[attachment=0:ay2hc96x]Rush 77.syx[/attachment:ay2hc96x]
Well, this is a patch I have been working on to replicate Alex Lifeson's live rig for Farewell to Kings, Hemispheres, and Permanent Waves. At the time, Alex had moved from his JTM45 and Twin with JBL's rig to HiWatt's, and he was using the Hiwatt Custom 100's(DR103) with three heads over four cabinets. I had the pleasure of seeing Rush live from the 14th row during the Permanent Waves Tour, and I'd have to say his sound was loud and ugly from what I remember even though his playing was great. The Hughes and Kettner rigs that he's been using lately have been the best that I have heard from him and are much better than what he was using then.
Based on diagrams I have seen of his live rigs at various stages in his career on the net, I have modeled this setup with parallel dirty and clean amp blocks. The dirty amp has the MXR Distortion Plus in front of it which had to be eq'ed to make it less snotty. Since Alex rarely turns his masters above four, a large part of his distorted sound comes from the germanium diodes in the MXR distortion plus. To get the top end shimmer, I have put a chorus with a triangular wave LFO on back end of the clean amp. That represents the characteristic tone of the Roland Dimension D that appeared around that time although I could probably spend a little more time tuning it. I've also put a tape echo on the back end to represent the Roland Space Echo. The rest of the stuff is diagnostic stuff. The cabs are my own special recipe of the Redwire HiWatt SE4123-Fanes IR's which is:
HiwattSE4123-Fanes-R121-Cap-0_5in.wav,.4522
HiwattSE4123-Fanes-KM84-CapEdge-0_5in.wav,.4521
HiwattSE4123-Fanes-TC30-Back-0in.wav,0.0955
I still have to add a wah to the front and Alex's Electric Mistress Analog Flanger to the signal path.
My next project with respect to Rush will be to modify this setup to the 1981 Moving Pictures tour setup which added Marshall 4140 combos to the back line. When I started researching this part, I thought the Marshall 4140's were there to added more depth to the distortion, but research has revealed that the 4140's were actually Marshall's answer to the Fender Twin. Upon listening to Moving Pictures through Grace Under Pressure concerts, I have come to the conclusion that the 4140's actually replaced the HiWatt's in the clean side. Since no 4140's exist on the Axe-FX yet, I have been experimenting with a JTM45 with a Blackface tone stack based on the wiring schematics for a 4140. So far, it comes extremely close to the Moving Pictures sound when put in parallel with a HiWatt.
BTW, the guitar I was using for this patch is a PRS Hollowbody I with the 1957/2008 pick ups which has a bit of similar sound to the Alex's ES-355 Stereo when the varitone is off. The Axe-FX Ultra is routed through a pair of Atomic Reactor FR powered Cabs.
