How to get Oscar Moore tone

[ruger9]

Since discovering Junior Watson, I've been reading and watching as much about him as I can, and...what do you know.... he also is a huge proponent of turning the guitar vol knob (and tone knob if necc) down to get the old-school tone he gets.... he uses a variety of amps, sometimes old ones (Silvertones, Gibsons),sometimes new(er) ones (Fender Pros)...

I realize it's not rocket science, "the knobs are there for a reason- use them" LOL I guess I've just always thought of the vol knob as a way to get "cleaner" sounds, not a way to achieve a specific tone I'm after.... I always looked to the amp itself for that, thinking "if I can't get the tone I want with the guitar on 10, then I need a different amp." You never stop learning...(thank goodness!)

[klk]

+1 for Vintage 47 amps. Or any kind of Octal tube preamp fender 5b3, 5c3.

You can actually find some early Gibson amps, GA-25's and 30's and BR-series amps for relatively cheap, as compared to EH-series amps. And the circuits were pretty darn similar until the early 50's - all octal tubes. . . .

FWIW - the difference between Charlie Christian and Oscar Moore is all in the fingers and attack. Historically the gear was the same . . .

Missed this great thread-- some years ago I spent about a year going through all of the Oscar Moore material I could find. Yes, despite their shared love for Lester Young lines, one of the things that stodd out to me was how much Oscar's style differed from Charlies. Lots of shared swing motifs, but really different approach.

In the early Trio transcriptions, Oscar is playing un-amplified, and you can hear him beating the living hell out of his axe to keep his volume up. After he plugged in (and pix show him with a variety of different amps over the years), his gigs with the Trio had to have been pretty different from most of the things Charlie was doing-- Oscar only had to compete with a very restrained keyboard and a bass. Charlie, in one of those huge arena-style dance halls at the height of the swing craze, must've had his gear cranked to eleven just to be heard. Live, at a big gig, I bet that amp sounded way more rock n roll and gutbucket than is represented on most of the recordings, where the engineers could compensate.

Oscar also played across a big period transition in acoustic engineering, out of those early 1930s style octal amps and towards a much more hi-fi kind of sound that he seemed to prefer. Gibson's GA-30 and GA-50 amps are octals, but they sound more like a blonde Fender than like one of the older Eh or B models that I've played. I have a GA-30, and I've played 50s. Jim Hall loves them, but I'm not a big fan, myself. Early octals never had a really clean sound, while the 30 and 50 do. But the 30 and 50 also dont do much of a musical overdrive very easily. I'd bet money that the Quartet sessions were recorded with a 30 or 50 or something similar, because there are several moments where Oscar really wails on his guitar and the amp stays pretty clean until it farts out, which is pretty much what a 30 or a 50 does and unlike an EH or most of the older Valcos.

And I'll second the recommendations for David Barnes. I always wanted, very badly, an es150/Eh185 combo, until I got to play a good p90 into one of David's circuits. Finally appreciated why Gibson had thought the p90 was such an improvement over the CC.

btw, one of the stories told about Oscar was that he at some point had studied flamenco. Certainly snatches of it show up in this playing. One of my all time favorite players.

Gunther Schuller, in The Swing Era, has a nice transcription of Oscar's Body and Soul.