John Mayer Style Tones with the Blackstar Studio 10 6L6
John Mayer’s guitar tone is a tone that many guitar players chase on a regular basis. We all know the make up of his tone. We’re talking super high headroom 6L6 amplifiers (Only the rarest, boutique style amplifiers will be seen here) and a pedal collection to rival no other.
Couple almost £100,000 worth of amps with a huge gallery of vintage guitars and you’re in the right ballpark.
But what about those players sitting at home with their small amps? Can they get a little bit of the John Mayer tone at home without re-mortgaging their home? Let’s find out.
The Blackstar Studio 10 6L6 is a 10w, Class-A valve combo with a 1×12 speaker. It’s significantly smaller than the multiple amp setup used by John Mayer. The top panel also has less for us to tweak. We’re going to pair this simple amp with a Strat style guitar to see how close we can get.
The Studio 10 only has a single tone knob so we will be relying heavily on the guitars pickup selector and tone knobs to tweak the amps basic tone a little further. This amp shows off the characteristics of the guitar so let’s see how far we can push it.
Clean Tones
In the video, all the examples of clean tones use the same settings. The gain is set to 6/7 and the tone is set to 7. The gain can be tweaked based on the volume. The examples were recorded with the master very low, as you increase the volume you may want to drop the gain to halfway.
The tone controls on the guitar and pickup choices are particularly important when trying to nail specific Mayer tones.
Here are the three clean tones and their pickup positions:
- Slow Dancing in a Burning Room – Position 5 (Middle Pickup)
- Belief – Position 5 (Neck Pickup)
- Gravity – Position 4 (Neck and Middle Pickups)
On the guitar, the guitars volume was rolled back to 8. This removes any top end fizz that you may get from single coil pickups. Depending on the single coils you use, you may find more or less of a roll off suits your setup better. You want to just smooth that top end.
For these examples, the middle pickup tone control was rolled back to 6 and the neck pickup tone control was rolled back to 8. Once again, this is dependant on your own pickups. Use the guitars tone controls to shape that top end to make sure it’s not too harsh.
Overdrive Tone
Similar to the clean tone, John’s overdrive tone uses a range of amps and pedals. He often used a mid-scooped American voiced amp with a mid-boosting overdrive in front to get his tone (Think Stevie Ray Vaughan style).
To try to emulate this, we are dropping the gain to just below halfway, setting the tone to a hair above 5 and using the guitars neck pickup. The guitar volume is now set to 10 and the neck pickup tone rolled back to 8.
The tone in the video is based on the tone John used in the John Mayer Trio track Who Did You Think I Was.