Joe Bonamassa: His Influences, Technique, and Soloing Style

mid front and then to me that sounds like a Les Paul guitar plugs right into an amp, if you manipulate the sound to the point where it doesn't sound like a Les Paul guitar then you could basically take these pickups and screw them to any piece of wood , and that's what happens. be, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it's just a way of doing it, so when I look down I have an association with the guitar and what I'm looking at etc. I just use a front humbucker pickup, you get your Johnny Winter, you know, with the, you know, and the best way to achieve that is to just turn on an amp, you know, and the best way to achieve the optimum, you know, I mean , like slash.

I mean, the same thing was direct, you know, it's like it sounded like a paw from Les. I'll use Reverb, I'll use Delay, I'll use a Flanger, sometimes a boost, you know, but inherently what I want the rig to do is this. I stay true to what the guitar is now if I'm playing a Telly or a Stratocaster or I want the guitar to be front and center, not the gear, you know, and I don't want to manipulate the sound as much. where it's like you can't tell the difference between a Les Paul and a Telly because they're two completely different animals, so when you came in I told you this, I said Joe, I set this up, uh, my, uh, Jubilee because I know.

Thanks, yeah, I thought, well, Joe can play any guitar with any sound. He could set up a clean-sounding Telly through a deluxe or whatever, and you'd play that or I can hand you a guitar. and you would play that and it doesn't matter, you will adapt what you play to whatever sound comes out of the amp, yes, yes, now there are certain things that you prefer or certain things that everyone prefers, you know what it is, but One of the things about having a headro, I I mean both volume and frequency, so if I'm in a session and it's like I just have a Les Paul and I'm just playing it, you could turn this on.

Come down and get something pretty vibrant, is that Brent Mason? No, is he close enough for what we're doing? Yeah, it'll check the box, you know, and those guys at the studio in Nashville, I mean, they've got the teams really tight. where it's okay, the producer wants this type of sound, that type of sound, they have a button, they have a preset for everything and they have amps that they can switch between and they have the kit and you know, that's a I mean, they're amazing musicians and amazing musicians and really nice guys and they never called me for those sessions.

They never called me because I was a solo artist, so I have to say, well, I can be a chameleon to a certain point, but then at a certain point, you have to assert your identity, you know, or you start to lose focus, you know. , it's like, look at all these things I can do, but then you listen to your sun record and you're like, well, the real Joe Bamasa. Ra raises his left hand and then you know the song that starts, that's the one everyone wants to hear, not all this awesome stuff you know, so they just want to hear you shred the blues, which is cool.

That's what the fans want, that's what I give Joe, you're a great singer and you're actually a tenor. I would say yeah, I mean, I think the highest note I can play is uh, like I, yeah, yeah, yeah. I run up to the microphone. I could probably play a high B. Yes, singing is the hardest thing you do every day, every day, because it depends a lot on how you feel at that particular moment and you know what makes you like being there. a roadside singer makes you germaphobic because like me I can hear nuances in people's voices at the meet and greet, I'm coming, you're sick, I won't go near you, no, no, yeah, there was this .

There, this really nice guy who showed up the other day and he had a Les Paul that he wanted me to look at was a 52 that was converted to look like one of these, this is a 58 and um and the first thing he told me. I'm like I'm really sorry, I lost my voice this morning. It's like I said you have to stay there. I'm happy to chat with you, but you have to stay there and then he kept coming closer. as a man because I promise you I'm not sick, I said well we're in, you know where we were, I don't know, we were in Springfield, Massachusetts and I said the people at SAR Sarasota Florida in 4 days will thank you.

You when I wake up and I don't have a voice to sing, you know? Because I probably will. I just have to be careful because it's a lot of responsibility. There are a lot of people on the road and you don't want to. I have to do an instrumental gig Joe, we don't have any instrumentals, I mean, the last instrumental we played with our band was because we ended up like love with John Mlin in Crossroads, the last instrumental we played every time, I mean, like it or not , I sing everything you know and I think the best thing I've done in my career was learn to sing, you know or at least shout in code.

Yes, I'm not a great singer like you. You know I'm a guitarist who sings, you know there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, the L Georges of the world, which you know, well, well, there he is, you know, well, and you know, there's the Glenn Hughes of the world, you know, where, like Glenn, he just opens his mouth and you're like, I don't know where that comes from, you know, I don't think he knows where singing loud comes from and I mean, his core tone is great and you know, that It's one of the things. What you have to learn is that it's like when you play a guitar loud, you know you can't complain that the guitar is too loud when you're the singer and there's only one person standing there because the singer was always the hierarchy.

The singer complains about the guitarist. The guitarist shows up to piss off the singer, but if he's just one person, he's counterproductive, that's how it is. Are the shows different every night and how do you trust what comes out of the public address system? It's like it's recorded on tape or you're playing it back. Yes, he talks about the thrill of having someone actually be there on a night exactly like that, for example. example F, so if you're playing it's like when you start a solo it's like what do you want what do you want to do do you want to go in easy or do you want to chop them and then come back and then do it softly and then chop them at the end there's two ways to do it, you could this is like get it, you know you're going Albert King

style

or you know you can do something like that, you know which one "Okay, save a little bit for the paying customers, also save a little bit for the end, but I like it, I like a little value of I drink like, you know, and it might be the first eight bars, MH, you know, I learned it when I was a kid, it's like, If I can, if I can, I can get people's attention, you know, play something like that, you know. , that, that goes back to having a long last name that no one could remember, two failed record deals with major labels and a career that didn't seem like that was going to take off at all and I was like, well, I have to do something, you know, and I would come up with these little tricks, you know, and I was, you know, if you ever want to see people go crazy, um in an it's like hey, you want to start the Slow Blues.

