Tone recipe
How to get a glassy clean funk sound
A clean amp with the treble up and the gain low, a compressor doing most of the work, and almost no reverb. In RigShed that is the Clean amp with gain at 0.42 and treble at 0.64, Red Squeeze compressing at 0.58, and Room Verb mixed in at 0.08 — just enough to stop it sounding like a DI.
Funk is the sound of a guitar getting out of its own way. Short notes, a lot of silence between them, and every stab the same size as the last one. Almost all of that is compression, and almost none of it is the amp.
Here is the whole rig. Three things, and one of them is nearly off.
The rig
| Position | What | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Compressor | Red Squeeze | Does the actual work. Evens the stabs so a muted sixteenth and a full chord land the same |
| Amp | Clean | A valve combo into a 12-inch open-back. Low gain, bright. It is a platform, not a voice |
| Reverb | Room Verb | Barely on. Takes the dryness off without putting the guitar in a hall |
Nothing else. No drive, no EQ pedal, no modulation. The temptation with funk is to add a wah or a chorus; both make it worse until the rhythm is already working.
The settings
Clean amp
| Control | Set to |
|---|---|
| Gain | 0.42 |
| Bass | 0.42 |
| Mid | 0.46 |
| Treble | 0.64 |
| Presence | 0.58 |
| Master | 0.70 |
Red Squeeze
| Control | Set to |
|---|---|
| Amount | 0.58 |
| Level | 0.56 |
Room Verb
| Control | Set to |
|---|---|
| Size | 0.22 |
| Damping | 0.55 |
| Mix | 0.08 |
Why the gain is so low
Gain sits at 0.42 — below noon. Every RigShed amp is fitted so that noon on the gain knob is the sound of the reference it was measured against, so 0.42 is deliberately short of that: you want the amp contributing nothing but headroom.
A clean funk part that breaks up at all stops sounding like funk. The compressor is what makes it feel loud.
Why the treble is up and the bass is down
Treble 0.64 against bass 0.42. That gap is the whole character.
The guitar is playing in a band’s midrange and high end, and the bass player owns everything underneath. Rolling the amp’s bass back is not about the guitar sounding thin on its own — it is about it not fighting. Played alone it will sound a little brittle. In a track it sits exactly where it should.
Presence at 0.58 is doing something subtler. On these amps presence sits before the nonlinearity, so hard playing drives the top end into compression harder than the mids. On a funk part, where you are striking hard and muting immediately, that means the attack brightens and then settles — which is most of what makes a valve amp feel alive under the hand.
Why the reverb is almost off
Mix 0.08. Size 0.22. That is a small room, mixed in at under a tenth.
Reverb fills the gaps between notes, and funk is made of the gaps. Turn it up and the stabs smear into each other; the part stops being rhythmic and starts being atmospheric. What you want is just enough that the guitar is not obviously a DI, and 0.08 is that amount.
Damping at 0.55 takes the top off the tail so the reverb does not add to the brightness you just dialled in.
What to play
Muted sixteenths on the middle strings, picked near the bridge. Let the mute do the rhythm and the compressor do the dynamics.
If it sounds stiff, take Amount down to around 0.45 and play harder. If it sounds uneven, take it up. The compressor is the only control on this rig worth moving once you are playing.
The shortcut
This is a factory rig. It is called Funk Squeeze, it is free on every tier, and it is already level-matched to every other factory rig at −18 dBFS — so switching to it compares tone rather than loudness.
You can also just describe the sound. Typing “glassy clean funk, squashy compressor, slight room” into Describe a tone gets you to the same place by a different route, and tells you why it picked each piece.