There, There guitar tone
Radiohead · Jonny Greenwood, with Ed O'Brien on the texture parts
Hail to the Thief (Parlophone, 2003), subtitled The Gloaming. Every device in the chain is era-correct with a decade to spare.
A clean eighth-note tremolo pulse over toms that builds across the song into a saturated mid-forward wall of British distortion.
The rig Radiohead used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
Fender Telecaster Plus with Lace Sensors and an added kill switch.
Amplifier
Two amplifiers, both documented for this track: a Vox AC30 Top Boost and a Fender Twin Reverb. The Twin supplies the clean headroom under the tremolo verses and the AC30 takes the ShredMaster for the climax. The sources describe them as blended rather than switched.
Cabinet
Vox AC30 2x12 (Celestion Alnico Blue)
Microphone
Shure SM57 close at the cap edge, on axis. Inferred rather than 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 There, There for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
The best-documented Radiohead guitar rig is Jonny Greenwood's Fender Telecaster Plus with Lace Sensors into a Marshall ShredMaster and a Vox AC30 blended with a Fender Twin Reverb, which is the rig this record reconstructs. The song arcs from clean tremolo-pulsed verses over toms to a saturated climax, and that arc is now carried by the section bindings rather than being flattened by blocks that never switch off. The guitar and the distortion pedal are the strongest identifications, at 84 and 82. The weakest by a distance is the tremolo device, held at 50: the effect is audible but neither the unit nor the player is documented anywhere reputable, and the track is multi-guitar with Ed O'Brien contributing texture, so the attribution is genuinely shared. Rather than invent a pedal the block is described by its measurable behaviour, with its rate derived from the song's 126 BPM. The delay subdivision is derived the same way. Nothing here is named beyond what the sources support.
Sources
- VOX Showroom - The AC-30/6 Twin Top Boost (front panel control set)
- guitar.com - Radiohead guitar sound guide
- Interviews covering the Marshall ShredMaster and the Telecaster Plus
- songbpm.com - 126 BPM, used to derive the tremolo rate and the delay subdivision