 Green
DazeGetting to the heart of Billie Joe Armstrong’s tone. by Matt Bruck I’ve only been playing guitar for about a year and I want to get tone like Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. What effect do I need to buy, and what kind of amp should I have? —Tony Hoskins via teched@guitarworld.com 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. 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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