 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com. In this video, we're going to be looking at the Eric Clapton guitar tone from the John Mail and the Bluesbreakers era. All the tones you're hearing in this video are coming just from the Department 10 Dual Drive. So we're going to be looking at how to use the Dual Drive from the Department 10 series to dial in some classic tones with cab rig. As I mentioned, all the tones you are hearing are coming just from the Department 10 Dual Drive. I'm plugged straight into the pedal using that as my preamp. I'm connected to my DAW via the XLR out on the back of the unit. I'm going to be using the cab rig software to dial in my cab and room sound. The guitar I'm using for this video is my Stanford Crossroads Marquis. This is a Les Paul style guitar, but the most important thing here is that it has a set of vintage PAF style pickups in there. Now if you're chasing the Eric Clapton tone, he would have used a 1960 Gibson Les Paul for this. So you want to get those low output humbucker sounds. That's a very important part of this guitar sound. So these pickups will do that for me. Now, as I said, all of the amp tones are coming from the Department 10 Dual Drive. We're simulating a cranked vintage British style amp here. So the settings for this are actually pretty simple. Eric Clapton is known for saying that he basically just turned his amp up full and set everything to 10. So if you look at the Department 10 Dual Drive, you'll see I've got the ISF fully in the British position. The treble and mid are also maxed out. I have dialed the bass back a little bit because we don't want it to be too bottom heavy just to try and simulate the original recorded tone. He would have set the bass to 10 on his original amp, but it would have been processed by the mixing desk and all the other outboard units in the studio. So some of that low end might have gotten lost. The channel volume is maxed. I'm using the clean channel here rather than the crunch and I've got the gain set to two o'clock. So the pedal is just pushing that point of break up. So there's not a ton of drive in this tone. It's very much a cranked amp breaking up tone rather than a very saturated tone. It's very dynamic and very responsive to how you play. And this is one of the reasons that the low output PAF Stalhumbuckers are very, very important for this. Now Eric was often quoted as saying he basically just left everything on the guitar on 10 as well. He predominantly used the bridge pickup for this era of his sound as well, which is very uncommon because we mostly associate Eric Clapton with those warmer neck humbucker tones. But in the John Mayer era he was using the bridge pickup with the volume and tone on 10. You can get some dynamic range by rolling that volume back slightly for certain passages of certain songs. Now we're going to go over to Canberra now to discuss the other important part here and this is the cabinet choice. So I'm using the two by 12 classic UK combo. This is probably the closest in the entire set of cabs here, closest to what Eric was using at that point in time. I've got this mic'd with a 412 dynamic mic but you could also mic this with a ribbon mic and get very similar results. He would have used a combination of condensers and ribbons in the studio at that point. To recreate that pushed amp sound we need to look at the power amp section. So I've chosen the EL84 power amp style here. This isn't exactly the same as what Eric could have used but it's the closest approximation and to get that cranked sound the resonance presence and drive are all maxed. I've got a little bit of speaker saturation here because I'm just pushing an extra 2.7 dB into that speaker so we're just getting the speakers to work a little bit harder I do have a large dampened room with a wide reverb sound here which is actually pushed by 5 dB. Now this is a very important part because the original blues breaker tone was actually not close mic'd because the amp was running so loud in the studio the mic had to be pulled back from the cabinet. So a lot of the recorded tone is the space that you hear on the record that's the space of the studio created by the mic being further away from the speaker cone so you don't want a close mic tone here you want some of that room ambience. I've got the master volume pulled quite far down because I'm pushing a lot in here via the cab and the room settings and if we go to the master EQ you'll notice I've got a lot of low meds and a lot of highs put in. Now this is a very low mid heavy sound because of the cranked amp there's also a lot of high end detail here now it is speculated if Eric used a treble booster in front of the amp or not no one is fully able to confirm or deny that so to try and get closer to the tone I've also pushed a little bit of additional high end in there as well and I have shaved off some of the lows like I said some of the lows would naturally have come away from the amp purely from the distance the mic and the post processing that we've gone on at the time if you were in the room however there probably would have been a lot more low end because that amp really was cooking so this is quite a basic sound to get really the whole idea behind this sound is a low output set of pf-style pickups on the bridge pickup with the volume in tone on 10 you want your mid and treble set very high on a british voice obviously we're just using the gain very low here we're just getting that pushed sound did trim back some of the bass as I said a british style cabinet with either a good dynamic mic or ribbon mic and a lot of room space the room sound is bumped up as I said to recreate that additional space if you're using this as a recording tone or as a live tone you may want to pair this with a reverb pedal as well to get some additional space in the tone but within cab rig you can use the wide setting on a large room you can undampen this if you prefer an even more spacey sound and that will get you very similar results I find the dampening just helps control it a little bit more the other great thing with this tone is it's a very responsive tone so because we're essentially simulating an amp that is absolutely screaming loud we can get a lot of dynamic range by rolling the bridge pickup volume back slightly so we can go from 10 back to about eight or seven and it cleans up very nice so there you go there is a breakdown of the Eric Clapton blues breaker era tone using just the department 10 dual drive let us know down below in the comments what you thought of this tone and if you enjoyed the sound of this you can download the patch from the black star architect online community and use this in your own department 10 pedals if there are any other artists you'd like to just break down the tones of using the department 10 range let us know down below in the comments who you'd like to see don't forget to check out black star amplification on youtube for more videos just like this if you're looking for a music teacher in the local area please head to musicteacher.com check out the network of great music teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon