Anyone know of a good Tom Scholz Rockman clone?

Wow, I had one about 16 years ago. I bet I paid less than $200 for it. Great practice amp when I was on the fire dept.

Saved my pennies and bought one when they first came out when I was a teenager. Kept it for a few years then sold it to a pawn shop along with some other stuff when I was broke. I was a HUGE Boston fan back then. That said, the Rockman never really blew me away; it was neat getting that Scholz sound but outside of that...meh.

Decent used ones for $250, not bad considering what pedals are going for.

While I was and am a big Boston fan, I never got too deep into trying to recreate the sound.

I saw something a while back that lead me to believe the sound initially was created by scooping out the guitar mids with EQ and then tracking many, many layers of guitar. Is that correct?

If that is the case, then I guess he Rockman recreates that sound from a single guitar?  Probably out of necessity for playing live shows.

How far off am I on this?

Edited to add:

I know that as much as Tom Scholz was a musical mastermind he was also an electronic genius of sorts as well.

Compression is a huge part of that big sound. Add mild compression and keep the distortion fairly low, or use an overdrive instead.

Excessive distortion is what makes the tone sound muddy and lifeless. A really great example of this distortion weirdness is AC/DC: when you consider their music and their reputation as an iconic hard rock band, you immediately think about their distorted guitars and searing leads. In reality, both Angus and Mal played with a fairly clean tone. Listen really closely and you'll hear in on the vast majority of their stuff.  What makes the sound so aggressive and immediate is the compression, which in their case came from them having their Marshall amps cranked way up.  Both Angus and Mal used no pedals for most of their recording; they plugged straight in.

Many players use way too mush distortion.  That misspelling was on purpose 

Scholz ran his Marshall amps through his Power Soak (the attenuator he built).  He used this setup to track all his electric guitar sounds on the first record.  He analyzed that amp sound and developed the circuit to replicate that compressed tone electronically for the X100 and stuck it, along with overdrive, chorus, delay and reverb into a little box the size of a Cuban sandwich.  He did okay.

Many records were made in the 80s using the X100 and his larger Rockman rack gear.  Your Love, by The Outfield, is a good example of this.

Jeez. I still have the box, too.


Hmmm...

Good point.

I was going to post, with a few pedals you can probably get close, although it won't be an all-in-one box.

But this makes sense too, it would probably cost more than the current prices of a Rockman to approximate the sound.

FWIW, I had one back in the late 80s. I loved it, but it crapped out and chunked it. Which was foolish, it was probably just a loose jack like Peegoo has posted before.