Guitarist’s Acoustic Mag Interview
By David Meade

Acoustic Magazine had the opportunity to interview the busiest man in the blues world, Joe Bonamassa. They sat with him right before his performance at the famed Royal Albert Hall in London. As they are talking, Joe warms up on his vintage Gibson Explorer as he prepares to rock the audience. Joe begins thinking back almost ten years ago to when he first played at Royal Albert Hall with his guest, Eric Clapton. “Somehow, that gig turned into something that people would remember and that was really the beginning of this modern time in my career.”

The main reason for the interview is to discuss the details behind Joe’s new acoustic CD/DVD ‘Live At Carnegie Hall.’ The concert features Joe leading a 9-piece group of incredible musicians, some playing instruments not typically found in blues. Joe’s hard work definitely payed off and stated that “despite the ambitiousness of the concept, it came out great.”

The Carnegie Hall acoustic gig must have been a blast as well, surely?

“It was great. Carnegie was a life-long dream because I was a born New Yorker. I was born in upstate New York and we’ve played Radio City and we’ve played The Beacon but Carnegie was this mystical place, you know? They don’t run many non-classical concerts through there. So to make it there and to do two nights with this incredible nine-piece acoustic band really means something to me and it was great. I mean it was really one of those nights…”

So there has to be a considerable adjustment in terms of technique when switching from electric to acoustic?

“Usually with electric guitar, with a clean sound you lighten up the right hand and you need a bloom. You can get the bloom out of a pickup. With the acoustic guitar I feel like I hack at them. Tommy Emmanuel: that’s an acoustic guitar player. That guy knows how to get the most out of the guitar and he really lives and breathes this stuff. Rodrigo y Gabriela – these guys know what they’re doing, you know, and unfortunately I don’t have that skill set when it comes to that instrument. To me it’s tuned the same way but it’s a different instrument. I find I barre a lot of stuff and I always play more like Chuck Berry on an acoustic guitar than I do on electric because I’m constantly searching to fill out this sound. Single notes on electric bloom and it sounds thick and you can roll the tone off and adjust. If you’re playing on the acoustic you’re trying to cut through a nine-piece band without a cable and, if you are plugged in, to me it sounds like you don’t have the right pickup system and it sounds like rubber bands. You can quote my father if you want; he goes, ‘Joe, you have your electric sound together, but you probably have the world’s worst live acoustic sound’. I go, ‘Thanks, dad’.”

Finally, do you use pickups in your acoustics, or was the Carnegie Hall gig truly unplugged?

“We didn’t use pickups for Carnegie. I don’t have the same pickup system in all my acoustics nor do I have the time to figure it out. The problem is I don’t know anything about that world. I know nothing about woods – I know Tommy gets a killer sound out of his thing but I don’t know what they use. You know, like all these National guys – they have killer live acoustic sounds and they have this mixture of mics and this and that and different pre-amps. I go, ‘If it’s got a jack I plug it in’, you know? And I’m like, ‘What’s this?’ ‘Well, this is a Fishman’. I used a little Tonebone thing on the floor and those are fine for that, you know? You can scoop out some of that really clacky mid that kills you, but, for Carnegie, it was just straight-up microphones and I think it sounds better.”

“They’re really challenging, acoustic shows, because there’s a lot of guitar changes… I couldn’t do the gig with a single guitar because I’d spend the whole night tuning the damn thing”