Already Gone guitar tone
Eagles · Don Felder (main guitar and harmonised outro leads), Glenn Frey (second harmony guitar in the outro)
On the Border, 1974
A small combo pushed into natural breakup by a hot P-90: raw, midrange-forward and slightly gnarly, with far more bark than a stock Fender because of the Vox speaker.
The rig Eagles used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
A Gibson Les Paul Special with P-90 pickups, named by Don Felder himself for this song.
Amplifier
A blackface Fender Deluxe with a Vox speaker fitted, named by Don Felder for this song. Not a Deluxe Reverb -- the plain blackface Deluxe, which has no reverb tank and no master volume, so the overdrive is simply the single volume control turned well up.
Cabinet
Fender Deluxe 1x12 fitted with a Vox Celestion speaker
Microphone
A close dynamic on the combo; the specific microphone is not documented.
Signal chain
The order the original sound was built in. The exact settings get dialled for your own amp or modeller when you generate the tone.
Get this tone on your rig
Pick your amp or modeller and we’ll build Already Gone for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
This one is unusually well documented, because Don Felder named the rig for the song in his own words: a Les Paul Special and a blackface Fender Deluxe amp with a Vox speaker. Three prior claims are therefore rejected. The 1959 Fender Telecaster is rejected in favour of the Les Paul Special. The Fender Deluxe Reverb is rejected in favour of the plain blackface Deluxe -- an important difference, because that amp has no reverb tank, so the prior's amp spring reverb block cannot exist and has been replaced by mix-side ambience. And the claim that the harmonised outro is Felder with Bernie Leadon is rejected: it is Felder with Glenn Frey. There is no wah on this record; the word 'Vox' in Felder's quote refers to the speaker.
Sources
- Don Felder, first-person account of this song's guitar sound: a Les Paul Special and a blackface Fender Deluxe amp with a Vox speaker.
- Eagles On the Border credits and Eagles interviews identifying Don Felder and Glenn Frey as the two guitarists on the outro harmony.
- No source documents the microphone or the mixdown ambience; those blocks are inference and are marked Medium.