Guitar singers have truly been made by Eric Clapton…
This time, Jared James Nichols is showing us how to play the guitar solo from Cream’s song Sunshine of Your Love in a tabbed video lesson on the Gibson App.
Nichols, who has chosen his 1952 Gibson Les Paul Standard, “Dorothy,” for a video that is currently available for viewing on the Gibson App YouTube channel, need not worry about anything because Eric Clapton’s Sunshine Of Your Love solo is an all-time classic and serves as a useful case study in phrasing, feel, and ultimately great tone.
We’d think it’s worth checking this out even if you already know how to play Sunshine…, if only to hear this electric guitar that has been miraculously revived in action.
Dorothy’s guitar narrative is unmatched by any other; Nichols’ Les Paul was among the first Les Pauls was the greatest artist of all time, but before it was revived, it was completely destroyed in a tornado and only its body was found. For the sake of this lesson, this amazing instrument may effectively replace Clapton’s 1964 “Fool” Gibson SG.
“This solo is all about the bending, vibrato, tone, and attack, so it’s really awesome because that’s what it’s all about,” explains Nichols. Make your guitar sing all the way through this solo.
That’s the concept. That’s what Clapton accomplished in 1967 when he released Sunshine Of Your Love, which marked the formal introduction of one of the most recognizable guitar tones in rock history—the “woman tone,” so named because Slowhand thought it made his guitar sound like a female vocalist. Over the years, numerous attempts have been made to make it again.
Even more, Aclam Guitars included it in The Woman Tone, a guitar effects pedal that features a two-stage drive and may give your pedalboard some classic Plexi flavors.
It looks fairly good, with an enclosure design by Dutch artist Marijke Koger of The Fool, who gave Clapton’s famous Cream-era SG a psychedelic makeover.
However, a pedal is not really necessary. Hardly has Clapton kept the woman’s tone’s secrets under wraps. Turn up an old Marshall Plexi until it screams—most overdriven guitar amplifiers should be able to bring you close—then roll back the tone control to discover the sweet spot, which is when the vocal, nasal sound appears.
Numerous will advise using the neck pickup for this, but if your guitar has a single-pickup, as Nichols frequently has, all you have to do is roll the tone off the bridge pickup to get there.
Clapton clarified, “The woman tone is produced by using the lead pickup with all the bass off, or the bass pickup with everything off.” In reality, you should completely deactivate the tone control’s bass if you use both pickups in the middle position. That is, adjust the tone control to 1 or 0 and then fully increase the volume.