Okay, so you can do it, so the way I do it is sometimes if it's just if it doesn't matter, it's like we're having fun, you know and people, what was that? I thought it's a different way to do it, you know what I mean, it depends on what you don't want to like and I'm guilty of this all the time and I have to do it, I just have to do it if I hear you. to what I'm doing, I'm okay, like there's more frets than just 12 up there, you know, play down here and you want to avoid the Wily wies too much, you know, even though those are cool, they're cool Wily wies, that's right, but you .

I know there are others, there are other frets, you know, you know, so there are a lot of you who do a solo in one of our songs where the first, I would say, 12 bars are all chords and it's great, it's just an approach, ya you know, and it's and the The way I try to make the sound is where the high strings and the unwound strings and the wound strings fade out a little bit so that it's not so bright and piercing, you know, it's and what I found is in the course. of a two hour show, if there's something to your guitar sound, obviously you need some treble, but if it has the right kind of treble and it's not too bright, people's ears don't get tired and I've been to concerts where they are great. players and, but man, I don't know if it's a disconnect with what they're hearing in their ears or something, but man, it's loud and you say after 45 minutes you say I just can.

I can't hear it at any time I can't hear it anymore you know and you know you have to be very aware of what the audience is hearing versus you know what satisfies you now I know some people who have been in the business for a long, long time. time, many more decades than me and I'm 35 years old where I can't hear anything above, you know, 1K, yeah, so what do they do? They just go, go to the amp and you see everything is ten cents. you're like wow that's when you have to go, you should probably take care of my hearing or trust the amp I like.

I used to set the treble to 5, now I'm on 10. Like, well, still the same amp. Talk about you. choosing your right hand, you can do these super fast alternative pi on these things and you practice these things a lot, yeah, and my

style

, if you can call it that, comes from not having Legato at all, I choose everything I do. I love the Ald demo, one of my favorite guitarists of all time, and when you like it, when you listen to it, you know, on a Friday night in San Francisco, you know, and all that kind of stuff, and I It's going well, so I was practicing. the fast stuff like Al, yeah, but I found out that if I had it, you like my crip tonight is if I do this, if I turn the gain up to max and bad example, it sounded good, but my crip.

My kryptonite is like too much profit. too much compression, yeah, because what I want the guitar to react the way I want it to react is if I were sitting here playing without the amp. Proper dynamics, all my dynamics are derived from this alone and ideally you need an amplifier that is like this. It's not too saturated or too soft, so I realize I'm a little rusty. Actually, I've been playing with Joe too much, okay, so I just realized this, even though you don't use Legato, but you do so many slides and bends that it sounds like this, it sounds like you're playing Legato, so yeah, I want say, a lot of times, like you're doing like a cascading crack that falls there, it's like that and I learned it from Al. like he would do it he would go in and out of intensity dynamically, you know, so if you're doing it, you know he I would start, you know, or maybe and I would finish very hard and fast and I would like it to be a bad example. but like a lot of times in music you can compress time, yeah I always tell people it's like when you're on stage, you've been on stage for a long time in your career, things happen slowly if a string goes break, oh.

Oh my God and God forbid it's a d string because that's going to make everyone mad, okay I don't know no one can get out of it alive if your D string breaks so you'll be ready when you get there. for another guitar change it feels like 10 minutes passed if you actually saw it in the movie yeah it's like just part of the show yeah you know that and when you're playing and you're playing faster runs or you're playing whatever kind of examples where you know it's like that, depending on the size of the room, where everyone likes to ride on every note, the artist feels like he's going much slower than the audience. so you have to understand that the audience says yes you are going to try it but they are not going to hear that, you know, maybe on the baked potato, okay, maybe, maybe in a very small room and in some cases your amplifier is hitting someone. on the face of it, if you're in a room that has more than 500 seats and it has some natural reverb and some acoustics, there will be bees, you know, so you have to know, so divide it by two instead of doing it. you know, put some space and some curves and some things you know so you can hear them and when you hear yourself live, which is always not narcissistic to do, it's actually good, well, you know, good training, you know , it's like you.

I want to hear you suck you want to leave oh my god, terrible, you know I had to do it. I had to do this a couple of years ago. I watched a couple of videos and uh, I thought, man, I'm out of tune and I'm like that, I never used to be something. I'm doing good, I need to work on it, so now I'm like, I do this self-inflicted wounds thing. Words, everything is slow, you know, so I'm like. every night live I'm like I'm planted you know and I'm like you know and I want you to know I'm trying to stay in tune with the with the with the you know, Reese wiin, which is great and the keyboards of him.

They're not out of tune, I'm out of tune, right, so it's those little things that you see when you watch yourself on a video, whether a fan takes it or, um, or you know, just record yourself, it's again, He is not narcissistic. It's actually a good way to work on things you don't realize are happening while the music is playing. You know, I mean, and when I say while the music is playing, I mean while the band is playing, because you know we can talk a lot about it. sounds and stuff like that, how it sounds like, yeah, on the amp, it sounds great in the room and stuff like that, but if I was playing with a drummer, if you know that ourwhen you see me doing this or that, they're the new guys, well Joe, maybe I'll do this in 10 years and I can have you.

Then, at the end of this, we can talk and where we are, we'll just be like, hey, listen, you know, congratulations on your latest show at the Fox Theatre, show me the pen, Joe. I thank you, it is an honor to be with you, thank you for welcoming you to your beautiful home. I can see all the gear that I see online, you know, it's a very impressive collection, very nice, so I appreciate that, thanks Joe.