Someone needs to build Clapton an amp

[Johnhenry]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9tC2qAEsw4
What amp is he useing in this Vid from Melborn ? I saw him live a while back and he had the normal Fender tone !
Johnhenry

[Darkbluemurder]

That Cream reunion really disappointed me just because of the guitar he played and the tone he got. For my ears, his tone peaked on tracks like Spoonful.

I agree. Spoonful and Crossroads. That was his best tone, to me.

+1. He should use humbuckers and a Marshall-type amp. But - I also always liked the tone he had with Derek & the Dominos on the Live album and on the "Just One Night" album. Of course the playing was great on both albums!

[dr. who]

clapton doesn't need an amp...he needs another SRV or JH to come along so he can have to pull off the road and say "not again"...then the new badass needs a Dumble It would probably just seem like a little dejavu for ol' eric.

[Tonegeek]

Clapton's tone on Crossroads when he was 18 yrs old or so is my fav EC tone followed by Layla. Never liked the thin Strat sounds. The reunion DVD has some OK guitar tone (mostly the amps actually), but nothing fabulous. This is off topic but has anyone read "Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument" by Allen St. John? I highly recommend it. It's an inspirational piece that should appeal to any artist/artisan wanting to be a master of their craft. Not about Clapton at all really...

[d95err]

I haven't seen much Blues Breakers footage so I dunno what he used.

According to legend, it was a Les Paul into a Rangemaster treble booster into a Marshall combo. (The Rangemaster is subject to some debate)

[Luthierwnc]

I fall into the HB's for EC camp. A lot of the amps he's played over the last 20 years would have sounded better with a 335. Forgive me for the semi hijack but I was at a Guild of American Luthiers convention 12 years ago and got to listen to Ralph Novak talk about the frequency composition of 24.625", 25.5" and 25" scale lengths. He had charts of different partials in the harmonic wave. To grossly understate the speech, Gibsons tend to emphasize the sweeter harmonics while Fenders have more dissonant ones (the 13th in particular).

Both are the gold standard for electric guitar music. When I think about my tastes, though, I have always tended to like Gibsons when they are used more melodically and Fenders for music with built-in tension. Back to EC, his tense music was mostly with Gibsons and his gentle stuff with Strats.

If you like this sort of stuff, the entire presentation, with charts, is in GAL issue #51 which is probably still available through them.

Cheers, Skip

[RJ Guitars]

I rewatched my Yardbirds video and it appears that VOX was almost the exclusive amp for that band... Jeff Beck even comments that he Knew they were on the road to success when the VOX guys showed up with "free amps - the really big ones". He also mentioned that they didn't sound as good as the AC30's but they really put out the volume...

Unfortunately there were very few scenes where you could see Clapton's amp... The 2nd guitar was generally a 335ish hollow body, but Clapton, Beck, and Page always had Telecasters.

I'll rewatch my Cream Video sometime soon and see if there is something else there in the way of amps...

rj