Style
Bloomfield's musical influences include Scotty Moore, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, B.B. King, Big Joe Williams, Otis Rush, Albert King, Freddie King and Ray Charles.
Bloomfield originally used the Fender Telecaster. During his tenure with the Butterfield Blues Band he switched to a 1954 Gibson Les Paul model, which he used for some of the East-West sessions and which he was said to have found in Boston. In due course, according to biographers Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom, Bloomfield swapped that guitar for a 1959 Les Paul Standard and $100. This was the guitar Bloomfield used as a member of the Electric Flag, and on the Super Session album and concerts. He later veered between the Les Paul and the Telecaster, but Bloomfield's use of the Les Paul—as did Keith Richards' with the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton's with John Mayall—influenced many others to use the model, helping prod Gibson to re-introduce the line (which it had discontinued in 1960) by mid-1968. Bloomfield eventually lost the guitar in Canada; Wolkin and Keenom's biography revealed a club owner kept the guitar as partial compensation after Bloomfield cut short a round of appearances. Its location today is unknown.
Unlike contemporaries such as Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, Bloomfield rarely experimented with feedback and distortion, preferring a loud but clean, almost chiming sound with a healthy amount of reverb. One of his amplifiers of choice was a 1965 Fender Twin Reverb. Bloomfield's solos, like most blues guitarists', were based primarily on the minor pentatonic scale and the blues scale. However, his liberal use of chromatic notes within the pentatonic framework, and his periodic lines based on Indian and Eastern modes, allowed a considerable degree of fluidity to his solos. He was also renowned for his use of vibrato.
Gibson has since released a Michael Bloomfield Les Paul—replicating his 1959 Standard—in recognition of his effect on the blues genre, on helping to influence the revived production of the guitar, and on many other guitarists. Because the actual guitar had been unaccounted for so many years, Gibson relied on hundreds of photographs provided by Bloomfield's family to reproduce the guitar. The model comes in two configurations—a clean Vintage Original Specifications (VOS) version with only Bloomfield's mismatched volume and control knobs, missing toggle switch cover, and kidney-shaped tuners replacing the Gibson originals indicating its inspiration; and, a faithful, process-aged reproduction of the guitar as it was when Bloomfield played it last, complete with the finish smudge below the bridge and various nicks and smudges elsewhere around the body.
His influence among contemporary guitarists continues to be widely felt, primarily in the techniques of vibrato, natural sustain, and economy of notes. Guitarists such as: Joe Bonamassa, Carlos Santana, Slash, Jimmy Vivino, Chuck Hammer, Eric Johnson, Elliot Easton, Robben Ford, John Scofield, Jimmy Herring, Phil Keaggy, remain essentially influenced by Bloomfield's early recorded work.
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