When Jeff Beck taught Stevie Ray Vaughan a lesson about volume
During his final years, Jeff Beck was on a mission to teach proper volume techniques. The legendary guitarist had his fill with massive ear-shattering volumes, which he used willingly and joyfully during his time with The Yardbirds and in his initial solo career. But as he aged, Beck became more interested in refining his technique and finding the perfect sound. It was then that he came to a revelation: you can still fill up a room without actually having to crank up amplifiers.
“By using the P.A. to act in the way it was designed – which is play at low level and use all the distortion and whatever else you need, but make sure you don’t come out louder than the side-fill monitors or the front wedges – you can blow the house down, and I’ve done it,” Beck told Guitar Player in 2010.
“I’ve done a whole tour with a Fender Twin when Stevie Ray Vaughan was going through about four billion watts with a rig that looked like an amp shop,” he added. “He asked me, ‘What the hell are you using? Are your amps under the stage?’ I said, ‘Nope, that’s it right there.’ [Laughs.] But we spent quite a lot of time dialing in the sound and getting rid of the squeaks and squeals. We’d raise the level and then tweak it a little bit, and then we’d raise it a little more. You can’t believe what you can get out of a little tenor 20-watt amp.”
Beck and Vaughan appeared together in 1989 on ‘The Fire Meets The Fury Tour’. The pair would often cross over throughout the night, with Beck inviting Vaughan on stage Freddie King’s ‘Going Down’ and Vaughan returning the favour by covering Stevie Wonders’ ‘Superstition’, a song that Beck helped create.
“I think Billy Gibbons is on that route as well, as he plays though some blown-up little thing now,” Beck observed. “You have to work in symphony with the amp for what sounds best, and it depends on what you’re playing. If it’s power chords, then you’d probably use a slightly bigger amp, otherwise it’ll shred down into a narrow bandwidth. Most of the time, though, you can get away with a couple of Champs – one clean, one distorted – and use the clean one to get more definition.“
“I played with this powerful band that had 18 pieces, and I thought I’d need a Marshall for it, but I didn’t; I needed a Pignose,” Beck observed. “Even though the trumpets and the horns were blasting away, the difference in character of the guitar with that concentrated trebly sound just cut right through.“
Watch Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughan perform together down below.
