JOE BONAMASSA Blues, rock, acoustic & more
Richard Barrett goes in deep to analyse important facets of Joe’s style and influences, with four fully tabbed sample pieces and three bespoke backing tracks.
Bonamassa has forged an astonishing career and is now one of the top selling guitar artists of all. Richard Barrett highlights some of his best licks, all fully tabbed with backing tracks.
Joe Bonamassa took up guitar at the tender age of four, inspired by his father’s collection of British blues records. By the age of 12, he was spending most weekends gigging in and around the New York area using his tried and trusted ’72 Strat, Rosie - a present from his father. Surely the young Joe would have been delighted to forsee the astonishing collection of vintage guitars and amps he was to amass over the coming years, along with a bewildering assortment of signature models.
A genuine and very knowledgeable ‘guitar geek’, Joe plays just about every classic guitar design you could name, including Strats, Teles, 335s and Flying Vs (and owns several examples of each to boot), but he is probably most associated with the Gibson Les Paul, just like his biggest influences, Clapton, Beck and Page. Though he acknowledges traditional blues artists like Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker and BB King - who he opened for as a young teenager back in 1989 - Joe credits bands such as Humble Pie, Mahogany Rush and Free as his most profound influences.
Having been down the traditional Marshall head with 4x12 and pedal board route, and then an array of multiple boutique heads and cabs, these days Joe plugs straight into a backline of Fender Bassmans and Tweed Twins - two of each, driving the amps hard. As various photos and features on his stage set-up have shown, the amps are screened off with clear perspex shields on stage to keep levels manageable for the front-of-house sound engineer. To clean up his tone, Joe rolls back the volume on his guitar. He is particularly expert in his manipulation of the guitar’s controls, modelling his approach on his heroes, who had no choice but to develop these skills in an era when multiple gain stages via pedals or channel switching amps was simply not an option. A quick search online should turn up some very interesting interviews covering this.
The demo pieces in this feature are designed to encapsulate four different aspects of Joe’s style: the more traditional British influenced blues like his main band; solo acoustic blues with a bit of shredding thrown in; Led Zeppelin style riffing (with a solo, of course) inspired by Black Country Communion, featuring the legendary Glenn Hughes; and finally a jazz-funk-fusion piece modelled on Rock Candy Funk Party, whose name pretty much speaks for itself. You can hear Joe changing his approach to fit with each style, echoing classic Clapton phrases when approaching the more traditional style blues, through to a much more ‘outside’, less Pentatonic flavour on the jazzier material.
One thing that stays constant is Joe’s confident attack - you don’t ever hear him fluffing his way through half formed ideas. He is a player with a mission to constantly improve - his own take on practicing is that you have to commit “all the way”. That doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) mean punishing eight-hour practice sessions though; just a methodical approach to incrementally improving your skills through constant evaluation and reappraisal. Have fun and enjoy the examples!
a genuine and very knowledgaBle guitar ‘geek’, Joe plays Just aBout every classic guitar design you could name