Attempting to copy a Sylosis tone

Rocketsurgeongeneral

Rocketsurgeongeneral

Inspired
Sylosis - After Lifeless Years. the first three seconds of the song the tightness of the guitars is something I've been after for a long time. It's the equivalent of a heroin addict chasing the magic dragon, except the heroin addict is an avid guitarist and the magic dragon is that sylosis tone. I've tried using a 6160 block with some EQ but still it's not quite there...using an AXE FX II XL+ and an AXE FX III.
 
I hear ya dude, that's my personal holy grail tone on that album too!

I've picked up every little tid bit of information I can find on that session over the last decade, but the first and most obvious question is have you tried using the Tone Match block?
 
That era Sylosis was recorded on 6505's iirc (when they moved to Orange/Marshall on the newer records, it was never the same imo) I swear there are some videos of Josh showing off some of his kemper profiles, he may go into detail on what he tweaks etc in them?
 
There's a bunch of posts on the old UltimateMetal forums where Josh posted (under the name JoshSylosis) from around this time period. Seems like there used to be studio footage from the recording of this album which unfortunately no longer exists, but he did talk about it in other posts. Around that time he seemed to be a big Peavey XXX fan which he used with a Krankenstein on the Supreme Oppressor EP. Slightly later it looks like he switched to the JSX, as you can see in the video for After Lifeless Years, and also looks like he'd sometimes use a Tubescreamer in front of amps with the gain set around 4 which seems higher than usual. Now specifically for that album they used ESP guitars with EMGs, the amp was meant to be a Randall RM100 with the UltraXL module but they disliked the tone and ended up reamping with a TS9 into a 5150 and a Marshall Mode 4 cabinet for all the rhythm guitars. Rhythms which were quad tracked. So in theory you're in the ball park emulated gear-wise.

As mentioned above Josh more recently made some Kemper presets, including a Peavey 6505 and a XXX, and in the demonstration video there's some small snippets of isolated guitars that you could always attempt to tone match. You could also try tone matching the brief isolated chugging near the beginning of After Lifeless Years though neither might be long enough to get a great result. Outside of that just keep at it and hopefully you'll find a tone you enjoy, though it may not be perfect.
 
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I was curious about this topic just to see how you weren't able to match the tone. I haven't started to mess with that sort of stuff yet, but it's an interesting topic for me, so I went and checked out the video clip.

You can see in the clip that one of the guitarists (I'm not super familiar with this band, will have to check out some more stuff), is using a Peavey JSX.

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Fluff reckons the JSX is very different to 5150 and 6505. Here is a clip below where he describes the difference, which is in-line with your conclusion about the band having a very 'tight' metal tone.



Not sure if stating the obvious here or if it helps you, but let us know how you go!
 
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