American Woman

Does anyone know the effect The Guess Who uses to play American Woman? Even though I don't have the means to achieve this tone right now, I still wonder what they use to get that great tone.

I think there was an "American Women" pedal released a couple of years ago

http://www.zzounds.com/item--TCHAW1

Actually I stumbled onto that when I was searching through tabs and whatnot trying to find some explanation for how the tone is achieved. The pedal description doesn't give a very good explanation. Is there some combination of regular effects used for this song or what?

ok I think I answered my own question through a lot of experimenting throughout the past few hours.

I realized the only effect is distortion. Luckily, my little ibanez (15W) has an overdrive that gets some pretty good distortion. I have the gain way up with the mids and trebble low (around 10-12 o'clock) and the bass way up as well. But I wasn't 100% satisfied with the tone.

So, the only problem I was having was minor sustain problems (don't usually have to much of a problem with my epip les paul) and a noise problem. When you pump on the overdrive and turn the gain way up on my Ibanez, you get a lot of noise crap. So, never having done this before, I plugged an additional cable into the 'phones' jack on my Ibanez, and plugged it into my 20-30W fairly old Crate amp. This just acts as basically a noise cutter and makes the tone on my guitar sound so awesome. Plays like a gem now.

Sounds like heavey compression and/or maybe some light tremelo plus some overdrive on single coil's. But that's just what my ears hear.

Neck pickup...

Wow you guys, thanks for the posts. When I get my new Vox I'll actually be able to get that fabulous tone

Sounds like heavy distorto with a device called an EBOW. I have used an ebow and have gotten sounds real close to "AM WMN" sound. BTW ebows are very cool but very expensive for a tool that gets limited use.

If you're talking about "The Guess Who" version of American Woman, it wasn't a pedal at all, it was a small amp plugged into a bigger amp, the first (but primiative) and very effective "overdrive".

The guy's name is Gar Gillies out of Winnipeg Manitoba, he built an amp for Randy Bachman called the "Herzog"

Here is a picture of Randy with one of the Herzog amps:
http://www.randybachman.com/index.php?choice=2¬e=2

from Randy Bachman:
"The signature guitar lines in "No Time" and "American Woman" were my '59 Les Paul (neck pickup), into a Herzog, into a Garnet Amp."

More Info:
http://www.garnetamps.com/PPbyM.htm
http://www.lynx.bc.ca/~jc/garnetAmps.html