BOSTON Mainman Tom Scholz Talks About Love Affair With Les Pauls
Gibson.com spoke with
BOSTON mainman
Tom Scholz about a number of topics including his long love affair with the Les Paul guitar.
www.Gibson.com: What first turned you on about Les Pauls?
Scholz: "They sound great - period. The first time I saw somebody play one was
JIMMY PAGE and then I heard
JEFF BECK use one on Truth. Then, I heard someone play a Goldtop in a bar and I thought it was the sweetest sounding thing. 'Where do you find a guitar like that?' A couple years later that guy had to sell his equipment and offered me that very guitar for 300 bucks. It’s the same one I use today. Now it has a Mighty Mouse on it. That was a bumper sticker I cut out and stuck on, then buried under 14 layers of lacquer. It’s been there for 22 years now so it’s not going anywhere."
www.Gibson.com: You’re famous for having gigantic tone. How much of that comes from your Les Pauls?
Scholz: "They do have a huge sound. It’s tough to quantify that. I’ve compared them in great depth to lots of other guitars, and I couldn’t even put that into technical terms. But the sound is big with lots of character, and if you want a chunky sound it’s there or if you want a pure, crystal clear tone it does that. I just don’t get that range from other guitars."
www.Gibson.com: Are you working on a new Boston album?
Scholz: "I am. I had planned to have that album done before touring, but I was unable to finish it in time. The good news is, I also remastered the Sony greatest hits album and revised the song list on it, and that’s going to be released in June when we start our tour. On tour, we’re concentrating more on the classic Boston hits."
WWW.Gibson.com: Do you have to do anything special to recreate the sounds of those hits, like 'More Than A Feeling' and 'Foreplay/Long Time'?
Scholz: "All of the equipment we’ve had has been tailored just to produce Boston sounds. The reason we use what we use live is that it would be impossible to present a Boston performance without amps you can repeatedly make instantaneous changes in tone, sound, and effects on.
I could plug into a regular guitar amplifier and play you the lead part to 'Peace Of Mind' or the rhythm to 'More Than A Feeling', but to play the whole song would be impossible. You’d have to make a half-dozen changes in EQ, gain, output level, and effects, and there’s no way to do that with standard amps. With the Rockman stuff, we can do anything we want. It’s all programmable and you can run through every sound you need while you play each song. It becomes second nature after a while.
That’s why when people say, 'Why don’t you come down to our party and play a couple songs? We’ve got an amp here,' we just can’t do it. There’s no way it would sound like a Boston song unless you had three engineers in the house running a mixing board to change all these settings."
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