BOSTON ARE OFTEN maligned as “corporate rock,” an ironic categorization for a band whose debut album was conceived largely by one guy working alone in his wood-paneled basement after getting off work as a product design engineer for Polaroid. That guy, guitarist and songwriter Tom Scholz, not only managed to come up with Boston’s self-titled, multi-Platinum-selling 1976 debut album — he also revolutionized rock-guitar tone using little more than a goldtop 1968 Les Paul with a “neck like a log” that he recorded at extremely low volume due to his less-than-adequate studio environs.
Scholz has identified that tone — characterized by a sweetly distorted and heavily sustaining guitar sound — as the combination of his Les Paul running into an old 100-watt Marshall head and a prototype power soak that he built “because of the need to bring down the gain, but without losing the saturation of the sound.”