Guitarists spend a lot of time thinking about electric guitars, thinking about amps, thinking about which overdrive pedal is going to be the one that unlocks everything for them, revealing the tone they have been seeking all these years.
It might be no exaggeration to say that we can often spend as much time thinking about about this as we do playing. Josh Middleton, frontman/guitarist of Sylosis can relate. He’s been there, too.
But speaking to MusicRadar about the UK metal stalwarts’ forthcoming album, The New Flesh, out 20 February via Nuclear Blast, Middleton says we should be paying more attention to our guitar speakers – because that’s where your tone lives or dies.
“The speakers are so important when it comes to like a good tone,” he says. “Because you can have a great amp, but if the speaker sucks, it won’t sound good, whereas you can have an okay amp and an amazing speaker, and you’ll get a better sound.”
And it just so happens that Middleton has a great cabinet loaded with four great speakers. This oversized Mesa/Boogie 4x12 is pretty special, and no small amount of research went into sourcing it. Middleton has former Periphery bassist and now progressive metal über-producer/engineer Adam ‘Nolly’ Getgood to thank for it.
“It’s from the year 2000. Quite nerdy info, but it was my friend Nolly, who I actually bought the cab off,” says Middleton. “He was into looking at serial numbers and stuff, and we were really obsessed with all these old Andy Sneap productions from back in the day, and he spoke to Andy Sneap, and this cab is one serial number way from Andy Sneap’s.”
Andy Sneap, for the uninitiated, is the co-founder of and guitarist of UK thrash icons Sabbat guitarist, whose History Of A Time To Come (1988) remains an unimpeachable genre classic, and who has gone on to become one of metal’s most respected producers, with credits including Amon Amarth, Judas Priest, Megadeth and more.
Sneap’s body of work, whether engineering/mixing or as producer, is a big influence on Middleton and how he produces Sylosis.
This cab, coming off the Mesa/Boogie production line next to Sneap’s in 2000, loaded with four Celestion V30 12” drivers, is the secret sauce. “It has the sound of all the stuff I grew up listening to,” says Middleton.
Speaking to Guitar World in 2020, Middleton admitted that he had fallen down the rabbit hole when it comes to speakers. And as any speaker geek worth their salt will tell you, not all are created equal – and sometimes the same make and model will vary in quality from year to year.
“I’ve gotten really nerdy about ages of speakers,” he told Guitar World in 2020. “There was a period where V30s where sounding incredible in Mesa cabs, between 2000 and 2005.”
This is the cabinet we hear on The New Flesh. Middleton’s rig was simple. He used his ESP/LTD JM-1 signature guitar, a Horizon-esque double-cut loaded with a pair of Fishman Fluence Modern humbuckers.
It has the sound of all the stuff I grew up listening to
There was his trusty Maxon OD-808 doing its Tube Screamer thing. All this was going into a Peavey 6505 (“with barely any mids!”), into the cab…
But there’s a catch. What Middleton used for the recording was an impulse (IR) response of the cabinet, a precise engineered virtual capture of the cabinet and the Shure SM57 and Sennheiser MD 421 microphones in front of it. It sounds exactly the same, only it allowed Middleton to record his guitar parts at home and still stay on speaking terms with the neighbours.
“It’s my cab and it is how it would sound, but I moved house since doing the last record and I don’t have a home studio,” he says. “I just couldn’t make noise at home – and tracking guitars is loud!”
Middleton makes a great point. For all the time spent obsessing over the brands of strings we use, our electric guitar pickups, making sure we have the best quality guitar cables we can afford (still important), speakers arguably get the short end of the stick.
If you have a 1x12” cabinet, be it standalone or in a combo, it can be a relatively cheap mod (you’d pay about 150 bucks for a Celestion V30 these days), and not that difficult to do at home.
Just remember to follow the instructions carefully, unplug the amp first, match polarity and impedances and, if swapping out a speaker on a tube amp, let the tubes cool down first and don’t turn it back on until the speaker has been installed (that load has to go somewhere... Also don't be opening the chassis – there's no need, there are lethal voltages, and that's a job for the pros).
But a 4x12” is a more considerable investment, and that’s where the digital transformation of guitar gear offers players options. Sure, you can use your quote/unquote real amp, keep that pedalboard stocked, but with IRs readily available – and cheap – you don’t have to be limited anymore.
And maybe, after all this time, what was really missing from your metal rhythm tone was an IR for an early 2000s over-sized Mesa/Boogie slanted cab loaded with V30s.
You can read our full interview with Josh Middleton, coming soon to MusicRadar.
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