No. 0571971·hard-rock·4 blocks
Black Dog
Black Dog's snarling, compressed riff was recorded with no guitar amp at all. At Island/Basing Street Studios in London (December 1970), Jimmy Page ran his 1959 Les Paul through a direct box into a mic channel of the Helios console and overdrove the console's mic preamp to make the distortion — then fed it through two UREI 1176 compressors in series, the first cranked as a saturation stage and the second doing the compression. Engineer Andy Johns triple-tracked it (left, right, centre). The tone that sounds like a synthesizer is a preamp pushed past its limit, not a speaker.
Led Zeppelin IVSignal path · input → output · 2 blocksLive values · IK TONEX
Guitar
Gibson Les Paul Standard 'Number One' (1959)
Pickups
HH
Tuning
bridge (inferred from the aggressive midrange — Page did not document the selector for this track)
Strings
standard
Search ToneNET for 'console preamp distortion' or 'cranked Plexi Les Paul'
Search ToneNET for 'console preamp distortion' or 'cranked Plexi Les Paul'
← Overdriven Helios console mic preamp + 2x 1176
Engineer's note
File 057
Black Dog's snarling, compressed riff was recorded with no guitar amp at all. At Island/Basing Street Studios in London (December 1970), Jimmy Page ran his 1959 Les Paul through a direct box into a mic channel of the Helios console and overdrove the console's mic preamp to make the distortion — then fed it through two UREI 1176 compressors in series, the first cranked as a saturation stage and the second doing the compression. Engineer Andy Johns triple-tracked it (left, right, centre). The tone that sounds like a synthesizer is a preamp pushed past its limit, not a speaker.
— Jimmy Page
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