Why Joe Bonamassa Loves Fender Tweed Amps

hey i'm rhett shaw this is my second channel and this is the long-form interview that i did with joe bonamassa for the what is the tweed sound video joe was super cool to take time out of his day to talk to me over a zoom call last week and uh we get pretty in-depth into joe's love for tweet amps as well as my love for tweed amps and he he dropped some serious knowledge uh on me and and now on you so huge thanks to joe for for coming out and and showing up here on the channel i'll have links to all his uh stuff in the description box down below the man knows a thing or two about how to make a tweed amp sound right so we're gonna jump straight into the interview but before we do that if you haven't seen the original video i'd highly recommend it check it out here you can also find links in the description box down below to support this channel as well as my main channel and mark your calendars for november 21st saturday at 5 00 pm over on my main youtube channel we have backstage live episode 5. that's a full band live stream concert series that we've been putting on this year over there and that episode is going to be a tribute to chess records which i'm really really excited about all right without further ado let's get into the interview with joe so in your mind what is the tweed sound i think the tweed sound really encompasses a few things to me when leo was was coming up with his amp designs you know everything from 46 he was knf from the woodies and and the early dual professionals and they were going for clean they were going for high fidelity clean and as the parts and his designs got more refined he achieved that certainly by the end of the run of the tweet amps um to me the tweed sound is everything from neil young and crazy horse you get a deluxe that's just with a jensen speaker that's just collapsing and it kind of does a thing um to you know like robbie robertson you know at uh you know at the winterland ballroom you know for the last waltz you know and what you do see a lot of common denominators and your favorite rock and roll tones your favorite bluestones even like those pictures of bb king in the live at the regal you know era with a dot neck and a stereo cable or you know whatever and he's plugged into a high-powered tweet twin why because it was loud and but to me it's a little bit darker it's it's more pronounced in the mid-range and they're very articulate if you get the right speaker combination and and speakers make or break the entire amplifier for me same thing with dumbbells you can put an altec in a dumbbell and you're like whoa this is real harsh and then you could put a celestion in a dumbbell and you're like there's robin ford same thing with it with a tweed twin or deluxe it's like the the amico versus ceramic component changes the entire sonic makeup of the amplifier it's they're really really specific on what speakers you use so off of that what are your preferred speakers for a tweet app well it depends i like i'm i'm really weird i like evs and very very high powered speakers for marshall amps i don't like what celestions do even though many have used them um to me they sound with a marshall it sounds pretty fizzy and a little bit too bright and a little bit too compressed and my kryptonite is compression and treble and conversely with a fender amp especially an early you know mid 50s tweeting i like what a ceramic celestion does i i think they it brings out the best in the mid-range um it kind of it kind of curtails the amp's you know propensity to kind of collapse within itself and it holds the bottom end tighter so i like celestions in amps that i'm using um high power tree twin i'll tell you where i got the idea pierre gave me a tour of keith richards rig back in 2014 and i'm sitting there i'm looking at the chocolate covered sir amp and then another one and i'm like hmm 80 watt chinese speakers in this thing i'm like that sounds like a good idea and then when i bought one uh a few months later it had already had the celestions and i go this is the sound you don't need to go look any further and same thing with deluxe's you know my my main tweed deluxe that i use in the studio has a roll of 25 watt mid 70s ceramic celestion and those to me give me the articulation and the flexibility about you know because really at that point between four and nine that's your gain how much gain you want four or nine i tend to run mine between nine and nine you know i default to nine and then i use my volume control right and you're using you said chinese selections you're using just the modern off-the-shelf selections and stuff are you going like finding old uk made solutions i use um right now because um i've retired my old twins off the road i've been using uk made joe bonamassa 85 watt celestions which are modeled after the chinese 80 watts and and i kept saying i go make it sound like the chinese speaker i like it you know um you know a good you know late 70s early 80s rola 65 robin ford kind of speaker that he used um even just the ones you used to buy for 80 bucks like right off the rack they're consistent you know so to me when you're looking for a speaker you can't don't don't hear with your eyes especially don't don't fix on fixate on where it's made stick