How did he get this tone on the lead guitar?

genius.

It's either a Fuzz pedal or they cut slits in the amp speaker with a razor.

If rock and roll isn't dead, it's on life support.

He used one of them ho daddys what makes distortion and fuzz.

Post #5

You can also use any effects pedal with a very weak battery to get that sound......for about 5 minutes

Hey! My, my!

http://www.thrasherswheat.org/friends/amps.htm

The Bigsby vibrato added to Neil Young’s Les Paul (also occasionally available as a factory extra on a Les Paul) makes a very real contribution to his tone. Used to give lead lines anything from a jagged, angular irregularity to a bouncing, wobbly vibe, Young’s Bigsby also functions as a trigger into feedback, and is used to bend decaying notes to nail down the howl zone.

Of course, truly effective use of feedback is enabled by the right amp and the right amp settings. The first part of the equation is achieved by a surprisingly simple, petite piece of gear: a late-1950s tweed Fender Deluxe. This little beastie, with just two volume controls and a single, shared tone control, puts out a mere 15 watts from two 6V6GT output tubes, and carries just a single 12†speaker, but has powered Neil Young’s rock sound in stadiums and arenas around the world since he acquired it in 1967 (although the sound is fed through other, larger amps and its own monitoring system in order to be heard on large stages). A raw, hot little amp, the tweed Deluxe breaks up early, with a lot of tube-induced compression at most volume levels. Up past around 11 o’clock on the dial these amps really don’t get much louder, they just saturate more, issuing increasing levels of distortion tone. (Young’s Deluxe is reported as being rebiased to use larger 6L6 output tubes; the change wouldn’t increase its volume all that much, but would most likely fatten up the lows some and give the sound more body.)

The Deluxe’s hot, hotter, and hottest gain structure brings us to the second part of Young’s lead/feedback tone equation: the settings. In order to access the Deluxe’s varying degrees of overdrive, Young uses a custom-made amp-control switching device known simply as “the Whizzer.†Consisting of two parts, the foot controller and the mechanical automated switching device that physically turns the amps knobs, the Whizzer allows Young to stomp a footswitch on the floor to command the unit to twist the Deluxe’s volume and tone controls to any of a number of carefully determined preset positions. As such, and rather incredibly—if you’re familiar with the Neil Young overdrive sound—he uses no booster, overdrive, or distortion pedals to achieve his unhinged tone; just the little 50-year-old tweed Deluxe, and the Whizzer.

Young does, however, use a range of pedals and devices to create effects sounds in and of themselves. He relies heavily on a particular vintage Fender tube reverb unit, which is set up with a separate spring pan mounted to the top of a microphone stand that is anchored on the cement floor below the stage he is playing on (often with a hole drilled through the floor to bring springs and tube-reverb chassis close enough together!). The convoluted arrangement is undertaken in order to avoid the disruptive, wet “sproing†sound that ensues when you stomp on a stage with a lively spring reverb unit sitting on it. Young also makes use of an analog delay, an octave divider, a flanger, and a digital delay.

Neil Young’s electric guitar tone stems from relatively basic piece of equipment, although his means of achieving his desired sounds and settings are fairly complex. Short of modifying two pieces of prized vintage gear and building your own Whizzer, run a bright but powerful guitar into a simple, low-output tube amp and give it all the gusto and emotion you can muster. That, in the end, is what’s at the heart of the Neil Young guitar solo after all.