"I serve both masters..."

January 1, 2017 1:41 PM

Welcome to Nerdville: Joe Bonamassa and his personal guitar and amp collection
posted by dfm500 (38 comments total)

Wow.

I own 7 Fender guitars and 4 Fender amps and thought I was doing alright. An astonishing collection and I love that they all get played. A fine instrument under protective glass is a sad sight.
posted by spitbull at 2:20 PM on January 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

Really nice gear.

The irony of bemoaning that young and poor musicians can't afford old gear anymore while sitting amongst hundreds of pieces of it does seem to be lost on him though.
posted by deadwax at 3:03 PM on January 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

All that gear; Plays tired-ass old blues lick, every time.

People LOOOOVE the Blues. Blows my mind.
posted by humboldt32 at 3:12 PM on January 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

I never understood why people needed more than one guitar until I got a second guitar. Now I get it. I now have four electrics and each one has its own personality. I wish I had more space and more money.
posted by bondcliff at 3:24 PM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm digging the Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken baseball cap he's wearing in that video. Check out the original location in Mason, TN for good eatin'.
posted by grimjeer at 3:37 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

The way I explain it to my partner is that every guitar is unique like a piece of art in how it looks and plays. Could you possibly choose only one painting or print to own and appreciate?

The only problem with this line of argument is that we have become enablers for each others habits, we have more art than can fit on the walls and my study is getting kind of crowded with guitars (though I do hang them on the walls in part to emphasise the 'this is art' connection).
posted by drnick at 3:59 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

People who love old guitars love the blues, yes.
posted by spitbull at 4:21 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ho. Lee. Shit.

I knew Bonamassa collected stuff - he occasionally writes a Guitar Safari article for Guitar Player magazine - but I had no idea his collection was THAT big.


G.A.S. Attack by Walter Becker seems relevant, here. . . . . .
posted by soundguy99 at 4:23 PM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

This was interesting! G.A.S. may or may not also be a risk of modular synthesis--I know it when I see it

not first hand, mind you

I just know some people, is all
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 4:30 PM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

There's a lot of guitar players that collect. Rick Nielsen has a big collection, Ron Wood too but I think he sold some off when he got divorced.

All that gear; Plays tired-ass old blues lick, every time.

I fail to see the problem here.
posted by Ber at 4:52 PM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Guy's got chops. Plus, there was a nice surf lick and a few jazz runs in there.

The only thing stopping this from happening at our house is money. I'm absolutely sick about the gear I lost when I went back to school, needed money, and thought I was done playing.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 5:52 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

One of the things I learned when I was a broke-ass high schooler, and it remained a useful guide in my broke-ass twenties as well as the years since, was the secret to shopping for an electric bass is to try out everything in the room unplugged. When all you have to go by is the feel, not the sound, the chaff separates from the wheat with astonishing speed.

A bass that feels like playing a baseball bat is never going to make you happy, and if it sounds fantastic that's just gonna frustrate you even more. A good tech can dial-in something that's good-not-great, but is never going to turn lead into gold. However the tone can always be changed -- by replacing the pickups or altering the electronics or adding pedals.

If you have to sweat the authenticity of replacing a five-way switch with an active circuit, it wasn't meant for you. There are a lot more good-sounding axes out there than there are good-playing ones, so keep looking.
posted by ardgedee at 5:53 PM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I completely agree with ardegee, with the addition that the instrument should sounds good unplugged as well (though arguably this is a large part of it feeling good). You can do a lot with the electronics, but you can never really make a piece of wood that's sonically dead sing. The cheaper, crappier axe can always have the hardware - tuners, bridge, etc - replaced, but if it doesn't feel right or resonate, there's a low ceiling to what you can do with a thing.
posted by Dysk at 6:07 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

I have a couple of cheap beat-up Squiers that I gaze upon fondly, while I lean back in my E-Z chair and stroke a cat sitting on my lap.
posted by ovvl at 6:15 PM on January 1, 2017

I appreciated his little dig at eBay. Buying use/vintage gear was so much easier before the Internet. Used to be every medium sized city had a vintage guitar shop you could try shit out, the owner could tell you the story of the gear, you could pick out a gem that played right for you. Now everything's on Craig's list and your buying basically on specifications. All the used shops around here are basically crap or highly curated museum quality shit that costs tens of thousands and there's just not that much in circulation.

When I was 18, working part time and going to school I picked up a twin reverb that had been hot rodded by a guy that went on to found Mesa Boogie and a decent 80's telecaster for under a thousand. I was looking for neither of those things, nor did I know much about them, but they were there in the back of some dusty shop and I fell in love.

