

Interestingly, Eric places the Tube Driver after his reverb and delays. On his lead channel is a TC Electronic's Sustainer, a Fender Reverb unit, another Echoplex and a Chandler Tube Driver. He's been known to lightly sandpaper the sides of his red Jazz III picks to create a finely rough surface to facilitate this brushing effect. He also picks from the guitar's body up into the air, brushing the string with the side of the pick with a slight bounce in the wrist. He describes his slightly unconventional picking technique as alternate picking where he holds the pick at an angle to minimize friction and faciltitate speed. Unlike most players who approach pentatonics with hammer-ons and pull-offs, Eric prefers to alternate pick most of his pentatonic ideas. He then adds a little vibrato with the left hand.Īt 3:01 he flips to the lead pickup on his Strat, switches to his lead channel and begins traversing the fingerboard with his trademark pentatonic flurries. While fretting notes conventionally with his left hand, he employs a thumb and forefinger technique with his right hand - he plucks the note with his thumb while the index finger lightly dampens a note on the same string right next to the fret played with the left hand. But you were limited to only 800ms of sampling time.Īt 1:41-1:51, Eric uses what he calls his ' japanese koto' technique.

Back in the day, the Boss DD's were among the few that provided a short sampling feature so that loops could be created on the fly. The background 'loop' sounds like an a 800ms sample from a Boss DD-2 Digital Delay pedal. His clean tone is awash with copious amounts of Electro Harmonix Memory Man and/or Echoplex tape delay and a hint of chorus from his TC Electronics Chorus unit which he also uses as a splitter to send his signal to his two Twin Reverbs. This cabinet is an open back, which allows him to get the bottom-end of a Marshall cab while still maintaining the open-back characteristics of a Fender Twin. His clean sound is pumped through two Fender Twin Reverbs amps, each driving two 12" speakers in a single Marshall 4x12 cabinet for stereo. On this clip he plays a lengthy intro with his most pristine of chimey clean tones, courtesy of the 4th position of the pickup selector switch on his Stratocaster. Eric's Cliffs of Dover is just one such rarity. In the world of instrumental rock guitar, it's rare that a piece stands the test of time while being the signature tune most closely associated with the artist. Here's a clip of maestro Eric Johnson doing his thing on Cliffs of Dover.
