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Suede·Social·Issue No. 20
Tone recipes·2026 · JUL
Funk1966easy to fake

01Eddie Floyd (Steve Cropper on guitar)

Knock on Wood

Stax sound — Telecaster bridge pickup into a small Fender amp, picked hard and palm-muted lightly. Every accent is a sharp, percussive stab on the upbeat. No effects, no reverb, no compression. Tone is intentionally dry and trebly to cut through horns. Cropper plays mostly upper-string voicings; he leaves the bottom for Duck Dunn's bass and the horns.

02Signal chain

Guitar to amp, 0 pedals between.

  1. In
    Guitar

    Fender Telecaster, bridge pickup

  2. Out
    Amp

    Fender Harvard or Princeton

03Field note

The secret sauce

Cropper plays on top of the beat with hard pick attack, leaving the bottom strings alone. The 'tone' is the song arrangement — the guitar fills the high frequency band that the horns leave empty.