Joe Bonamassa Has Embraced a Digital Amp, and He Is Not Entirely Happy About What It Taught Him

Joe Bonamassa spent years as a devoted defender of vintage tube amplifiers. His new signature model with Fender, the Tone Master ’59 Twin-Amp JB Edition, is not one of them. It is a digital recreation of a circuit he has long trusted, and he arrived at it by listening rather than by argument.

The practical case came first. Playing the digital Twin night after night, he found it stayed consistent in a way the original did not. It did not run hot. It did not fatigue. The confirmation came when he played a run of shows without it and noticed the absence. He has since described the digital version as better and more consistent, which is a notable sentence coming from a player whose reputation was built on the old hardware.

The stranger realization came afterwards. Bonamassa says that at this point in his career, anything he plays sounds like him. A Stratocaster, an ES-335, a Telecaster, all of them get adjusted and reshaped until they resemble him playing a Les Paul. He calls it the thing that bums him out. It is also the definition of a signature style, which makes it an uncomfortable kind of achievement.

He remembers when gear still carried that promise. A DigiTech DSP-16 would be the thing that made him sound like Robben Ford, a Super Reverb and a Tube Screamer would be the thing that made him sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan. The purchases happened. The transformation did not. Even Gary Moore’s Soldano from the Still Got the Blues era, plugged in for the first time, produced Bonamassa.

There is a tension worth noting in a musician endorsing a machine partly because it is predictable, then describing predictability as the thing that troubles his playing. The amp solves a problem of consistency. The other problem, the one about discovery, has no setting on it.