“When I met him, he didn’t have an amp. He would use my Twin Reverb and turn it all the way up. And he would sound like B.B. King”: Joe Bonamassa recalls the times B.B. King borrowed his amp – and made it sound better than him
Joe Bonamassa has recently recalled an era when B.B. King used to borrow his amp without any additional effects – and still sound bigger than Bonamassa himself.
“One of the things that I always noticed about the front guys, they always had a bigger sound,” says Bonamassa on the Jay Jay French Connection podcast.
“B.B. King, up until probably the last 15 years of his career, never travelled with an amp. You know, he had a twin back in the day for Live at the Regal. I can hear that. But in the ’70s and ’80s and early ’90s, when I met him, like in ’89 or ’90, he didn’t have an amp.”
“He would use my amp when we played with him because he just travelled with his guitar. So he would use my Twin Reverb and turn it all the way up. And he would sound like B.B. King. And it was a bigger sound than I got out of the Twin Reverb and I never understood that.”
Bonamassa credits B.B. King’s fuller and distinct sound, to “manually manifesting the sound in his soul [and] in his mind through the guitar amp, so he would lighten up his attack. The amp would bloom, he would dig in.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Bonamassa also mentions how other blues guitar legends, like Albert King and Freddie King, did the same thing.
“And Albert King same thing you plug into whatever sound bigger than the band. Freddie King, same thing, Quad Reverb and you know, two finger picks, plug into whatever. It sounds like Freddie King, and it always sounded bigger than the band when it was like this.”
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In a recent interview with Total Guitar, Bonamassa talked about what makes for a great blues guitarist, sharing it’s “taking on influences that aren’t blues-based. It’s got to be something that’s a little bit off the main trail, you know?”
Bonamassa also recently showed his support for emerging jazz fusion guitarist Matteo Mancuso by inviting him up on stage in Berlin.
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