Animals guitar tone

The rig Nickelback used

Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.

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.

1. PRS Singlecut

   1

   source

   guitar
2. Boss NS-2 Noise Suppressor

   2

   dynamics

   gate
3. Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier

   3

   amp

   amp
4. Boss DD-3 Digital Delay

   4

   lead ambience

   delay
5. Mesa/Boogie Rectifier 4x12 (Celestion Vintage 30)

   5

   cab

   cab
6. Shure SM57

   6

   mic

   mic

Why we think this is right

All the Right Reasons was produced by Nickelback with Joey Moi in Vancouver; the band's mid-2000s guitar sound is a well-established modern hard-rock template - drop-D humbucker guitars (Chad Kroeger's PRS Singlecut, with Gibson Les Paul Customs alongside) into Mesa/Boogie Rectifier heads on the Modern/Red channel and Mesa 4x12 Vintage 30 cabs, tightened with a noise gate and heavily multi-tracked. 'Animals' is a percussive, palm-muted high-gain rhythm tone with a short lead break. The Rectifier high-gain identity and the drop-D humbucker source are strong. Two things are deliberately not claimed: a Tube Screamer-style boost in front of the amp is genre-common but is NOT confirmed for these sessions and is therefore omitted rather than fabricated, and there is no wah, no chorus, no phaser and no compressor pedal anywhere in this chain. The gate was previously written as the bare words 'Noise gate' and the delay as 'Digital delay (lead)'; both are now named units, the gate with reasonable period confidence and the delay at low confidence, so that the mapper has real circuits to resolve. Lowest-confidence elements are the exact guitar (PRS vs Les Paul Custom) and the delay unit.

Sources

• Premier Guitar - Rig Rundown: Nickelback's Chad Kroeger and Ryan Peake
• Joey Moi production interviews on the All the Right Reasons guitar tracking
• Equipboard - Chad Kroeger and Ryan Peake gear entries
• Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier owner's manual (Channel 3 Modern voicing, silicon diode vs tube rectifier)
• ISP Technologies Decimator product history (released 2006 - after these sessions)

More example tones

• OneMetallica
• BatteryMetallica
• Sad But TrueMetallica
• Summer of '69Bryan Adams
• Sweet Child O' MineGuns N' Roses
• You Shook Me All Night LongAC/DC