Research his equipment and of course, his guitars. Whie he was amazing, he had some incredible guitars and amps.

Just a TS808 over the clean channel with the tone and drive set to about 12 o'clock sounds to my ears pretty close.....

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I don't care for the blooze but I can listen to SRV all day.

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"Music is what feelings sound like"

It's the result of the perfect blend of string rattle and fret buzz along with the perfect blend of overdrive, distortion, and volume.

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"The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst." J. Edgar Hoover

Getting a clean, slightly dirty sound isn't too hard if you have a tube amp. Just turn it up all the way and you're there.

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I mentioned this in the amp forum yesterday. I find using two amps at once is particularly useful for blues and blues based rock. I'll use my Radial Twin-City to run two amps simultaneously. A big amp and a little amp. The big one being clean and the little one being dirty. It is a very useful sound.

Stevie was frequently in the habit of daisy chaining several amps together. Some of the harder to believe stories (legends) about him involve chains of 18 and 20 amps.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

Agreed. It's the kind of tone which if you play quietly, sounds a bit thin and too 'nice', but when you're moving some air in front of a band, all becomes clear.

I'm (GASP!) not a big fan of SRV, but I do appreciate he could wring a decent tone out of an old Strat and some cooking tubes.

I'm sorry, but you will never duplicate SRV or his sound. It comes from a higher being and a emotion beyond most mortals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2y6xx2q ... re=related

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Gary

I'm with you on that Gary. Two other little things, heavy strings and tuning. Oh, hell, he could have made a banjo sound great.





















Stevie Ray Vaughan's Sound: The Amps

Posted 06/21/2011 at 11:57am | by Guitar World Staff



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Stevie Ray plays atop his amp.

Throughout his career Stevie Ray Vaughan used a myriad of different amps, often in different configurations with each other. His primary amps were Marshalls and Fenders, though he also used Mesa Boogies and Dumbles.

Vaughan's on-stage amplification differed from his studio set-up. Early in his career, Vaughan used a Marshall 4140 Club & Country with JBL speakers for his clean tone, and two 1964 Fender Vibroverbs for distortion when performing. He eventually traded the Club & Country in and began using Fender Super Reverbs, 200-watt Marshall Plexis and Majors, and a Howard Dumble Steel String Singer.

In the studio, Vaughan's amp use became even more intricate. Still relying on Super Reverbs, Vibroverbs and Dumbles, Vaughan incorporated Marshall and Fender Bassman bass amps, with 4x15 "refrigerator" cabinets. During the 1989 recording for In Step, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble's final studio album, Vaughan became infatuated with a variety of amps, filling the band's rehearsal and studio spaces with 32 models.

Much like his guitars, Stevie Ray's amplifiers were often modified. Noted "amp doctor" Cesar Diaz met Vaughan in 1979 and worked as his amp technician for most of the guitarist's career. Diaz often swapped out transformers, filter caps and tubes, and occasionally reset the amp dials. Vaughan had a superstitious attraction to the number six and would set his amps to this level. Diaz would unscrew the amps and scale the knobs back so they would read six while actually at ten.

Vaughan typically played his amps in conjunction using splitter boxes. His unusual combinations matched with Diaz's modifications make emulating SRV's tone a challenge for the average guitar player, but a Super Reverb and Vibroverb split will get you closest.

Just a quick link, but Rene Martinez has a lot to say about Stevie's guitar tone.

http://logicalleadguitar.com/magazine/?p=289

You can find a lot of other links with Rene Martinez talking about amps and stuff.

He could make anything sound good SRV because he was that good. Have you ever seen the size of his hands?! they look as though they belong to someone two feet taller. That certainly is a big help when you have hands like that. Another guy who had hands like that was Tal Farlow, they nicknamed him the spider because his hand was like a giant spider on the neck

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Luck won't do it and ignorance can't

George Van Eps.

To me SRV's sound brings up a few other players whose sound you could definitely pinpoint as to whom it was...
Tommy Bolin was one, Mason Ruffner is another, Kim Simmonds. All te above mentioned had/have the distinction of always searching and refining their own signature sound, which if you are making a living from playing guitar, one had better be distinguishable from everyone else.....

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"C'est parti mon Kiki "

Stevie's Fender amps were all modded with a highly classified tone stack configuration......



And whatever their function was, he and Cesar Diaz took the secret to their graves.



Arjay

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"Here's why reliability is job one: A great sounding amp that breaks down goes from being a favorite piece of gear to a useless piece of crap in less time than it takes to read this sentence." -- BRUCE ZINKY