“You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a great sound, and it doesn’t have to be overly complex”: How Joe Bonamassa picks the right amps for his gigs
Joe Bonamassa might be known for playing stadium stages and hauling around rare vintage gear, but when it comes to picking the right amp for the job, he’s all about keeping things simple.
Whether he’s sitting in with a band for a single night or flying in for a special appearance, the guitarist says that the goal is to bring something that’s “appropriate”.
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“The older I get, the more I prioritize my general condition and the condition of my back,” Bonamassa tells Guitarist. “If I’m in L.A., I have a lot of stairs. What goes down must come up.”
So when he’s just dropping in for a guest spot, Bonamassa keeps things light. “I just scale accordingly,” he says. “It’s only one guitar, a gig bag, a protector case, and a cable.”
Unless absolutely necessary, he doesn’t insist on his own amp, either.
“If I’m just sitting in, I just prefer to play through whatever’s there,” says the guitarist. “The only thing that will make me bring my own amp is if they go, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a Princeton Reverb’ and it’s a live band. Well, you can’t really move the needle there; it’s not loud enough. You’re just peaked.”
“In any situation, you just want to bring something that’s appropriate. You don’t bring a high-powered ‘[Fender] Tweed Twin to a small blues gig. It’s just too loud. You want something that is power-appropriate but when you solo it has enough headroom to where you feel it.”
As for how much power is enough? “It really is dependent on the drummer,” says Bonamassa. “The drummer and the rhythm section eats up a lot of the bandwidth on guitar, so if you have a loud drummer, in a small place, you need to balance the band. You need to have the power equivalent.”
Among his go-to amps are a modified Vibrolux and a Fuchs OD-50 (that’s switchable between 50 and 100-watts), which he describes as “a really, really wonderful approximation of a Dumble. It’s not a specific one. It [just] does that thing.” Plus, it saves having to cart around “crazy valuable” Dumble originals.
Recalling a recent show where he played a tribute to Duane Eddy, Bonamassa says, “I brought an amp with a lot of reverb and tremolo, from 1963, and tremmed away. So it just depends on the type of thing you get called for.”
“You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a great sound, and it doesn’t have to be overly complex,” he adds. “My rig is large. It’s not complex. It’s just [that] bigger stages require more headroom. In this room, a Tweed Champ would sound super-loud. All we have to go is 100-feet from here and you will barely hear it.”
The post “You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a great sound, and it doesn’t have to be overly complex”: How Joe Bonamassa picks the right amps for his gigs appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
