In The Style of Joe Bonamassa
By Miguel Ángel Ariza
We could have in front of
us the complete ‘world catalogue’ of guitars, grab an innocent hand, tell that
person to choose three or four random models and probably they would be three
or four models that have passed through the hands of Joe
Bonamassa, perhaps the current guitarist most linked to
the world of collecting – and a man who seems as passionate as we are at Guitars
Exchange. Maybe others we've talked about before have a similar collection but
it's very easy to collect an incredible arsenal when you start buying guitars
in the 60's. This is not the case of our
hero today, who was born in 1977, and poisoned with the music and the
tone of decades before his birth as has happened to many of us today, so why
not say it? We feel we identify with Mr. Bonamassa's tastes and tendencies, so
why not applaud him? We prefer that these guitars end up on stage and being
played in the concerts of a guy who spends nine months a year touring than see
them hanging in the museums or on the walls of collectors who have no idea what
to do with them.
So Joe, we are with you,
but the truth is that you are a real hard one to talk about in this section, as
here we try to summarize in a few lines the sound of a guitarist. Maybe we can
talk about this guitarist's style that is powerful and based on hard blues and
hard rock. His style is also technical and visceral, that mix that we like so
much, but perhaps the former rather than the latter, something that Bonamassa
himself acknowledges himself. In fact, he uses a thick string, minimum of 011,
just to make it difficult to run around the neck since he knows that in the
field of blues, speed almost never goes hand in hand with beauty.
That said we are going to
list some of the jewels in the crown belonging to his private collection and
that, we repeat, you can listen to on his albums and see and hear in his
concerts. Let's start with the one that, because of the number of times that we've
seen him live, we think must be his favorite model: The Gibson Les Paul. This is a guitarist who for years has been using
dozens of different guitars in his shows, many of them being the various Les
Paul models. In his collection he has not one but several ’59 Gibson Les Paul Standards and at least a
couple from 1960, one of them being the one that accompanies him on his current
tour. To this model he always adds a Gibson
Les Paul Standard Goldtop with P-90's from 1954 or a Gibson Les Paul Custom from 1953 with the same pickups.
With just that paragraph we
already have more than a million dollars in guitars but we can finish the
article by simply listing others of his jewels, such as his 1950 Fender Broadcaster; a 1956 Stratocaster; or one that has been said
to be one of the very first Black Fender
Stratocasters in history, from 1955; a Gibson
Firebird from 1963; a Fender
Jazzmaster from 1966 in the very rare original color 'sea foam green' ...
and so on for several pages. So as not to bore the staff, let's highlight the
fact that, this Paul
Kossoff fan, it might be that he is a voracious collector but it is the
result that accompanies that hobby which is much more important for us, and that
is he plays the guitar in an incredible way, which has allowed him to play with
the greatest blues guitarists in history and the praise of all of them
afterwards, starting with BB King when he was just a kid up
to Eric
Clapton years later. He is perhaps the youngest of the blues legends at
present, and although his style may not be as pure as he wants it to be, we
think we should celebrate the great guitars he continues to plug in, the great
sounds he produces and the people he makes happy thanks to great guitarists
like him.