Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I bought a recent issue of Guitar World magazine with some articles about Black Sabbath Paranoid and in one article it mentioned the Dallas Rangemaster used by Tony Iommi. I found schematics on the internet and it looks like just a one transistor stage with voltage divider bias and apparently uses capacitor values to boost the treble.
Here it says that it was modified and later thrown out.
https://www.musicradar.com/totalguitar/ ... ath-310167
Also, if you compare the studio versions of the songs with live versions it might be that the studio versions use a ring modulator, but not the live versions (?). I read something earlier about a studio engineer using something like that.
https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/ ... hem?page=3

This sounds a lot like it.
War Pigs - Black Sabbath - guitar cover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... K1XHnlJm0c

I've always much preferred his sound on Master of Reality than on Paranoid. The Rangemaster was modified to be a bit more a full range boost. Laney later incorporated a similar feature into the "Klipp" model of amp, which he used on at least one album.

There are tons and tons of Rangemaster clones out there, many by high quality, small builders. I'm pretty sure that he uses some variation on it to this day.

Old thread, but here's the classic Brian May "Star Licks" video where he demonstrates the difference a treble booster makes in his sound. It's a little over 3 minutes in:


He started with a Dallas Rangemaster, but had to move onto a different model when a roadie threw out the original(!) More detail as to the models here: https://fryerguitars.com/history-of-bri ... ound-1986/

(One might protest "but this thread is about Toni Iommi!", but lots of guitarists used a treble booster in this same way to get their classic tones. )

Peanuts Gang Singing "Paranoid" by: Black Sabbath
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzc-Nb4a83c

War pigs and Paranoid solo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2sTTN0IJPg