AmpRecipe

Roxanne guitar tone

The Police. Built for this recording. Nobody has played this one yet; it comes from a documented rig, not from ears.

Play it in
AmpliTube 5Guitar Rig 7
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Dial it in Guitar Rig 7 Pro by hand, using only components the Pro edition includes. A starting point nobody has played in this edition yet.

An amp modelled on a Fender Super Reverb, through a Fender Super Reverb 4x10 cab.

Knobs, in signal order

  1. Reverb DelightAmp

    • Bass, 4 of 10
    • Treble, 7 of 10
    • Reverb, 2 of 10
    • Volume, 6 of 10

    The recipe also sets gain, mid and presence, which Reverb Delight does not have. Leave its other controls where they load.

  2. Matched Cabinet ProCab

    • Cabinet, the one that loads with Reverb Delight

    The rig calls for a Fender Super Reverb 4x10 cabinet. NI does not publish the names of the matched cabinets, so start from the one that loads with the amp and change it by ear.

  • Amp swapped: The Fender Super Reverb has no counterpart in Guitar Rig 7 Pro; Reverb Delight stands in as the first Clean amp in this edition
  • Note: A plain number is the knob's own reading on a 0 to 10 scale unless the setting gives another range; %, Hz, dB and ms are the units the Guitar Rig 7 interface shows. Amp, drive and fuzz knobs are assumed to read 0 to 10.

Set your guitar

Pickups
an unusual pickup layout
Position
bridge
Tone knob
8-10
Channel
Clean

Where the rig comes from

  • The guitar on Roxanne was Summers' heavily modified early-1960s Fender Telecaster (variously dated 1961 or 1963), bought for $200 from a student in California; The Telecaster also has a built-in preamp/overdrive unit (third knob, on/off mini-toggle) and an out-of-phase mini-toggle switch guitarplayer.com
  • The Telecaster's neck pickup had been replaced with a 1959 Gibson PAF humbucker; the bridge single-coil is mounted into the body rather than the bridge plate, and the bridge is brass; The guitar track on Roxanne was recorded through a Fender Twin Reverb, giving the icy treble tone; the bridge pickup sound is what is heard on the track guitarworld.com
  • The onboard preamp is switched on/off and has a knob that adds or subtracts gain; the out-of-phase switch reverses pickup polarity groundguitar.com
  • Roxanne's opening staccato chords were played on the Telecaster's bridge (back) pickup with no distortion, i.e. a clean setting with the preamp/overdrive off andysummers.com
  • Summers' early Police setup was just the Telecaster into a Fender Twin with a little reverb and careful treble/middle/bass balancing, before he had a pedalboard; After the bare Twin setup, the next effects he added were an MXR Phase 90 and then the Echoplex guitarworld.com
  • Fan equipment wiki lists Summers' Outlandos d'Amour studio gear as the 1963 Telecaster custom, a Fender Twin Reverb and an unidentified Ampeg amp, plus an MXR Phase 90; Fan equipment wiki says guitars at Surrey Sound were close-miked with a Beyer Soundstar X1 or Shure SM58, with a Neumann U87 about 3 ft away for ambience thepoliceequipmentwiki.miraheze.org
  • Summers says he started with a Twin Reverb and later moved to old Marshalls; his live colour came from the Echoplex, a chorus and envelope filters vintageguitar.com
  • The Maestro Echoplex EP-2 was acquired around autumn 1978 (bought from Pete Cornish), i.e. after Roxanne was recorded in January 1978, and first used on the late-1978 North American tour the-police-equipment.fandom.com
  • Conflicting community claim: one gear blog states Roxanne was recorded in one evening after the Echoplex was discovered in the studio guitargangsters.net
  • Live on the 1978–79 Outlandos d'Amour tour Summers used a Marshall 1959 100W head into Marshall 1960A 4x12 angled cabs with Celestion speakers (rented in the US); The Pete Cornish pedalboard (Phase 90, compressor, fuzz, Electric Mistress, Mu-Tron, volume pedal) only entered the live rig from February 1979, along with the Echoplex thepolicewiki.org
  • The Outlandos tour effects were a DeArmond 610 volume/tone pedal, Maestro Echoplex EP-2 and the Pete Cornish custom board, with Marshall 100W heads and 4x12s the-police-equipment.fandom.com
  • Summers used Dean Markley 10-46 strings in the past (undated) and D'Addario EXL115 more recently uberproaudio.com
  • Tone-recreation reference (not Summers' own rig): zZounds matched the Roxanne tone with a Telecaster into a Marshall 1987X low input plus only an MXR Dyna Comp blog.zzounds.com