He’s known as a vintage gear collector and a tone purist, who owns a museum’s worth of vintage gear at his Nerdville home but, with a new signature Fender Tone Master amp that’s exclusively digital, Joe Bonamassa has revealed that he now thinks he got it wrong.
“This is the King Cork Sniffer with one of the largest amp collections in the world telling you that he is enjoying his digital version of a high-power Twin more than his tube ones,” he told Guitar World in a new video interview (below).
It’s an acknowledgement of how far modeling tech has come in recent history. “I wanted to be true north going, ‘Yeah, it’s tubes all the way. I’m taking this to the end of my career. I’ll be burning glass and filaments for the rest of my life.’ I probably would have said that in 2022 or ‘23, but we’re in ‘26 and honestly, the technology is incredible.”
He’s marvelled at how Fender has been able to take his “Steven Segal” Twin (named after the actor he bought it off) and “analyze each component, each resistor,” to make for a scrupulous copy.
The process was exhausting, too, taking two whole years. During that period, Fender sent him a Tone Master ‘59 Bassman, and he started to see the light.
“I plugged it in and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what Bassmans do.’ A lot of this stuff is very symbiotic, it’s ‘How does it feel under the strings?’ When I plugged it in, I was like, ‘This feels like a ’59 Bassman. And I like it better. It’s tighter.’”
There are other benefits of digital gear, too. Again, Bonamassa is willing to concede. “When you lift a Twin, you have a certain expectation of what it will weigh,” he says. “Depending on the speaker, there’s a certain expectation of how injured your back will be at the end of the night.”
The Tone Master recreation, meanwhile, features two lightweight Celestion speakers and weighs approximately 30lbs. That’s a lot more spine friendly, and a lot easier to cart about.
He adds that the Jensen P12N Alnico speakers that featured in a lot of the early Twin designs, “have a survival rate in my settings, of about 15 minutes.” That simply isn’t a concern for the Tone Master copy, and Bonamassa’s amp has already been taken to the stage.
Still, his “gluttonous, obnoxious” three-channel amp rig won’t be getting usurped anytime soon.
“You get this gigantic ball of guitar sound that covers all the frequencies,” he says. “And you’re not taxing one amp to do it all. One amp can not efficiently generate all those frequencies in the spectrum of a chord. There’s not enough headroom.”
