How to Achieve 1950s to Current Day Guitar Tones for Gigs

With modern day effects, it is possible to easily replicate guitar tones from early rock and roll in the 1950s to modern hard rock or metal.

In order to easily achieve this without too much fuss, you would need to employ a multi effects pedal. There are so many great pedals out there that not only provide a lot of presets, but also provide impulse response settings to replicate guitar speakers.

Let’s take a look at some tips on re-creating a 1950s style guitar tone. When I say 1950s, I’m talking about the guitar tones of Scotty Moore with Elvis Presley, Bill Haley & His Comets, and Chuck Berry. One thing they all have in common is a fairly clean tone that when played hard, begins to break up and distort. Chuck Berry has the more overdriven tone out of the three so you could easily set up a preset to cover the Scotty Moore and Bill Haley sound and a separate patch for Chuck Berry. The Scotty Moore and Bill Haley sound will have a cleaner tone and you could achieve this by playing on the bridge pick up but rolling your tone control to a slightly darker less bright sound. Employing a compressor is going to be very advantageous to give you a much fuller sound. Then add a little slap back delay. Some pedals such as the Boss GR series offer other settings to make your guitar sound like a hollow body guitar. This is optional, but it does add a touch of realism.

As we moved into the 1960s, there will be a number of sounds you can focus on from the Rolling Stones to the Beatles to the Byrds to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. There’s a lot of overlap happening here where clean and distorted guitars are utilized by each but when you get into the later 60s, more fuzz and distorted guitars with modulation effects were employed by players such as Hendrix and Clapton. If your pedal doesn’t cover modulation, then that’s a separate outboard pedal you’ll have to engage.

In my opinion, the 70s were a little more straight forward with guitar tones so you’ll need to emulate the Strat or Les Paul as one key preset on your pedal. 

As we move into the 80s, you’ll have both distorted guitars with some chorus and flange, but also clean and bright tones with chorus. 

In the 90s it’s almost a throwback to the 70s with the addition of much heavier distorted sounds.  There’s also the scooped mid-range metal sound that you should have in your arsenal for certain songs.

And with all of those combinations, I think you could pull off anything from 2000 onward. It’s just a matter of selecting the right preset for the song.

With multi effect pedals that let you create user assignable presets. you can then rearrange the presets to be in a logical order according to your setlist. This will eliminate having to scroll endlessly to find the right preset for each song. I have found that no more than five or six presets are needed and often I can use a heavier distortion setting and roll the volume control on my guitar down to play semi distorted tones without having to have a dedicated preset.

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