Long Live Rock 'N' Roll guitar tone
Rainbow · Ritchie Blackmore
Long Live Rock 'n' Roll (Polydor, 1978). The Marshall Major had been out of production for some years by then but was Blackmore's amplifier throughout the period, and the Aiwa boost trick carries over from the Deep Purple years.
Mid-gain hard rock: a single-coil into a cranked non-master Marshall, boosted at the front end for the solo and dry everywhere else.
The rig Rainbow used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
Fender Stratocaster with a scalloped fretboard, five-position switch, neck pickup for the lead.
Amplifier
One amplifier, a cranked Marshall Major 200W, non-master-volume, with the front end pushed by an Aiwa tape preamp for the solo.
Cabinet
Marshall 4x12 (Celestion G12H)
Microphone
Shure SM57 close at the cap edge. 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 Long Live Rock 'N' Roll for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
Ritchie Blackmore's mid-seventies rig is very well documented: a scalloped Fender Stratocaster hitting cranked Marshall Major 200W heads, with the front end pushed by an Aiwa reel-to-reel tape preamp used as a booster, into Marshall 4x12s with Celestion G12H and G12M speakers. Tape echo appears on the solo passages. The amplifier is the strongest identification at 78 and is also the hardest to map, because nothing models the Major; the directive to reach for a 100W Super Lead or Plexi and to take the drive down a step for the Major's extra headroom is carried in the block's own notes so it survives into the patch. The microphone is a period-standard inference and sits at 45 to say so, and the echo unit is not identified at all. Nothing has been invented to fill either gap.
Sources
- Marshall Major documentation and schematics (non-master-volume panel: presence, bass, middle, treble, Volume I and Volume II)
- Premier Guitar rig rundown material on Blackmore
- Guitar World gear features on Blackmore's Marshall Major rig
- Ritchie Blackmore interviews on the Aiwa tape preamp boost
- songbpm.com - 143 BPM, used to derive the echo starting time