How to get a blues tone on any amp

Find the edge of breakup

The edge of breakup is the setting where an amp stays clean under a light touch and starts to distort when you pick harder. To find it, play the hardest chord you use in a song and turn the gain up, or the volume on an amp without a gain knob, until that chord just starts to crunch. A soft note at the same setting should still come out nearly clean.

On an amp with gain and master volume, the gain finds the edge and the master sets how loud it is. On a single-volume amp the edge arrives at one particular volume, so a small amp gets there at a level where a big one would still be clean. Both guitars on Layla are said to have gone into one small Fender Champ.

Keep the mids up

Start with bass 5, middle 6 to 7 and treble 5 to 6. Blues guitar lives in the midrange, and scooping the middle is the quickest way to a thin sound that disappears once a band plays.

If the tone is thin, raise the middle before you raise the gain. If it bites, lower the treble or presence a step. If the low strings get boomy as the amp breaks up, take the bass down rather than the gain. An amp with only treble and bass, like the Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb, keeps its mids where the circuit puts them, so shape it with those two knobs and your choice of pickup.

Let the guitar's volume knob do the work

With the amp on the edge, the guitar's volume knob works as a gain control. Around 7 or 8 cleans the sound up for rhythm and 10 brings the grit back for a solo, without touching the amp. It only works if the amp is not set too dirty: past a point, turning the guitar down makes the sound quieter without making it much cleaner.

Your pick does the same job note by note. Playing softer for a verse and digging in for a turnaround changes the tone more than any knob, which is a large part of why the same amp sounds so different in different hands.

Pickups, and a blues tone on a Strat

The neck pickup gives the round, thick sound many blues leads use. The bridge pickup is brighter and cuts harder, and usually wants the treble a step lower. Humbuckers push the amp harder than single coils, so the same setting breaks up sooner with them; take the gain down a step when you switch guitars.

On a Strat, the positions between two pickups give a hollow sound that suits rhythm: Hendrix used the one between the neck and middle pickups for the rhythm of Little Wing. Rolling the tone knob back a little on the neck pickup takes the edge off the top for a warmer lead.

Adding an overdrive pedal

When you cannot turn the amp up far enough for it to break up, an overdrive in front gets you there at a lower volume. The usual choice is a Tube Screamer: Drive 4 to 6, Tone 5 to 6 and Level at unity or slightly above, into a clean amp set just short of breaking up. The pedal adds the grit, the amp adds the body, and the sound still cleans up from the guitar's volume knob.

Stevie Ray Vaughan is well documented using TS808 and TS9 pedals in front of loud Fender amps, where the pedal pushed an amp that was already working hard. Other overdrives, such as the Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, can be used the same way: gain low, level around unity, and the amp doing part of the work.

Blues settings by type of amp

Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb: use the Vibrato channel, the one with reverb, and turn its Volume up until a hard strum starts to break up, then set Treble 5 to 6, Bass 4 to 5 and Reverb around 3. On a Fender Blues Junior IV, Fender describes the Volume knob as preamp gain and the Master as the overall level, so set Volume for the amount of grit and Master for the room. Its FAT switch boosts the preamp gain, which suits a solo.

Master-volume valve amps: gain 3 to 5 on the lower-gain channel, Middle 6 to 7, Master for loudness. Boss Katana: the Crunch amp type with Gain 3 to 4, Bass 5, Middle 6 to 7, Treble 5 to 6 and Reverb around 3; on a Gen 3, the Pushed type is built for this sound.

Blues settings for a specific song on your amp

These positions are a starting point for the edge-of-breakup sound most blues is built on. A particular song adds its own pickup, pedal and EQ choices, and the numbers move from one amp to the next. When you want positions for one song on the amp you own, Tonelify writes them for the controls that amp actually has.