Blues: Clean or dirty?

Artie

Peaveyologist
Me and Curly were just talking about this.
When you think of "blues", do you think of clean or dirty guitar/amp sound. Or both?

What would you call the quintessential blues guitar/pup/amp combo?

Artie
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

i got a couple of images of blues playing.

Like xerxes said, i often imagine blues with acoustic guitar and a harmonica, like the intro to the chapelle show, lol.

I could also picture Curly throwing down licks with one of his telecasters on a tweed fender amp.

Then there's the quintessential electric blues action-SSS strat through a blackface fender ala SRV.

I like my blues to have either a very smooth gain sound like SRV, where you can't really notice the grit in the tone, or a very clean position 2 quacky strat sound. That's how i like my blues tones.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

I'd say Peter Green / '59 LP Standard.

The tone on "Need your love so bad" is hard to beat, IMHO.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

I like a gritty Strat tone, or a really smooth gain humbucker tone.

Of course, the sh*tty-old-parlor-acoustic recorded-in-a-bathroom-tone is tits, as well :D
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

I think, BB king, SRV, and Jimi Hendrix- Red House mostly.

Mostly Strat type tone or 335s.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

Hmmmm? That's a tough call . Cuz' everyone has there own deffinition as to
what is a clean sound or dirty. My Blues setup: Strat-APS(neck) Lil 59er
(Bridge) - Princeton Reverb. So clean is the APS in the neck. For dirty the
lil' 59er Maybe add a tubescreamer? Curly's 100% right about having a
Good speaker and tube combanation in a Small combo. I just put a Alnico
speaker and Phillips JAN 6L6 in my Champ 12. you would NEVER know it's
a 80's Red Knob amp. Sounds Chimey and vintage now.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

I didn't even think about acoustic. But thats definitely another valid choice.
As I was telling Curly, what got me to thinking about this was finding an old BB King CD in a pawn shop. I've always thought of blues as being a "gritty" kind of tone, like an overdriven Fender Tweed, or such. But BB's definitely playing clean on this CD . . . and its definitely "blues". :)

I'm getting a reasonable bluesy sound, using my 59's into a Blackface setting on my "J". Its not bad. ;)
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

I usually think of a SRV kind of thing. But my favorite blues tone is that dirty delta slide tone.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

I have seen interviews where BB was emphatic about his setup. His guitar is plugged directly into his amp, usually a Gibson Lab Series.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

Peter Green clean on Black Magic Woman - love that tone.
Hendrix dirty on Red House - love that tone too.

I like it either way as long as it's not fake or boring blues.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

Stevo said:
Peter Green clean on Black Magic Woman - love that tone.
Hendrix dirty on Red House - love that tone too.

I like it either way as long as it's not fake or boring blues.

Agreed. When it comes to blues, it's about the feeling that is conveyed through the playing and not so much about the tone, IMO. I think that my playing is much more interesting when I'm emotionally torn up about something, and I seem to hear that in other players' playing, too. If someone is playing from the heart, you can hear it, no matter which tone they choose to convey it.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

Electric Blues' got to be Dirty. I just don't feel the power of Blues on a Clean electric sound. Clean is for Jazz and not Blues in my opinion. Wail and make that guitar cry baby! That's the BLUES! I hear people play blues on clean tones and it doesn't make me feel blue, instead it makes me feel sleepy. Give me some Peter Green and Michael Bloomfield Les Paul Blues tone and a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon and i'm good to go :alcoholic :chairfall :smokin:
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

A clean tone that just barely breaks up when pushed hard, or played with a bridge bucker.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

Blues it's so hard to play. Tone doesn't matter as much as melody here. The melody pattens are so fixed that you have to be very ingenious to make it fresh when you are playing all along a CD or a gig. IMO a very few players have achieved the goal of making a good fresh blues CD.
 
Re: Blues: Clean or dirty?

But we are talking about tone!!!! :smack:

I love anything played with feeling... but to say something different I absolutely love Eric Clapton tone on the John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers album. So that is a 100 Watts cranked Marshall with the bridge pickup of a Gibson LP and the tone know backed off. Or something like that...
 
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