Joe Bonamassa's biggest seller album, Blues Deluxe is a collection of cover songs and also includes four original compositions, including the track “Woke Up Dreaming,” which, to this day, Joe Bonamassa still performs at almost every show. Joe thought it would be cool to revisit the approach he used for that album to record what will soon be released as Blues Deluxe, Vol. 2.
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MusicTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:09 Hi, this is Joe Bonamassa,
00:11 and we're here at Guitar World,
00:12 and we're talking about some blues songs that I just did.
00:16 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,
00:29 and four originals, including Woke Up Dreaming,
00:32 which I still play to this day.
00:33 [MUSIC]
00:37 So, I'm 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,
00:47 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,
01:07 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,
01:17 however you want to look at it,
01:18 to overplay when it's not necessary.
01:22 So, I was trying to divide by two,
01:25 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.
01:41 [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.
02:04 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.
02:16 [MUSIC]
02:40 What I was finding too,
02:42 which is a really good sound,
02:46 was if you put both pickups on and with four dials,
02:50 you can, if you,
02:53 okay, right now they're equally on.
02:54 [MUSIC]
02:57 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,
03:33 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, check it out.
03:48 There's a lot of sounds built right in here.
03:50 [MUSIC]