One of the most important aspects of Billie Joe’s sound is how he plays. He’s a very solid player who has a lot of strength in his hands, and he is a perfect example of what conviction and aggression in a player sound like after years of practice and gigs. His tone is very pure—he doesn’t run many, if any, effects for most of his rhythm parts—and he has traditionally played through cleaner-sounding amps, like Marshall JCM800s from the Eighties and old Hiwatts. On his most recent recording, Warning, Billie Joe added a Les Paul Junior equipped with a P-90 to his arsenal, which he used with a Marshall half stack or a blackface Fender Bassman through a Marshall cab.

When turned up loud and smacked hard, these amps produce a quite pleasing, musical and natural distortion called output distortion. This is very different than the sound a player gets from using a light-handed style with an overdrive or fuzz pedal in front of an amp. That’s because output distortion results from the power tubes being pushed to their limits and then assaulted by tones produced by a guitarist that’s exerting enough strength in his playing to strangle the guitar’s neck.

Inevitably, a tone like Billie Joe’s sounds convincing and sincere because it results from the player’s hands, rather than from a fuzz box or overdrive pedal. What you’re digging on doesn’t come from an all-in-one effect pedal; it comes from hard work, practice and having a ton of conviction within your hands and soul.

As for an amp, if you’re not in a band and just want to play along to the records, you can approximate Billie Joe’s sound, even without an effects pedal or big amp. A small eight- to 20-watt combo, with a 10-inch speaker, turned up to 10 will work just fine. Fender, Marshall, Vox and Peavey make amps in this power range. Make sure you choose an all-tube amp, because tubes are the key to achieving the sound you’re after. Once you get it, practice until you can play the songs in your sleep. Then, plug in, turn up and play like your life depends on it. All the while, keep thinking about what conviction strength and confidence should sound like.

I have a Fender Blues Junior amp and I crank it all the way up. I love the mellow distorted tone I get when I crank it, but how can I get a clean tone at the same volume? I have tried stompboxes, but they don’t sound as good. I thought about channel selectors, but my amp is rather small, and I am not sure if channel selectors exist for my amp.
—Cassistheman2
via teched@guitarworld.com

The remedy for your dilemma will depend heavily on how hot your pickups are. That said, if I were in your shoes I would try to keep the amp settings up where you dig them and roll the volume knob on your guitar down to see how clean you can get your sound. You may think that the overall volume of your sound will go way down if you lower the guitar’s volume knob, but you may be pleasantly surprised—you’re more likely to decrease the distortion than the overall volume. It’s important to remember, too, that clean tones tend to cut through and carry better than distorted tones, even at lower volumes. Listen to any classic Hendrix, Zeppelin or, especially, Van Halen record. Nine times out of 10, when the sound goes from balls-out to clean, it was done as a result of turning the guitar volume down, and the quality of both tones was great. In the earlier days of rock guitar this method came about by necessity since, at the time, channel switching didn’t exist, and players had no choice but to “work” the volume knob.

If your guitar has “hot” high-output pickups, rolling back the guitar’s volume knob may produce only average results. If so, you could switch to pickups that have a lower output. Since the Blues Junior is not a channel-switching amp, you could also consider running two amps with an A/B box, with one amp set to crank out and the other set for clean. Obviously, you’ll incur the cost of another amp and an A/B box, but if you don’t dig the volume-knob approach, this method may work well for you. d

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