Nail the ToneTom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Learning to Fly

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers · Into the Great Wide Open · 1991

The rhythm bed on "Learning to Fly" is a Jeff Lynne acoustic stack, not an amp tone: Mike Campbell described tons of acoustics layered thick, and engineer Richard Dodd described Petty, Campbell and Lynne sitting in a circle with two six-strings and a twelve-string, each on a Neumann KM 84, summed through one 1176, then swapping guitars and doing it again. Dodd also puts Petty on a Telecaster for rhythm, tracked clean through a mic'd combo, with Campbell's twelve-string chime on top through an open-back Ampeg. Play it clean and bright with almost no gain, roll off the boom, and let compression and doubling do the work.

Where these numbers come from: worked out from the documented rig and the sound of the record

Tuning

Standard tuning, no capo

Standard tuning at concert pitch, no capo on the record; the rhythm bed is layered six- and twelve-string acoustics plus a Telecaster, so if you only have a six-string, a capo at 5 playing C-G-Em-D shapes gets you the high jangle layer over the F-C-Am-G part.

Part: Rhythm

Guitar

  • Fender Telecaster · single-coils · bridge pickup
  • Acoustic 6-string flat-top (Gibson Dove reported)
  • Acoustic 12-string
  • Electric 12-string (Rickenbacker-type) · single-coils · bridge pickup

Amp

Fender-style clean tube combo

GAIN
3.5
BASS
5.0
MID
6.0
TREBLE
6.5
REVERB
2.0

Engineer Richard Dodd says Petty tracked rhythm on acoustic and on the Tele, mic'd with an SM57 plus an AKG 251, but he never names Petty's amp, so the model here is a category, not a claim; Petty's documented studio/stage combos of the era include a Fender Deluxe Reverb and a Vibro-King.

Amp

Ampeg open-back combo

GAIN
4.0
BASS
4.0
TREBLE
6.0
REVERB
2.5

Dodd specifically recalls "an open-back Ampeg" for Mike Campbell's guitar on this track, mic'd with an SM57 plus a Radio Shack PZM for low end into a Urei 1176; he does not give the model, though Campbell's long-serving Ampeg Rocket is the obvious candidate. Vintage Ampeg combos have no mid or presence control.

Pedals

  • Urei 1176 (studio compressor) · compressor - recording chain, not a pedal · Dodd summed the amp mics and the stacked acoustics through an 1176; to imitate it live, a compressor pedal set light - low ratio, modest sustain, level matched

Tone character

bright acoustic jangle · chimey 12-string shimmer · clean, almost no breakup · compressed and layered · light spring reverb · tight low end

easy

Four chords in one repeating loop with a steady eighth-note strum; the only real hurdle is holding the F barre chord cleanly and getting in and out of it in time.

Want this on your own amp?

These are the record's settings. Tell us what you play through and we'll translate every knob to the amp you actually own — free.

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Sources