it in there if it's working it's a win you know and i find that you know with the way i run the twins especially in a live sense i get about 45 shows out of a set of speakers before they they just they don't blow up they just start losing the articulation in the mid-range and you can pull them out and you see like the voice coils and the cones are all twisted you know you put 80 watts into 212 that loud it's a violent event those things are shaking and um yeah so i get about 45 shows out of them and then and then i and i i have them either re-coned or i give them to other cats and they you know maybe they use a higher gain amp and they're not playing as loud and that's totally fine for the rest of their lives wow that's awesome man so tell me about your uh your first tweed amp my first tweet amp was oddly enough a 1956 fender super that my father found in rome new york for the grand total of drum roll please 225 all original and it didn't work and we weren't ant techs i've never been an amtec you'll never see me with a screwdriver pulling the amp and going hey let me what does this do you know i've been shocked too many times probably goes to you know show you what my personality's like and i was like i was a kid i was a teenager i was like 13 years old and i'm like holy cow look at this thing it's a fender super it was all beat up and i did have enough skill set to go well let me see if the fuse is blown and i we got it home and i put a new fuse in it and it just fired up and worked so i lucked out and that was my very first one and then i remember um being on tour with bloodline in 94 and i'd been saving up my per diem and we went to a store in austin texas named one world guitars i believe it was a really nice guy in a super clean like wide panel 54 deluxe it was 700. i and i spent all of my money it was top of the heap in 94 but it was mint it was clean and i still have it and i spent all of my money on that ant and uh i have no regrets because i was like this is the coolest thing ever and i carried it around in uh uh like a like a rubbermaid container so it wouldn't get beat up and i just stick it i stuck it in the back of the and you know we were on we were in a bus at that point so i stuck it in the bay of the bus and i got it home in mid condition i flew with it i it was like my child i loved it i still love it amazing so thinking back to the early days what do you think leo and the the people at fender what do you think was going through their heads when they were designing these early tweet amps because like you said they were going for clean but to me there's nothing really clean about a tweed amp do you think that they realized at the time what they were creating and the impact that it would have on the music world well you know to me leo was a genius and and he got it right the first time most of the times um he look about look the strat comes out in 54 it's the strat change much other than the difference in the neck and whatever you know rosewood maple but the design of it is pretty much the same broadcaster which turned into the telecaster we're still playing those today um you know his early amps are pretty crude like i have in the living room i have a couple of the very first princetons they're pre-tweed they're the wooden ones and there's no volume control the vine the idea was the vine patrol was on the steel and they were selling them as sets and then you know he you know leo would start running to guys like you know bob wills and the texas playboys eldon chamblin and and you know all those guys that were playing that kind of western swing you know in bakersfield and you know and and they were all asking like well listen we want it clean the steel players had extra strings and they wanted it clean so then you get amps like the pro you know with the 15. and i have a couple of his his first professional amps that he made like 47 48 which are called the dual professionals and and the guitar input or the regular input is pretty mundane you know but it would do what it was supposed to do with two 10 watt jensen speakers and it would you know you put it any kind of electric guitar it was kind of clean and it had enough treble to make it sound somewhat high five it wasn't super high five but it was a high five enough for those days and then you plug into the microphone input which he had all intentions of people singing through and then it's like instant like trace ombres it's like tons of game so by the time he got to the high power twin he was going for as loud and as clean as possible to service the professional western swing market and and this this this this kind of we want it louder we need it cleaner and then by the time he's he switched to like the the showman in like 60 or 61 you know and got involved with the surf scene it was those amps the difference between a high power twin and a white twin it's like apples and oranges it they have very little to do with sonically and and an appearance and he achieved what he wanted to you could turn a white twin up to like nine yeah it's still pretty clean and it's loud and it's glassy and it's and it's like wow this is a super high five turn on high power twin up tonight it's it's chewy and fat and and distorted right so when you were when you were a kid what what was