friend who I had lost contact with, a drummer, who asked me to come over and jam with him. His favorite bands being AC/DC and KISS; we were able to knock out a few songs pretty quickly. The rush of playing with another person again brought back all the reasons I loved guitar in the first place.
I knew it was time to break out the Maiden. This was an interesting time for me as I had to catch up on DoD/AMoLAD/TFF, which was a really fun chore, I was stunned to see that they were still putting out great music.
I remember the one record I didn't really care for in my initial Maiden explorations was The X-Factor. The whole tone of the album just didn't ignite me the way some of the others did. I definitely enjoyed Virtual XI more at the time so I only had given X-Factor a handful of spins.
Well I've been listening to all the albums all day every day and getting my guitar playing back up to snuff and wanted to check out the X-Factor again. I really really enjoyed it this time though and especially the lead guitar tone on many of the songs, but particularly about 4 minutes into The Unbeliever.
So after that big rant, finally the question:
What makes this tone so smooth sounding? Does anyone know some tips to achieve this tone? Not looking for an exact replicate but I have Amplitube and would like to try and dial in a tone that is similar.
Any tips would be hugely appreciated, and I also just wanted to say I've read through some of the board discussions this past week and really had a good time with all the insight from you guys, lots of great reads.
Thanks,
Stephen
29 years old been playing guitar since I was 12 because of Powerslave. My dad brought the disc home for me from a used record shop, and I still to this day have no idea why because he never listened to anything metal, and neither had I before this record. I'm pretty certain he had never heard an Iron Maiden song, so this happenstance truly became an epiphany for me.
I immediately had to check out their whole catalogue and was just stunned.... just completely shocked at what I was hearing. The dueling guitar harmonies and beautiful guitar solos truly inspired me like nothing in music had before. I begged my dad for an electric guitar and he provided a Fender Strat and a nice vox amp for Christmas. For the next four years I basically lived in my bedroom trying to learn to play these songs on guitar without any instruction, but I had more fun doing this than anything else I had ever dabbled in.
I ended up picking up every album and had purchased Brave New World on its release. Shortly after that I finished High School and I moved outta state away from my band mates and friends and music really disappeared for me. I rarely played guitar after this with any serious ambition, and when I did play it was usually acoustic folky/bluegrassy type music that I had been enjoying listening to.
Well about a month ago I had an old friend who I had lost contact with, a drummer, who asked me to come over and jam with him. His favorite bands being AC/DC and KISS; we were able to knock out a few songs pretty quickly. The rush of playing with another person again brought back all the reasons I loved guitar in the first place.
I knew it was time to break out the Maiden. This was an interesting time for me as I had to catch up on DoD/AMoLAD/TFF, which was a really fun chore, I was stunned to see that they were still putting out great music.
I remember the one record I didn't really care for in my initial Maiden explorations was The X-Factor. The whole tone of the album just didn't ignite me the way some of the others did. I definitely enjoyed Virtual XI more at the time so I only had given X-Factor a handful of spins.
Well I've been listening to all the albums all day every day and getting my guitar playing back up to snuff and wanted to check out the X-Factor again. I really really enjoyed it this time though and especially the lead guitar tone on many of the songs, but particularly about 4 minutes into The Unbeliever.
So after that big rant, finally the question:
What makes this tone so smooth sounding? Does anyone know some tips to achieve this tone? Not looking for an exact replicate but I have Amplitube and would like to try and dial in a tone that is similar.
Any tips would be hugely appreciated, and I also just wanted to say I've read through some of the board discussions this past week and really had a good time with all the insight from you guys, lots of great reads.
Thanks,
Stephen
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