Our distortion and amp simulation plug-in, Blue Cat’s Destructor, already includes a handful of factory presets that mimic the tone of famous guitarists (check out the “Guitar Legends” presets category!), but we wanted to take it a step further…
Our friend Hans Van Even has accepted the challenge to reproduce the exact guitar tone of famous guitar licks, using only Blue Cat’s Destructor, and sometimes a delay or reverb, such as Blue cat’s Late Replies, with a single guitar!
Did he succeed? Check out the videos below! We must say we have been pretty impressed…
Note: Links to the presets used for these examples are available at the end of the article.
Heavy Distortion – Eddie Van Halen’s “Brown Sound”
Eddie Van Halen’s heavily compressed and distorted tone and his incredible two hands tapping licks are very easy to recognize. It’s another thing to actually reproduce them…
Clean Tone – Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits Era)
Based on an existing factory preset, “Sultans of Silk 2” is specifically tweaked for Mark Knopfler’s incredible solo on Sultans of Swing:
And with additional tweaks and compression with Blue Cat’s Dynamics, it works for the introduction of “News” too!
Lead Tone w/ Filtering – Brian May (Queen)
Probably the most challenging is Brian May’s lead tone on Bohemian Rhapsody, if you do not own the exact same guitar: he uses phase inversion switches to combine the pickups, which results in this very specific “hollow” guitar tone.
But thanks to Destructor’s comb filters, you can simulate this very specific behavior, even with just a bridge humbucker pickup.
Vintage Distortion – Jimmy Page On Whole Lotta Love
To reproduce Jimmy Page’s powerful guitar tone (that actually does not use much distortion), several instances of Destructor have been necessary – hosted in parallel chains in Blue Cat’s PatchWork. Here is the result, for both rhythm and lead tones:
Crunchy Rhythm & Lead – SRV Style
If you want to know how Hans managed to reproduce these tones, watch his guitar tone matching tutorial with Destructor. You may also need to learn how to play these licks like him…!
Presets
You can download the presets used in these demos for free using the links below. Both the raw guitar tone presets for Destructor and full signal chain built with PatchWork (also using Late Replies for reverb and delays) are available:
- Download Blue Cat’s Detructor free Guitar Tone Presets here.
- Download Full Signal Chain PatchWork Presets here.
More guitar videos are available on our YouTube channel. You may also want to check our Late Replies and Destructor guitar examples.
Enjoy!
Where can I get Lenny’s Sister preset?
I think it’s the “Stevie & Lenny” factory preset for Destructor with a bit of reverb.