How do I achieve this smooth but powerful gain type guitar distortion?

Question

Can anyone help with a guitar distortion I'm trying to achieve? It's a smooth yet powerful gain type distortion.

This song is a Bollywood song with rhythm guitar (starting at 0:19 minutes) which is playing throughout the song.

Answer 1

As blusician says, there's nothing extraordinary about that sound. In fact, if you heard that guitar by itself you'd probably find it pretty dull and thin. The reason it sounds powerful in the mix is that every single chord is actually a tight combination of guitar-powerchord + bass-fundamental + kickdrum (and the mix is substantially compressed). The guitar itself is probably also double-tracked, and of course there's some well-chosen subtle room reverb on the recording.

It's no good trying to achieve that effect with guitar alone; in fact a guitar sound with so much bass frequencies would be utterly unusable in a mix. So, keep it simple, use a tube amp with a cabinet that matches the basic character (Vox AC seems indeed the right ballpark) and blow it – not too much! – with some distortion pedal (IMO that actually sounds more like a substantially muffled Tubescreamer sound, re-brightened through a bit of the amp's own distortion). A tiny bit of chorus or flanger could also be useful to imitate double-tracking, but don't use any heavy fudge or long delay/reverb.

Answer 2

That's quite simple. I like that sound too. The best way would be with a tube amp, even something simple like an AC15, and an distortion pedal. You can use a solid state amp, but probably won't sounds as good. If you plugged straight into a computer interface, check out Amplitube.