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. Next year, believe it or not, I'll be 46 years old and it'll be the
00:2020th anniversary of a record 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,
00:30including Woke Up Dreaming, which I still play to this day.
00:36So, I'm an acoustic guitar. This would just be silly. Anyway, I recorded a brand new batch of
00:45songs. We did some Bobby Bland stuff. We did some Fleetwood Mac. We did some Bobby Parker.
00:50And my approach to the playing is I wanted to see if I had matured, if I had gotten better.
01:00And I'm happy to say that as a singer, I'm a much better singer now than I was. I'm still not really
01:06a singer, but I can carry a tune better than I could 20 years ago. And what I wanted to try to do is just
01:13curtail this proclivity or propensity, however you want to look at it, to overplay when it's not
01:21necessary. So, I was trying to divide by two, maybe even three in my phrasing. So, if I was playing
01:28something like this. Okay, so I wouldn't play that on the Blues Deluxe record. So, I would play something
01:40like this. So, essentially kind of dividing by two. And for the tones, I was leaning heavily on the neck
01:53pickup, kind of turning up the treble on the amp. And if I did need to use the bridge pickup, I'd use
02:02this thing called a tone knob. These actually work on guitars. And so, I would, you know, keep the volume
02:09tone on 10 on the rhythm pickup. And then for the treble pickup, I would just like bring the tone down.
02:23And what I was finding too, which was a really good sound, was if you put both pickups on,
02:48and with four dials, you can, if you, you know, okay, right now they're equally on.
02:56But if you roll the treble pickup down a little bit, it kind of weighs toward the front. So...
03:17Yeah, so that approach, both on a playing level, dividing by two, sometimes three,
03:33and the sonic approach of just kind of blending the two pickups together until you get the sound
03:38you hear in your head. That's really what I use for Blues Deluxe Volume 2. And check it out. And
03:43next time you're playing a Les Paul or any two pickup Gibson-style guitar, check it out. There's a
03:48lot of sounds built right in here.
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