My last purchase was an impulse 62 jag reissue I saw on Craig's list and after a really good set up and new pickups it's fine, but I'm not in love. I like the idea of a guitar safari but I think this is becoming extremely difficult to do with most gear getting sold by individuals who think their precious snowflake amp is worth more than it is, who didn't necessarily know how to take care of it or ship it. I actually feel you get better quality and value buying new.

Maybe it's just that Seattle is lean pickings. I'm going to start looking for guitar shops when I go and visit other cities now.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:43 PM on January 1, 2017

Actually, on rethinking it, my last purchase was a pretty sweet bass rig I got at a used shop here, so I guess there are still a few gems. Again, I had done no research, I was just in the shop trying a bunch of stuff out and found the one that was calling to me.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:47 PM on January 1, 2017

I'm not a Bonamassa fan, but I could watch him talk about guitars all day.
posted by billjings at 7:59 PM on January 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I have to admit I have quite a few guitars, but my favourite for quite some time was a Squier Vintage Modified II Telecaster that I found in the paper second hand for AUS$150 ("only played in church on Sundays", seriously). It has a great feeling neck, big fat sounding P90's, and just a great punchy sound with a no fuss rock and roll vibe to it, it's a guitar that wants to be knocked around and played hard. I'd quite happily pick it up over my American Tele that was an order of magnitude more expensive. If you're not too worried about the name on the head stock there are some amazing guitars out there at a reasonable price, particularly the Squier Classic Vibes and some of the slightly more higher end Epiphones, amongst others. The only thing I've found is that the more budget guitars are often shockingly badly set up and so initially might not sound or feel so good (I got an awesome Squier J Mascis Jazzmaster where the pickups came setup about 1cm from the strings!). But that stuff can usually be fixed in half an hour with a screwdriver and ruler. I totally understand the cult of the vintage guitar and would dearly love to even just hold and play a early 50s Tele or Nocaster for a few brief moments, but there is no shortage of great sounding and great playing guitars at an affordable price.
posted by drnick at 8:44 PM on January 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

I've got one of those Classic Vibe Teles, the '60s model with the sunburst finish and the bound body. I paid $300 (in installments) for it in a shop near my house and it's been my main electric for years. I'd been considering getting a Tele for a minute, but that one was the one I pulled off the wall, strummed it once without plugging it in, and immediately thought "yeah, this one's coming home with me." It just felt exactly right.
posted by Maaik at 8:55 PM on January 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

an awesome Squier J Mascis Jazzmaster

Hell yeah. My Squier J Mascis is one of the two guitars I'm actively using. I replaced the nut because it needed it and the trem because I had some money to blow (I put a Mastery on, which is expensive but amazing), and otherwise it's stock. I love the pickups.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:59 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

More guitar porn: Joe Walsh sets up a Les Paul
posted by Ber at 9:02 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

I love guitars, but I really love amplifiers. This is hard to explain to my spouse, who is tremendously understanding but, y'know...patience has its limits. JB at least serves as a cautionary example that I can point to and say, "Well, sure, I probably have too many guitars and amps, but I'm not as bad as Joe Bonamassa." To which the obvious rejoinder would be, "Yeah, but you're not as good as Joe Bonamassa, either." But my spouse loves me and doesn't say that. She may be thinking it, however. Or muttering it under her breath.
posted by mosk at 9:36 PM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

He kind of lost me when he mentioned his friend Steven Segal.

That and I can only stomach so much Fender stuff. I mean, it's great but it's so ubiquitous. Just like his blues licks. The were other guitar manufactures in the USA besides Fender and Gibson. (I have a couple of Fenders, but also a Harmony, some Silvertones , a couple of Kays, and a pair of Teiscos because I can't pass up a cheap weird guitar.)

Now show us Deke Dickerson's collection!
posted by kendrak at 10:52 PM on January 1, 2017

This was funny for me. I know who this guy is, I've heard his name a million times and heard about him, but had never actually seen him, heard him speak or play. So I've built this entire mental image that is shockingly wrong. I'm picturing basically humorless Steven Segal with a beard. Imagine my surprise when John C. Riley showed up.
posted by bongo_x at 12:47 AM on January 2, 2017

but you can never really make a piece of wood that's sonically dead sing

I share the mystique. I own a pre-CBS Fender P-Bass and a new American Elite HSS strat and 5 Fenders in between those. However, physics is pretty much on the side of the "tonewood doesn't really matter" side of the argument for solid body guitars, as much as I hate to admit it or concede it. The differences between ash and alder, one or two piece bodies, this or that finish, this or that density amount to very tiny, incremental effects on tone directly, relative to electronics and hardware. Wood contributes to beauty and feel and playability in tangible ways that affect tone indirectly. But the geeks with the meters and sensors have pretty much proved that the mystique of higher end (solid body) guitars being better because they use more expensive wood is sort of nonsense.

