00:00Hi, this is Joe Bonamassa and we're here at Guitar World and we're talking about some
00:13blues songs that I just did.
00:16Next year, believe it or not, I'll be 46 years old and it'll be the 20th anniversary of a
00:22record that I did that's still our biggest seller called Blues Deluxe.
00:26And it was a kind of a collection of some cover songs and four originals, including
00:31Woke Up Dreaming, which I still play to this day.
00:37So if it's on an acoustic guitar, this would just be silly.
00:41Anyway, I recorded a brand new batch of songs.
00:45We did some Bobby Bland stuff, we did some Fleetwood Mac, we did some Bobby Parker, and
00:53my approach to the playing is I wanted to see if I had matured, if I'd gotten better.
01:01And I'm happy to say that as a singer, I'm a much better singer now than I was.
01:05I'm still not really a singer, but I can carry a tune better than I could 20 years ago.
01:11And what I wanted to try to do is just curtail this proclivity or propensity, however you
01:17want to look at it, to overplay when it's not necessary.
01:22So I was trying to divide by two, maybe even three, in my phrasing.
01:27So if I was playing something like this, you know?
01:36Okay, so I wouldn't play that on the Blues Deluxe record.
01:39So I would play something like this.
01:47So essentially kind of dividing by two.
01:51And for the tones, I was leaning heavily on the neck pickup, kind of turning up the
01:55treble on the amp.
01:58And if I did need to use the bridge pickup, I'd use this thing called a tone knob.
02:03These actually work on guitars.
02:06And so I would keep the volume tone on 10 on the rhythm pickup, and then for the treble
02:14pickup I would just bring the tone down.
02:21And what I was finding, too, which was a really good sound, was if you put both pickups
02:47on, and with four dials, you can, if you, you know, okay right now they're equally on.
02:57But if you roll the treble pickup down a little bit, it kind of weighs toward the front.
03:02So...
03:17Yeah, so that approach, both on a playing level, dividing by two, sometimes three, and
03:33the sonic approach of just kind of blending the two pickups together, until you get the
03:38sound you hear in your head, that's really what I use for Blues Deluxe Volume 2, and
03:43check it out.
03:44Anytime you're playing a Les Paul or any two pickup Gibson-style guitar, check it out.
03:48There's a lot of sounds built right in here.
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