the first time you ever became aware of the tweed sound was it a certain record or player you were listening to or was it your dad showing you the ropes what was that like well you know i think what really set me down the path of of fender amps in general was was my friendship with a guy named danny gatton and i ran into him when i was like 12. and there's a video speaking of youtube there's a video of me playing poorly when i'm 12 in a white hat and at the time um danny was using a super reverb and a vibe luck reverb and they were just you know and i use the word daisy chain because that's what he's doing is like we just daisy chained them together input one into input two and go you know and i said this on a video over the summer and there's people like well can you explain the single path of a daisy channel yeah input one into input two out to the guitar right and then pray you don't get shocked and don't touch both amps at the same time that's th that's that's the signal chain i knew daisy cham and it was big and clean but he would also talk about how he used basements he loved basements and you know but he was also he liked a little bit of grind when you when you really either got into it or rolled the volume up but then when you rolled the volume down it was clean and clear because you've planned everything from from like straight blues to les paul stuff so we needed to switch gears quickly and so you know that's when it all became on my radar and many conversations like you should check out a pro you should check out a twin you should check out a high power twin i'm like what's the ipad well there was a low high power and you know and there was actually four variants of the twin it was 53 54 and 55 56 with two rectifier tubes i think the early ones were two rectifier tubes and then there was the 80 watt one so this just then i bought a book on fender amps and i just went down this rabbit hole and i just loved him i've always loved fender amps and and and then i started to realize that like the marshals that i really liked were kind of variants on tweed basements and you know high power twins basically you know a super lead 100 was basically a british spec version without a rectifier tube of a high power twin so then you're going okay i get it dynamics the amps that i really loved have dynamics where i'm in complete control of how much it's going to do and and how loud it's going to be and how clean it's going to be and how distorted it's going to be there's no extra variant it wasn't too much i noticed right away that too much gain would shut me down and too much compression would just shut me down as a player because i have no legato i play all i pick everything from an aldemyola guy you know yeah right italians stick together so tell me about when you switched from the old rig because i saw you in atlanta this is the cobb performance center this must have been 2013 maybe and i think at that time you still had the old rig uh and then on the blues cruise i guess in 2017 that would have been you had the whole tweed rig at that point right right and then now you're doing uh two high-powered twins your signature fenders and then the two dumbbells you still doing that so when what when did you switch to the tweeds and why did you switch to the tweets from the old rig so the old rig was really it was it was um i called it the anchor jubilee which i at the time was i had a delay a leslie pedal and a few effects going and i would run it through the effects loop because it was a nice the jubilee had a great effects loop was really one to one it wouldn't you know and they were cleaner and then when i would use with the evs it was even cleaner than that so they're really tight and then i would cut it with either a super lead or two van wielding heads which was basically a dumbbell style amp 100 watts and that was basically the fender so i really like the combination marshall fender and then in 2014 we booked this gig at red rocks and we were going to do a tribute to holland wolf and muddy waters and me being a crazy nut thinking of what it would look like in the stage setup i'm like i'm like so i sourced three white twins i thought that'd be the coolest thing because kim wilson used to use white twins on stage with the thunderbirds this is so cool let me get in on this so i bought three didn't plug them in i just bought them found them bottom coming to plug them in i'm like whoa this is this is no it just that wasn't going to work so a friend of mine sold me um one of his high-powered tweet twins and then i found one um in england and then i bought a couple of basements and i wanted to do the blues gig the right way i didn't want to just play hollywood muddy waters songs with marshalls and stuff like that and not have it and i even went down the rabbit hole like you know in this song muddy played a tailor with a maple neck and this song howling wolf had an olympic white strat on this you know it's anorak collector stuff and i remember being its third encore studios in north hollywood and we set it all up on a sunday and it was buzzy and it but i we figured out a way to get all four of them running without electrocuting ourselves in phase and i brought a les paul a strat a tele and a 335 and i was like holy crap what have i what why