I was living in Austin when he started to blow up big, in fact he rented practice space at the same place as a drummer I was playing (bass) with. He was sort-of just one of the guys, but EVERYBODY knew he could blow up big, especially after SRV did. He was adamant about getting his own sound, so one thing you don't get is a sense of how versatile he is. He could sit in at Antone's or the Continental Club and play all slimy Texas blues, even out-slime SRV or Jimmie Vaughan, but he could also do a dead-perfect Chet Atkins tune. Or Hendrix. Or George Benson. Or Andre Segovia. Or Doc Watson. Or Keith Richards... he could have moved to Nashville or Los Angeles and done the whole studio geek thing perfectly.
One major hallmark of his style is big chord voicings, only three notes but spaced really wide. If you can visualize the E major scale, play the note closest to the 2nd fret on the sixth string, the fourth string and the second string, then move up to whatever position works well, like the 4th fret. It's sometimes called "octave displacement", which actually means playing 1-2-3-4-5-6...etc. but jumping around octaves.
And every so often a magazine will run their feature article "SECRETS OF ERIC'S TONE!!!" and they'll get the clean Fender and the gritty Marshall and the howling Dumble and the George L's cords and the Dunlop Jazz III's and the Fuzz Face and the Strat all right, because they sell ad space to people who make that stuff. But what they didn't tell you about, for the first few decades at least: the $20,000 or so of high-end Eventide and Lexicon rackmount stuff that goes in between the amplifier mikes and the soundboard. And the same held true for THE SECRETS OF STEVE MORSE'S TONE!!!" (They're good friends, BTW.)
The racks of Lexicon and Eventide processors were used to actually construct custom short delays to manufacture their own reverbs and a bit of modulation/chorus. And when you stomp on an EH Cathedral or Hardwire RV-7 in the year 2013, an awful lot of what you hear goes back to those sounds that they constructed one little delay at a time, all the foldbacks and circular signal routing. And after those guys pretty much wrote the book on solo guitar hero/god tone stuff in the mid 80's and because they were friendly guys, it ran from Johnson-> Alex Lifeson, Morse -> Satriani, Satriani-> Vai etc. and then blooey all over the place like a whole herd of puppies with diarrhea, and now Santana need four amps to play his three notes and Kemper and Ax/Fx will polish the doorknobs and shine your shoes too.
