You want to rock? You want a great blues/rock tone?
Look no further than Sister Rosetta Tharpe. (Youtube link) Check out this old clip of her leading a gospel choir while laying it down with an early 60’s Les Paul (yeah, I know - it looks like an SG; in '61 Gibson changed the body shape away from the one most are familiar with to this one; Les Paul objected (long story) and so they changed the name of that design to SG…).
Watch the “lead” about a minute and a have in - just a classic tone and she has chops! I love the flourish with her picking hand at about 1:45 in…
That’s a great link, thanks!
She’s quite a singer as well, very classic Gospel voice, but earthy, not overly refined. But I kept waiting for that gospel chorus to bust into some serious bg harms.
Definitely using a thumb-pick, and I’d be willing to bet she’s using fingerpicks. I’m pretty sure she’s using a three finger style similar to Scruggs style banjo - I play quite a few of those licks she’s using myself (but on banjo)
Really fun to watch, and I’ll be showing this to some of my students.
God damn, that lady can play. Great tone too, I wonder what kind of amp she had. Are there any recordings available for purchase? Google isn’t helping this morning.
Recordings: a quick check at Amazon shows a number of CD’s, several of which look pretty darn enticing! Not sure about iTunes or other mp3-type services.
Amp: Well, by deduction/process of elimination - gotta be a small-box Tweed Fender or Gibson amp. Either way, sounds like 6V6 tubes (the heart of both amp types) - great just-this-side-of-breaking-up tone, saturated and articulate. Really cuts through. As an aside: I wish more guitarists took the “less is more” adage to heart, especially when it comes to distortion/overdrive. Setting an amp so it is just breaking up results in a FAR, FAR better tone that putting everything on 10 and then stomping on a fuzzbox - which is also set way too high. Players don’t realize that their heroes typically dial in much less gain - it just sounds big because that just-overdriven tone cuts through so well. AC/DC is the perfect example - there is surprisingly little gain in their guitar sounds…
Cool! I haven’t heard you play, but you talk a great game, so I appreciate the fact that you dig it enough to share it!
I hear you about Scruggs-type approach; I was thinking about Freddie King, who also used a thumbpick + 2 fingerpicks style. Hmm, I wonder if Sister R is from Texas, too?
[quick Wikipedia check]
Bingo says here she’s from Arkansas (close enough) and grew up around music from day 1…so she came across any number of players who used variants of that style…
I think I’m going to steal that move. Her playing was great but her showmanship was also ahead of its time. She was cool before cool was even invented. That little flourish with the pick hand looked like something Angus Young would do. She had an unsung influence on rock and roll, inspiring Elvis, Little Richard and Keith Richards among others. Itr’s amazing to contemplate the fact that when she was rocking that guitar solo, that was before the advent of rock and roll, not afterwards. One might think that she was copping moves and licks from early rockers when really, it was the other way around.
My Boss Turbo Overdrive packed up a few years ago and I’ve never felt the need to replace it. I just crank the amp up, does mean I play quite a lot louder but heck, I’ve got double glazing and in any case the neighbours don’t seem to mind. Thinking back, whenever I’ve been playing for real* I’ve used output stage** overdrive, not FX pedals. This makes for an interesting experience for the audience in a small venue with a Telecaster and 100W valve head.
in front of people or recording, as opposed to trying to keep up with Steve Vai in the bedroom.
** is this geeky enough yet?
To be fair most of us don’t get to play at the kind of volume where sheer hand strength and tone start to naturally overdrive the amp, but there are more than a few live players who could stand to learn that lesson. The overdrive/gain knobs or the cheesy floor pedals help in that most common of gigs, rocking the guest room without having your girl come in a pull a Twisted Sister video on you.
Of course you’re right. You have to be willing to get a small-watt amp that breaks up tonally at the right level of loudness - for bedroom practice and small gigs. That’s a different amp than your typicall rock-star amp. Most players try to get what their heroes play - but they are playing in front of a huge crowd! So it can be tricky to figure out how to replicate their sound in a bedroom setting. There’s a few super-pricey hand-made amps that do this - kinda like Harley-Davidson’s they are marketed to mid-life crisis types (like me!) who are willing to spend way too much money on their hobbies. But I am not spending $2,000 on a Carr Mercury because it rocks out on 1/10th of a watt of power…
Current ‘practice’ amp 2 * EL84 about 15-20 Watts. Not deafening but above civilised for the front room. The old Marshall (which doesn’t get an outing these days) 2 * EL34. No master volume. Wayyy too loud for the front room.
Laney 100 head 4 * EL34s, yup loud. I used a reel to reel tape deck as a preamp, the Tele with no help couldn’t really get the overdrive going properly.
