Topic: "Joe Bonamassa: The Most Common Question Guitar Players Ask Me"
https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/
"'Do you need a $200,000 Les Paul to sound good?'
"Absolutely not.
"You can go to Denmark Street, or your local guitar shop, and you can buy a $400 Epiphone Les Paul and a decent amp, like a [Fender] Hot Rod Deville. You're in and out with a cable and a tuner for under $1,000 and you can rule the world.
"The sound in your head is the sound that comes out of the guitar and the amp, not the other way around.
"The whole business is driven by this: people are constantly looking for the holy grail, the magic pedal, the magic cable or the magic whatever to get them to sound like Eric Clapton.
"When Eric Clapton sat in with me in the Albert Hall in 2009, and I keep talking about this but it was a big deal for me, I watched him plug into a US power '57 Reissue twin - stock and brand new from the Fender showroom.
"It still had the tags on it, they gave it to his tech Lee [Dickson]. He plugged one Monster cable into the bright channel, turned everything up to about six and a half. Everything; bass, middle... every dial at about six and half to seven.
"Took out a blue Eric Clapton Strat that had the Noiseless pickups people #@$@# and moan about, and he waltzed out there and he sounded like the Bluesbreakers. Why? Because it’s in his DNA.
"It always stuck with me. If you read the online reviews of the '57 Reissue Twin by the glitterati, and the Eric Clapton Strat... how you're never going to get a good tone out of it blah blah blah, and then to witness somebody like that, playing at that level and the sound just oozes out of his pores, and not to mention he sings pitch perfect.
"The real work is in the musicianship, not the gear. The real time and the 10,000 hour thing really holds true. I feel that at 40 I've put in my 10,000 hours. In Eric Clapton's world, he's put in his 10,000 hours at the Albert Hall. He's lived his whole life there.
"So that's the one piece of advice I always tell people; if you spend all the time building your pedalboard and walking around with gear, it's time you’re not spending on your musicianship and your real gift, the thing that's really going to get people to notice you.
"Hound Dog Taylor played some Univox piece of **## and it sounded great. And BB King played whatever Lucille and it sounded like BB King - a 335, he could get a new one every year... it doesn't matter.
"You start witnessing these things. These guys walked onstage and played, and they had this centerised pitch and musicianship that you can only learn by experience and step and repeat, step and repeat. It's astounding."