What is your favorite blues TONE?

Buddy Whittington does it pretty well here. It's a 1952 Tele and a Dr. Z Carmen Ghia according to the notes.

 

almost anyone's but my own

 

What I would consider a pure blues tone would be something akin to this...fwiw in those days Anson played thru a BF Super Reverb.

 

This may be heresy, but I don't think the tone is as important as the song and the playing. If they're both as good as this:



Or this:



I'm a very happy camper as a listener.

 

This young lady can generate some seriously nasty blues tone.

 

Summer 1974 in a bar, dancing with my girlfriend directly in front of Albert King as he played his V through his very large Acoustic brand solid-state amp laid sideways - 2 x 15" speakers and a horn. Totally clean, totally loud. Not a concert, it was a bar gig. That to me is adult blues guitar tone as it should be experienced. In a bar, in the summer, drinking beer and dancing with a pretty woman.

 

Many great blues tones but I really enjoy my tele through my 5b3 Deluxe clone. Maybe a touch of reverb.

 

Robert Cray by a mile. Matchless.

 

No wrong answers, of course. This is my vote - 1959 Flying V through a cranked super reverb.

 

The subject of tone and that Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton album reminds me of the story about when it was cut. In the spring of ’66 Clapton was in ascendence to Godhood in the UK and the band went into the studio to record. There were no real expectations as all they were going to do was take a day or two and record their live set into microphones. Eric set up his 45 watt Marshall 2x12 (with a Dallas Rangemaster to overdrive the ever-loving mess out of the treble) and a recording engineer placed a microphone in front of it. From the book, The Birth of Loud:

“The prevailing practice in studios was to record with each instrument set to a low volume, screened off into it’s own microphone. That way, the instruments wouldn’t bleed into each other, and the engineer would have utmost control over the levels of each element when setting the final mix.”

Clapton took one look at the setup, picked up the microphone, moved it to the far end of the room, returned, plugged in, and cranked the Marshall wide open. He then started to play, pinning every VU meter in the place in the red. Everyone’s. The technicians went nuts. The sound engineers went nuts. The producer went nuts. Everything went sideways.

Everything, that is, except Clapton. While everyone demanded he “turn it down,” he responded:

“No, I can’t, because if I turn it down, the sound changes. And I can’t get the sustain I want. He’s the engineer, you're the producer; tell him to engineer it and you produce it. But I’m not turning it down.”

Pandemonium ensued.

“As the stalemate continued, Mayall decided to step in. He knew how important Clapton’s sound was - he heard it on stage every night. He shouted at Vernon and Dudgeon… 'Give God what he wants!' And that was that.”

And that’s precisely what you get with that album. Raw, raucous, petulant Clapton in all his splendor.

If you haven’t already read it, The Birth of Load by Ian S. Port is an essential read for we guitar nerds. It’s a biography of Leo Fender and Les Paul and history of the parallel emergence of the Stratocaster and the LP. It's loaded with stories like this of the artists who made them famous. Well worth the time.

 

Best blues tone I ever got was a 51’ ES125 with the original single Gibson neck P90.
Made good money when I sold it but I sure do miss that old gal.

 

My favourite is SRV on that first album.

 

Jon Herington goes for that classic BB King, Thrill Is Gone tone on this Donald Fagan track: