How to get Stevie's tone

This section explains you might duplicate Stevie's tone. But remember that Stevie's playing style had as much to do with his tone as his equipment did. Stevie's hands were very strong and he used a very agressive right-hand attack when he played. Consider this: on "Texas Flood," Stevie simply plugged Number One into a Dumble amp with no effects. When you hear the wonderful tone on that song, you will understand just how much of his tone came from his fingers.

Guitar
Get a Fender Stratocaster or a good copy of one. It should have single-coil pickups, a rosewood fingerboard, big strings (12's or higher) and big frets. Small strings are easy to play, but weaken your tone, and you'll want big frets to help bend those big strings!

Amp
Fender amps are the obvious choice, since that's what Stevie used. Try to get a tube amp with at least one 12" speaker or two 10" speakers; you can't get a good bottom end response like Stevie's with small speakers. A DeluxeŽ Reverb or Twin are good choices. And it's hard to go wrong with Marshall amps.

Effects
Try not to use too many effects, as this will diminish your tone quality. The idea here is to have a tone that is somewhat overdriven, but that also allows the true sound of the guitar and player's fingers come through. You need an overdrive pedal, compressor, and wah. I personally like Ibanez TS-9 Tubescreamer overdrives and Dunlop Cry Baby wahs. If you are really serious about getting Stevie's tone, you can have your TS-9 modified to exactly match the specs of the TS-808 it is based on. See Analog Man's Tubescreamer page for more information.

Putting It All Together
Set your amp's volume so that it breaks up a little, but doesn't fuzz out (fuzz tones can sound pretty cool, but they're not Stevie-type tones). If your amp has a master/preamp setup, set the preamp knob to ten, the guitar volume knob to five or six, and make the master volume as loud as you can comfortably listen to. Stevie nearly always played at deafening levels, but this way you can get a breakup similar to his without losing your hearing. Experiment with higher guitar volumes for stage gigs if you like. It may help if you add a little reverb.

Now turn your attention to the effects chain. Work on the overdrive pedal first. Stevie used a Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer, but for more gain instead of distortion. Many smaller Fender amps have some natural overdrive, so you can set Overdrive fairly low (1 or 2), turn Tone down to 2 or 3, and crank Level to 7 or 8. This will produce a "clean boost" with a good tube amp for nice smooth distortion. With bigger amps, you can turn Overdrive and Tone up, since there is less natural overdrive present.

Tube amps naturally produce some compression, but a small amount of pedal compression helps to smooth out the pops and thumps that accompany hard playing. It will also help your sound if you use a lot of finger plucks and string rakes like Stevie did.