haven't i done this before because it was the way that those amps worked they were optimizing everything it was the the les paul sound that i heard in my head it was the 335 sound and it would sound different like the les paul would sound different than the 335 which with the old rig it just a humbucker sound like a humbucker a single coil sound like a single ball that was it i was like and then the big strat thing came i was like wow this is amazing and i never look back and there are times i still use four twins and there's times i'll put the dumbbells in it just depends on over the last eight eight or nine years the music has kind of changed a little bit so i require a little bit more gain so i'll throw the the the dumbbell thing in there and then if i'm playing like a straight blue set i'll just use the twins because it's a little cleaner and but they shake the ground right you know and it's this high headroom optimization of whatever the guitar is doing and if i go man i got some nice vintage guitars i'd really like to hear the way they're supposed to sound and that's why i switched and that's why i never look back i know some people prefer the old way i sounded with the more higher gain and stuff like that but i've actually hooked up the old rig a few times since then and i'm like whoa this was a lot of game you know and this was a lot this was a lot to harness and and it was squishier than i remember i'm like wow i used to use a lot more compression and and it's cool i don't rule it out going back to it but it would have to the music would have to dictate that sure sure so let's talk about the actual tone for a second and specifically the mid-range so when i found tweed amps a tweed deluxe it was about two years ago i built a uh 5e3 clone from mojo tone great little amp and and i built it and then that was my main touring rig for a year i use it in small clubs and big arena shows and everything because to me the mid-range especially between deluxe it sits perfectly where the guitar needs to live in the context of a mix of a full band not just sitting in your bedroom and playing but when you're in a band backing up a singer with a keys player another guitar player there's something about the mid-range of a tweed that i think works incredibly well i also think they're incredibly versatile amps they can cover a ton of ground and i've heard you refer to um the the term mid stacking so what what's all that about okay so one of the best things you could ever do is go to a pawn shop there's always some used pa gear okay and go to a pawn shop or an old music store and go to the go to the old rack gear section they're happy to sell it to you cheap buy yourself a dod a yuri whatever don't spend a lot of money buy yourself a 31 band eq hook it up and all you got to do is just push frequencies up and down to understand what they what they do and it's the same thing when the singer can't hear themselves sing in a in a club situation like the the monitors are too sizzly or they're too woofy well like what is what's the sizzle what's the woof and the the thing is if you want to hear yourself sing in a wedge you take off the top and you take off the bottom and you and you you kind of make it all in the middle same thing with an amp now if you ever want if your amp is sounding a bit thin or not punchy enough all you need to look no further than going right to the 500 hertz 600 hertz and notching them up a little bit that's the weight everybody goes well you you know like the the this intangible thing it's like when you feel it in your on the strings there's this weight of a tone that's the weight so in concept of mid-stacking so in my current rig when i used to be guitar player on the road used to the twins do a thing so they're doing they're the they're the jet engines they're doing the highs the lows as low as i get i don't get too low um because then why do i need a bass player you know and they're doing the the the highest frequency that my sound will generate um they're doing a lot of that heavy lifting they're also cleaner now if if i was using basements basements are a little bit you know they're a little bit more um focused a little gnarlier a little little in some cases not as tight but you can also eq those things to where it fills in the gap of the twin same thing with the dumbbell the dumbbell really does it well because or any dumbbell style amp because they're really narrow focus and a lot of people play it through john's like oh you paid all that money for for it just sounds really dark and you know not full range i'm like well that's going to help you when you stack it with something else it's also going to help you on stage when you go man this 50 watt just cut through everything including horns because it's voiced the right way and a lot of your favorite guitar sounds if you solo them on record or live they're not as full range as you think they're pretty they're pretty narrow you know like even like some of paul kossoff's tones it's the combination of the guitar and the bass that was also distorted making this full powerful so the more you can experiment with mid-stacking and and understanding that not one maybe not one amp is going to do everything for you and you can use that in the context of a pedal you could you could