Mark Morton has got his electric guitar tone down to a fine art. Lamb Of God’s sound is a physical phenomenon, metal guitar set to a groove, all of which is designed and composed to move the crowd, and it does.
Press play on Virginia metal stalwarts’ latest studio longplayer, Into Oblivion, and you’ll hear Gibson Les Pauls – including Morton’s new signature Les Paul Modern Quilt – going into Mesa/Boogie Mark Series tube amps.
Some of the finer points of Morton’s new Gibson signature guitar – namely its custom-wound Jim DeCola high-output humbuckers – were applied to his vintage stock. Morton readily admits that he is not above modding a ‘60s Les Paul in search of tone.
Article continues below“I have a ’69 Les Paul Custom, and I used that quite a bit on the new record,” he says. “I love those. I’ve had a number of them, and I’ve got one in particular that’s a favourite, and it has the Jim DeCola pickups in it, so I pulled out the T-Tops that came in it originally in ’69, and it’s got the Jim DeCola custom-wound pickups in it.
“That is a mid-1969 custom, ebony fretboard, great guitar! And that one is all over the record. Sepsis is almost entirely that guitar. When you listen to Sepsis, you hear that ‘69 Les Paul quite a bit.”
When he has the guitar, the amp, he doesn’t need much more from his pedalboard. He will run a couple of choice overdrive pedals in front of the amps and that’s that. When we say “choice,” we mean vintage-and-rare grails. “For leads, I used a Boogie Mark IV with the Klon in front of it,” says Morton, smiling. It’s simple, he says.
Nothing too complicated. Nothing that exotic or left-field, all things considered. He is fan of the Tube Screamer. Since its launch in 1979, Susumu Tamura’s O.G. circuit has gone on to become one of the world’s most used, most copied, and occasionally most controversial overdrives of all time.
The Tube Screamer and its clones are so commonplace that it feels ubiquitous. But it’s how Morton uses his that’s the interesting part. He doesn’t use it as a drive per se.
“Yeah, so for my rhythm tracks, I used a Mesa/Boogie Badlander with the first generation Tube Screamer in front of it, with the drive rolled all the way down,” says Morton.
Morton’s logic is that there already is enough saturation going on with his Badlander that all he needs is a tone-sweetener, or rather a shaper. Some players might use a compressor here, or maybe a boost or EQ pedal. But for Morton, the Tube Screamer is the secret to a happier union between amp and guitar.
“It just kind of tightens up that bottom end,” he says, “just a little bit in the gain structure. So the Tube Screamer not adding a lot of gain because it doesn’t need it. It just brought the sag up just a little bit in the bottom end.”
It just kind of tightens up that bottom end
Mark Morton on his Tube Screamer
This all makes us think about what Morton told us years ago about what he likes from a tube amp; he calls it the “watermelon thunk,” that slightly giving sound a ripe watermelon makes when you slap it. If you’re not getting exactly what you want from your tube amp, maybe too much sag – that spongy feeling from the dynamic compression – then the Tube Screamer can do the business in reshaping the feel of the amp, giving Morton’s rhythm tone the kinetic energy it requires to articulate a Lamb Of God riff.
Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme does something similar with his Pro Co Rat. Using it effectively as a filter pedal, tuning out the frequencies he doesn’t want and using it to juice his Marshall DSL amps in just the right way.
“When it comes to gear, anyone who has talked to me over the years knows I am boring as fuck. I am a creature of habit,” said Bettencourt, speaking to MusicRadar in 2023. I have my Rat pedal filtering things out. I have the Marshall DSL [JCM] 2000. When people go get a DSL they’re like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? A fucking DSL. The thing sounds like shit usually.’
“Whatever. A lot of people tell me that. But when you have the treble at two, and you have the midrange at two, and then you have the bass at four and the presence at two, and you turn it way up, that’s what that is. Whatever that is, to me, that is the key to it.”
As for other effects, Morton prefers to leave them out entirely while recording a take. If using the Tube Screamer gives him the feel and the attack that he needs when recording a take, then time-sensitive effects, such as modulation and delay pedals, can get in the way. They can also ruin it.
Additional effects, reverbs and delays and stuff like that, all that comes in post
“Now, there’s some other additional effects, reverbs and delays and stuff like that, but all that comes in post,” says Morton. “It comes in [during] the mix, because it’s much easier to play with that stuff after you’ve printed a take than it is to commit it to a delay setting on a recording, and then find that it’s clashing or was something else, rhythmically or whatever, and then not be able to undo it because you printed it, you know what I mean? So all those kind of effects outside of tonal things, we will do outboard, we’ll do after the fact.”
And that logic holds whether you are recording a demo in your bedroom or tracking, what, your 13th studio album. Recording guitars is like mixing a cocktail; you can always add but you can’t take away.
Into Oblivion is out now via Century Media records.
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