Simply put, Freddy King had one of the coolest tones of any blues guitar player ever. He created the signature sound through a combination of three different factors. First of all, he used the plastic thumb pick and a metal finger pick as part of his aggressive attack on the guitar strings. The metal pick in particular on his index finger, helped produce the biting tone you hear on his solos and single string rounds. I guess he adopted this approach after spending time hanging out with Eddie Taylor and Jimmy Rogers in Chicago. Second of all, its tone resulted from the guitars he chose to play.
On most of his earlier recordings, he used the 1954 Les Paul Gold Cup with p90x pickups. He can be seen holding this particular guitar and a number of promotional pictures, take it and during his time with King records out of Cincinnati later he switched to a red Gibson ES 345 that you can see him holding on the cover of the Bonanza of instrumentals LP so the instrumentals featured in these lessons were played using one or the other of these guitars. And finally, there was the amplifier he used in the studio. From what I've read, there is some debate as to exactly which amp free to use for which sessions many people seem to think he played some kind of tweet Gibson perhaps an essay 40 whatever amp it was that he is apparently he cranked his treble and volume up, which also helped to create his amazingly thick and biting tone.
For these lessons, I am using an Epiphone night 56 Les Paul goldtop reissue cost me about $350 on eBay and there's a wonderful guitar. My amp is a little Fender frontman 25, our practice amp. I have a 59 Bass man reissue that I use for playing larger venues, but it's too big for making these lessons. I've turned my treble up to nine in accordance with what I've read about how Freddie did it, but my volume is relatively low. Again, given the small room used to make these videos. my guitar is turned up to 910 using the treble pickup setting.
Well, it's not anything close to what Freddie got. The tone will suffice for what I hope to share with you through these lessons.