Long Train Runnin' guitar tone
The Doobie Brothers · Tom Johnston
The Captain and Me (1973)
clean, percussive semi-hollow funk rhythm played hard for bite
The rig The Doobie Brothers used
Researched from interviews, production write-ups and gear histories — not guessed.
Guitar
Gibson ES-335 (1969, cherry red)
Amplifier
Fender Twin Reverb
Cabinet
Fender Twin Reverb 2x12
Microphone
Shure SM57
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 Train Runnin' for it — with a preset file you can load, not a list of knob positions.
Why we think this is right
'Long Train Runnin'' was cut for The Captain and Me (1973) at Warner Bros. Studios with Ted Templeman producing and Donn Landee engineering; it grew out of a live jam the band called 'Osborn'. Tom Johnston played the funk rhythm figure on his cherry-red 1969 Gibson ES-335, which is named consistently across his gear interviews, the Sessiondays session log and the album's 50th-anniversary features. The amp is a blackface Fender clean played hard: sources most often name a Fender Twin Reverb for the studio, with a Marshall JMP documented alongside it for the album's harder-driven tracks and some accounts citing a Deluxe Reverb instead. The Twin is committed to on headroom evidence - the recorded guitar shows no power-amp compression at the level the part sits at, which a 22-watt Deluxe would have produced. The stored record's separate block named 'some accounts: Fender Deluxe Reverb' is deleted as a hedge occupying a gear-name field and a second amplifier the song never had. There are no effects: the percussive groove is right-hand palm muting, and the instrumental break is harmonica, not guitar.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Train_Runnin%27
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captain_and_Me
- https://equipboard.com/pros/tom-johnston
- https://www.guitarchalk.com/doobie-brothers-tom-johnston-amp-settings/
- https://www.hifinews.com/content/doobie-bros-captain-and-me