use the pedal to create the mid-range and the amp that you're not hearing from the actual amp right so there's a lot there's a lot you could do um with that that concept you know because it's all about achieving the sound you hear in your head and it's all different it's all subjective so that leads on to my last question then and i always like to wrap these videos up with kind of some information about how players at home can go about achieving these sounds kind of on their own like how can you sound like a dumb without spending six figures or you know kind of approximate it so with that in mind let's say someone has a you know a deluxe reverb reissue and a couple of pedals maybe an eq how would you recommend somebody go about kind of cloning the tweed sound through their home rig okay so first of all if you have a deluxe reverb or any sort of like like a black face amp um they're very scooped in the mids that's why they get that nice shiny clean sound the mids of scoot um where basically the the the tweet amp is the mirror image they go like this not like that and you have to be able to identify what you like about a certain tweed amp sound and and most importantly these use your hands and you know if you like neil young's like super blown up deluxe sound turn the reverb off okay turn the treble down on the black face we're talking about a black face locks turn the treble down about four or five turn the bass up and turn the amp all the way up the thing will start kind of collapsing you know if you really want to get into it then stick like a like a clean boost on it and really you know go after that but it's also you know if you really if you want like you know like rocky mountain way you know those kind of like joe walsh things you know clearly it sounds like a band master or champ or something like that then you just got to be able to go in there and carve out those frequencies that you like either with a pedal or an eq in the choice of guitar you know it's like it's it's the same argument people have about dumbbells they're like well it doesn't sound like a dumbbell well with dumbbell and and i don't sound like robin ford i know i've seen robin ford play a million times i've seen him play with what the one the the blonde dumbbell that everybody goes oh my god it's the best one ever and i see him play with two rented supers and a pedal and guess who he sounded like robin ford it's here and you realize he's got a light touch so if you like sit there and you go oh if you just back off the intensity on the right hand you go oh okay it starts to bloom differently his tool kit is just there to accentuate the strengths of his plane and that's the most important thing to to realize is that your greatest asset in your tone and your in the greatest tool you have in your entire arsenal or collection are these that will get you to where you need to be i've seen it a hundred times where you go i cannot believe that that tone is coming out of that ramshackle set of gear and then you can plug into plug the same person into all the best stuff in the world and it's the same tone they you just manifest it so my example of that though i always bring up is jack pearson i've seen i've seen jax play so many times and every time i've seen him play it's with his squire strat through a backline twin with a tube screamer and he has some of the best guitar tone i've ever heard because he just knows what he wants to hear and he just he just fiddles with the knobs until he hears it yeah my best jack pearson though i gave him when he played on uh uh reese wine's record he's played on reese's rec i gave him one of the first epiphone amos's he just loved it right he loved it and he's like oh man this is like really cool and i go jack i love you have it it's all yours and he goes really he's like yeah he goes you know this would be cool you know maybe not for my for my my swing jazz gig i said i said jack i and i'm like i go i go here's the price just send me a video of you playing jazz with the v you know what i mean and he did and he sounded amazing he sounded like jack pearson yeah it doesn't matter if it's a flying v strat but he just it just comes right out of him it doesn't it does not matter what he plays and that's a great that's a great goal for any guitar player to have right it's just have your own singular voice regardless of what you're plugging into yeah absolutely joe i really appreciate your time man thank you so much for coming on thanks man i appreciate i appreciate the uh the opportunity and and and and the and the lesson and how to how do you this has been very informative for me so once again massive thank you to joe for coming on the channel and let me pick his brain about tweed amps uh hopefully this won't be the last time we see joe over on on my youtube channel subscribe here to my second channel if you haven't done so already and be sure to check out the links in the description box down below thank you guys so much for watching and i will see you all real soon

Channel: Rhett Shull Two

Views: 125,714

Keywords: Joe Bonamassa, Tweed Amp, Fender Tweed, Tweed Deluxe, Rhett Shull, Interview, Bassman, Bandmaster, Neil Young, Crazy Horse

Id: qLyIWWafv04

Length: 29min 0sec (1740 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020