I can confirm: have a cheap Squier HSS strat, supposedly made out of Alder, but far lighter and less pretty as wood than my American Fenders. In every respect the Squier is built like junk, plated cheap hardware, microphonic and noisy pickups, sharp fret edges, and for sure very cheap wood covered in thick paint to disguise how cheap.

Thing screams and sings like a motherfucker through a Deluxe and I often practice on it when I have two American Fender strats, one a brand new Elite HSS Shawbucker, on the rack next to it because I love the rich, biting, sustained tone of its incredibly cheapass humbucker for rock lead work. I have a feeling that if I swapped my Elite's hardware and neck onto the Squier body (leaving that cheapass Chinese humbucker at the bridge, however, and putting Tim Shaw's masterpiece to the side for now -- it's a beautiful humbucker but much less wild than the Squier's $30 special that looks like it was wound by children) it would play better sure, but it wouldn't have a different tone. Likewise I have actually considered dropping that cheap humbucker in one of my better guitars (not the Elite, I'm not nuts) to have the tone without the sharp frets and noisy pots and all the rest. I bet it would sound nearly identical.

I love wood, don't get me wrong. I've been more an acoustic player most of my life, and there wood is everything, alpha and omega of tone. I want to believe the one-piece ash body on my pre-CBS gives it that special extra something. But blindfolded tests and spectrograms would seem to suggest the qualities imparted by wood to solid-body guitar tone are vastly over-stated by most guitar buffs.

Known as the "tonewoods do/don't matter" argument on guitar forums, this is an argument that can make the old Mac/PC or Yankees/RedSox rivalries seem like garden parties.
posted by spitbull at 4:23 AM on January 2, 2017 [5 favorites]

Plays tired-ass old blues lick, every time.

Also on this, JB is a ****blues guitarist.**** That's his genre. It's not "tired-ass" if you can play it better than all but a few living players.

There really aren't any new, undiscovered "licks" on a 6-string solid body guitar in one of the basic tunings unless you abandon tonality. They've all been played and discovered and many of them go back to the West African kora . I guarantee you, as a guy who's been playing for over 40 years now and who puts in at least an hour every day, that there is nothing you can think of to do on a guitar neck using standard techniques that someone hasn't played before. If you think otherwise, you just haven't heard enough other guitarists yet. Once in a while a Robert Cray or Eddie Van Halen or Django or Ali Farka Toure or Jimi Hendrix comes along and finds some new sounds in the old axe, but even then "tapping" techniques were around long before any of those guys, and even Hendrix's licks were mostly standard blues licks with inventive harmonic extensions and unreal fluency. Electric lead guitar playing is something of a manneristic enterprise (as is rock/blues/country popular music in general), all about how you *execute* and *combine* the standard gestures and patterns.

I was actually impressed at how good a country-style "chicken-picker" JB appears to be, since so many blues "lead" players who come up through rock and roll can't do *anything* with their fingers and without a flatpick or with a dead-clean tone. Not really surprised, JB is a technical player of the first order. But it was cool to hear him stretch.

Those "tired-ass" licks are the building blocks of most American popular music of the last century, certainly the last 75 years or so since Leo Fender and Bob Dunn and a few others figured out how to make a guitar louder. Saying you don't like blues licks because they are tired is declaring a distaste for the history of all blues-based popular music. R&B and gospel (and now hip hop) are all built out of the same "tired-ass" blues foundations as country and rock and roll. It's all African music in the end anyway.
posted by spitbull at 4:47 AM on January 2, 2017 [12 favorites]

Blue Notes Matter
posted by wabbittwax at 5:22 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

saying you don't much care for retreaded Clapton licks garnished with some Eric Johnson leftovers also doesn't mean you don't like blues
posted by thelonius at 7:04 AM on January 2, 2017 [3 favorites]

spitbull, I don't really care about alder vs ash or different finishes or what have you. I mean pick up an individual guitar, play it unplugged, does it speak to you? Does it sound good to you? If so, that's a fucking awesome guitar that might or might not be being held back by crappy hardware and electronics. Expensive or fancy it old guitars don't necessarily sound good to me (though some do) and cheap crappy plywood or mdf guitars occasionally are the shit. It's not about what it's made of in the abstract, it's about how well put together and resonant a particular piece of wood (or plastic, or metal, it whatever) is, and above all, how sweet it sounds to you.
posted by Dysk at 7:05 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

echoing deadwax from above - if i understand correctly, dude owns THREE 1959 les pauls. that right there is the better part of $1 million. so let's spitball and put his collection at $2 million total, which i think is low, but bear with me. dude is paying a decent middle-class income on insurance alone on all that gear.

