The Bends guitar tone
Radiohead · Jonny Greenwood, with Ed O'Brien
The Bends (Parlophone, 1995). The Marshall ShredMaster shipped in 1991 and the Telecaster Plus in 1989, so both are era-correct with room to spare.
Jangly clean verses on an untreated Vox Normal channel opening out into a saturated mid-forward British distortion for the riff and the lead.
The rig Radiohead used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
Fender Telecaster Plus with Lace Sensors; bridge pair into the ShredMaster for the riff, middle position for the clean parts.
Amplifier
One amplifier, a Vox AC30 Top Boost, used on two of its three channels - the Normal channel for the clean parts and the Brilliant channel for the riff and lead. The distortion is the Marshall ShredMaster in front of it. It is the same head throughout; no second amp is on this track.
Cabinet
Vox AC30 2x12 (Celestion Alnico Blue)
Microphone
Shure SM57 close at the cap edge, on axis.
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 The Bends for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
The featured guitar sound is Jonny Greenwood's Fender Telecaster Plus with Lace Sensors driven by a Marshall ShredMaster - the pedal repeatedly cited as the core of The Bends-era distortion - into a Vox AC30, the album's signature British amp, with Ed O'Brien layering. The track moves from jangly clean verses to a saturated mid-gain riff and chorus and a sustained lead outro. The Telecaster Plus and the ShredMaster are well documented and sit in the high seventies and eighties; the exact per-track amplifier is the main uncertainty and sits at 70. The two-channel usage of one AC30 is what removes any need to invent a second amplifier for the cleans. The delay subdivision is derived arithmetic from the song's tempo, quoted between 90 and 92 BPM across sources and taken here as 90. No specific echo unit and no reverb device are documented, and neither has been invented.
Sources
- VOX Showroom - The AC-30/6 Twin Top Boost (front panel control set and channel layout)
- Guitar World and Premier Guitar Radiohead features
- John Leckie production notes (Sound On Sound)
- songbpm.com and corroborating tempo sources - 90 to 92 BPM, used to derive the delay subdivision