TALES FROM NERDVILLE by Joe Bonamassa
TOOLS OF THE TRADE, PART 4
For the last few columns, Joe Bonamassa has been demoing a variety of his favorite vintage guitars and discussing each instrument’s unique attributes. He began with a 1954 Gibson Les Paul goldtop with P90s, followed by a 1961 Gibson dot-neck ES-335 and a 1952 Fender Esquire. This month, the focus will be the 1954 Fender Stratocaster.
#JoeBonamassa #FenderStratocaster
TOOLS OF THE TRADE, PART 4
For the last few columns, Joe Bonamassa has been demoing a variety of his favorite vintage guitars and discussing each instrument’s unique attributes. He began with a 1954 Gibson Les Paul goldtop with P90s, followed by a 1961 Gibson dot-neck ES-335 and a 1952 Fender Esquire. This month, the focus will be the 1954 Fender Stratocaster.
#JoeBonamassa #FenderStratocaster
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MusicTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:09 Hey guys, Joe Bonamassa here from his apartment in New York City on a blustery afternoon in
00:15 January. We're talking about how Leo got it right the first time. We already did the Telecaster,
00:21 Esquire, and now we're on to the Stratocaster. Why the Stratocaster? Well, you know, these are
00:27 sonic staples of life, you know, as far as a guitar player is concerned. It's like a Les Paul,
00:33 a 335, an SG, a Firebird, Stratocaster, Telecaster. These are all the benchmarks of which guitar tone
00:42 is measured from. And, you know, you can argue which ones you like better. A Rosewood Strat,
00:48 which is more kind of like a Stevie Ray thing, or like I always call these like a Buddy Holly guitar,
00:53 or, you know, Eric Johnson used an early Strat like this. This is from 1954. And, you know,
01:00 there was a lot of great sounds. Eric Clapton used a Maple Nick Strat. So we're going to demonstrate
01:07 some of the cooler sounds that you can get from a Fender Stratocaster just by plugging in. Again,
01:12 all these videos in the last few months have been plugged into the exact same amp with the exact
01:16 same settings. So you really get to hear the tonal nuances of each guitar without any filter.
01:23 There's no, you know, special device. It's just a Fender Deluxe Reverb set on stun, and it's
01:29 tampered down a little bit, tempered down a little bit for the apartment so I don't get kicked out.
01:34 Although I own this place. Can they kick me out? Yeah.
01:39 [Music]
02:04 That's that classic front pickup. These do, these old ones do rattle around a little bit,
02:10 which is always fun on the gig, watching them move around. You can wedge the switch,
02:16 three-way switch, but you can also wedge a Tele as well. Check that out.
02:24 When they cooperate.
02:54 That's the front two pickups. Now we have the middle setting, which is great, you know,
02:58 for that kind of Ronnie Earl classic Texas blues, you know, Ronnie from Boston. You know what I mean?
03:05 [Music]
03:32 Now you can wedge it again. You get the middle pickup and the lead pickup, and that's that kind of,
03:36 you know it, you know it from many Eric Clapton records, you know. It's fantastic, and it's a great sound.
03:44 [Music]
04:11 And then finally the treble pickup, which if you have a, so inclined, you can modify this so the
04:17 tone pot works for the treble pickup, but this guitar is unmodified. I call this guitar Little
04:22 Wayne because I bought it from a small guy who was about 80 years old. His name is Wayne
04:27 in El Paso, Texas. Original owner, so I call it Little Wayne.
04:30 [Music]
04:58 And there you have it. So, you know, a lot of people are in one, two camps, Rosewood,
05:10 Maple. I'm a Maple board fan. I've always enjoyed Maple board strats. They just, the notes jump
05:18 off the fingerboard in a different way. This is a Maple neck with an ash body, and coupled with the
05:25 lower output pickups from the mid-50s, it really does something special. But you can go buy a Squire
05:31 strat that has a Maple board, and those sound great too. They do have certain characteristics
05:37 to them that the Rosewood guitars don't have, but similarly, the Rosewood guitars have certain
05:45 characteristics the Maple boards don't have. So, you know, there's no right or wrong, and it's just
05:52 one of those things. It's how you hear it, and how you play it, and what makes you happy inside.
05:58 You want to pursue happiness.
06:03 [Music]