00:00 [MUSIC]
00:09 Hi, this is Joe Bonamassa,
00:10 and we're here at Guitar World,
00:12 and we're talking about some blues songs that I just did.
00:15 Next year, believe it or not,
00:18 I'll be 46 years old and it'll be the 20th anniversary of a record that I did,
00:23 that's still our biggest seller called Blues Deluxe.
00:26 It was a collection of some cover songs and four originals,
00:30 including Woke Up Dreaming,
00:32 which is I still play to this day.
00:33 [MUSIC]
00:36 So without an acoustic guitar,
00:39 this would just be silly.
00:41 Anyway, I recorded a brand new batch of songs.
00:45 We did some Bobby Bland stuff,
00:46 we did some Fleetwood Mac,
00:48 we did some Bobby Parker.
00:51 My approach to the playing is I wanted to see if I had matured,
00:58 if I'd gotten better.
01:00 I'm happy to say that as a singer,
01:03 I'm a much better singer now than I was.
01:05 I'm still not really a singer,
01:06 but I can carry a tune better than I could 20 years ago.
01:10 What I wanted to try to do is just curtail this proclivity or propensity,
01:16 however you want to look at it, to overplay when it's not necessary.
01:22 So I was trying to divide by two,
01:24 maybe even three in my phrasing.
01:27 So if I was playing something like this.
01:29 [MUSIC]
01:36 Okay. So I wouldn't play that on the Blues Deluxe record.
01:39 So I would play something like this.
01:40 [MUSIC]
01:47 So essentially dividing by two.
01:50 For the tones, I was leaning heavily on the neck pickup,
01:54 turning up the treble on the amp.
01:57 If I did need to use the bridge pickup,
02:01 I'd use this thing called a tone knob.
02:03 These actually work on guitars.
02:06 So I would keep the volume tone on 10 on the rhythm pickup,
02:12 and then for the treble pickup,
02:14 I would just bring the tone down.
02:15 [MUSIC]
02:40 What I was finding too,
02:41 which is a really good sound,
02:45 was if you put both pickups on and with four dials,
02:50 you can, if you,
02:52 okay, right now they're equally on.
02:54 [MUSIC]
02:56 But if you roll the treble pickup down a little bit,
02:59 it kind of weighs toward the front.
03:02 [MUSIC]
03:26 Yeah, so that approach,
03:29 both on a playing level,
03:30 dividing by two, sometimes three,
03:32 and the sonic approach of just kind of
03:35 blending the two pickups together until you get the sound you hear in your head.
03:39 That's really what I use for Blues Deluxe Volume 2, and check it out.
03:43 Next time you're playing a Les Paul or any two pickup Gibson style guitar,
03:48 check it out. There's a lot of sounds built right in here.
03:50 [MUSIC]
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