something doesn't add up. he plays great, no doubt, but not THAT great. i'm inclined to think that he's part of the problem.
posted by fingers_of_fire at 7:22 AM on January 2, 2017

Dysk, couldn't agree more, but I do disagree that you'll really know how it sounds (if a solid-body electric) without hearing it through an amp and just by feel alone. Electronics are a huge part of the tone of any solid-body electric guitar. I have a beautiful HMT thinline Tele, one of the early 90s Japanese guitars. It is set up like an acoustic with a wood bridge (and a piezo under that) and a lace sensor at the neck, both that and the piezo routed through active EQ and blend. It plays sweeeet unplugged, with a vibrant acoustic tone (because it's semi-hollow). Plugged in it has a million tones, but not one of them sounds like any version of a classic Tele tone. I love that guitar but you'd have no idea what it was capable of (and not capable of!) without hearing it through an amp.

Yeah, I'd say JB's collection is worth way north of two million bucks, frankly, just eyeballing it. Hell of it is, depending on what he paid for some of that gear, vintage guitars and amps have spiraled up in price in recent years to where he's probably making a fortune just holding that pristine stuff in good conditions. I didn't know even very successful rock musicians of his generational cohort could put that much into gear.

As for tired old Clapton licks, fair enough. Clapton was always overrated.
posted by spitbull at 8:03 AM on January 2, 2017

Well, that's the hater word on Bonamassa - some people seem to dislike his music, or persona, or both, I guess.
posted by thelonius at 8:10 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

[ducks]
posted by spitbull at 8:10 AM on January 2, 2017

There's an old joke about lead guitarists.

Q. How many lead guitarists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A. Ten. One to screw it in fairly decently and nine others to say they could have done it better.
posted by spitbull at 8:14 AM on January 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

He has the ENTIRE line of tweeds in mint. That is so far over the line. Clap that man in irons.

Amps are a source of moderate obsession for me, but for whatever reason, vintage & rare guitars hold no interest. For instance, when i was in high school i answered a classified ad and bought a 1972 Black Les Paul Custom (one of the 'fretless wonders') from a guy. Had no particular interest in Les Pauls; it was a name i had heard before, so i gave him i think $400. (And like an idiot passed on the Gibson amp he was selling.) Over the years acquired a few Fender amps, a Vox, played in some bands, toured, recorded albums, etc., all the time with that same Les Paul. The finish was crackly and spider-webby and it was really quite beautiful. But then a couple years ago i played a friend's Gretsch (Tennessee Rose)--a brand new one, mind, nothing vintage about it--and within a week had traded in that Les Paul for a brand new Gretsch. The finish will never crackle, since modern finishes don't do that, but it sounds and plays beautifully, and i have zero regrets.

Nowadays I am totally this guy.
posted by Zerowensboring at 10:37 AM on January 2, 2017

Excellent post, very interesting, thanks for bringing it.
posted by Daddy-O at 3:49 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Loved it, thank you! I know of JoeB and like his stuff a lot - his "Black Rock" album has the most giganticus enormo-loudest guitar sound I've ever heard. Not for me, but damned impressive all the same. It's usually the first thing I think of when I hear about him.

I'll admit to buying a guitar, or maybe two *cough* but I'm the opposite of a Fender/Gibson person. (In heaven when they make you fill out the forms I'm putting "Fender" down, but that's another discussion.) What I've found is I love cheap eBay guitars, and the cheap-Internet guitars. And the local mom&pop sure, but I want a V, a shredder, a jazz box, a TeleStrat, one of those semihollow florentine dealies, the Bigsby, the headless, oh hey lapsteel and an acoustic that has a built-in recording device?? Well yeah. Oh and the bamboo one. SG type. Locking, of course! Except smaller, like a travel size and of course I play bass did you know they only made 60 of the Lemmy tribute Ricks, so how else was I going to get one omg the Capri Rick with the toaster knobs I forgot . . . and so on.

Fwiw, they're all pretty great and none cost much more than four or five fancy pizzas. For the most part. What I've learned is the best way to tell a good guitar is to play them all because what speaks to you might be some laminate Fakencaster with no tone knob or whatever.

*Then* go for the satin-finish thin neck bolt-on string-through maple fingerboard jobbie and feel for for mojo. When you find mojo, press record.
posted by petebest at 4:47 PM on January 2, 2017

I would like to hear Pete Anderson or Duke Levine let loose in JB's storerooms though.
posted by spitbull at 6:12 PM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]