Access Backstage Pass
Alex Lifeson has shed more light on the guitar rig he'll be using for Rush's upcoming reunion tour – and fans should expect to hear some very familiar guitar tones.
As a sea of elite guitar players make the switch from tube amps to modelers, Neural DSP, Line 6, Kemper, Univeral Audio and Fractal have been taking most of the wins.
But Lifeson, along with Joe Satriani, became one of IK Multimedia's earliest and biggest champions, working with the firm to release a signature amp pack and a limited edition TONEX pedal.
Now, Lifeson's faith in IK Multimedia is set to reach new heights, with the prog guitar hero set to take his signature TONEX on the road for the Rush reunion tour – making him perhaps the highest profile player to use the TONEX in a live setting.
What that means, tonally, is that their set will be a history of Rush’s guitar tones – because the TONEX has helped cloned them all.
Speaking to Rick Beato, Lifeson says IK Multimedia “took all the amps that I had in storage, and they kept them for almost two years” to produce digital recreations of four iconic amps from his collection. These were available both as a standalone plugin and baked into his signature TONEX.
The earliest iterations of amp modeling, he confesses, had flaws. But this current crop of digitized tones means serious business. IK Multimedia won him over.
“When they sent it to me, and I listened to it, I really wasn’t sure what to expect, because quite often this sort of technology, prior to this generation, always felt two-dimensional,” he confesses. “It was just pasted on a window; there was no depth, and everything sounded tight and compressed.
“Now, I guess with the advent of AI [machine learning] helping, they sound like the greatest amps ever. There’s depth in the bottom end. There’s real character. It’s not just the fuzziness and the noise that you get from an amp; it responds beautifully.”
As such, the TONEX forms a key part of his live rig, alongside the Fractal, which looks to be handling the lions' share of the effects duties. It's a far cry from Lifeson's old rig, which featured physical tube amp heads, cabs, and a much smaller crop of guitar tones to choose from.
In those days, Lifeson says he usually had a cluster of tones for live, split between hot, dirty, and clean channels. They covered all bases.
The TONEX and Fractal duo, conversely, has allowed him to be far more detailed with his tone-sculpting, recreating those classic tones for each song on their set list.
“I thought, 'Wouldn't it would be cool if I could go back and emulate all those guitar sounds that I had from those records?'” he relays. “I thought, 'If I could make the guitar sound from Tom Sawyer and Limelight, and go through the whole gamut of guitar sounds... wouldn’t that be cool?'
“It’s really interesting to listen to and fresh as it changes through the course of the night. It’s not just the same thing for an hour and a half.”
Lifeson recently confirmed he’s taking a Greeny copy, gifted to him by Kirk Hammett, on the Rush tour, and also discussed how close he was to taking a regular job as Rush battled mounting debt before they broke big with 2112.
Geddy Lee, meanwhile, has called out the “distasteful” drummers who put themselves forward for a Rush reunion while they were still mourning Neil Peart’s passing.
