Clapton Cream Tone BBC Sessions, Etc

[littlejohn]

Been listening to these tapes for a few weeks now. He has a distorted tone, but I'm wondering if the tone came from cranking the Marshalls in the BBC Studio which would be awfully loud?

Or maybe, he have some type of distortion pedal. It's good stuff, I'm assuming he was using EL34 amps by this time?

[Fireball XL5]

Hard to say and I doubt if even Eric himself knows for certain.

I have some very old Guitar Player magazine interviews where he's been asked if he used a fuzz in the studio on some of the Cream recordings to which Eric replies:

"Possibly, but it could very well have been just straight into the Marshall turned up very loud. Back in those days they would get that quality."

[Raballar]

From his autobiography, if i recall correctly, he said that his thick, distorted tone came from jacking the volume up until it naturally distorted

[BIGGERSTAFF]

Marshall's cranked. On the Tom Dowd DVD, they talk about when Cream was in the studio, you could hear them a few blocks away.

[dumeril7]

Marshalls turned up to patent pending. As I understand it, in the John Mayall days, he had engineers pulling out their hair because that wasn't the way things were done back then, and he was very adamant about it, as that was His Sound. So I imagine he wasn't shy about turning them up when he was in Cream.

D7

[eru]

I heard a story about a recording engineer yelling at him because he couldn't record eric's tone, to which he replied "that's how i play."

He was referring to turning every knob all the way up on either a jtm45 or a bluesbreaker combo...can't remember which.

[littlejohn]

I can see turning up in the recording studio...but on the BBC stuff too...brutal!

[pfflam]

The BBC stuff, on a disk called 'Prehistoric Sessions' is fantastic!

Great tone . . . great version of 'I'm So Glad"!!

-and this is coming from a Clapton hater (post-Cream)