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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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.