The world of guitardom has all sorts of cool descriptive words to characterise tone: The Brown Sound. Djent. Crunch. Chunk. Quack. Spank. Wah Wah. It’s all part of the unique vocabulary we share amongst ourselves. The Woman Tone isn’t quite as self-descriptive as the others though. Personified by Eric Clapton’s tone on various Cream Tracks such as “Sunshine Of Your Love,” it’s a harmonically rich, slightly muffled, honking, squonking tone. I guess perhaps it got its name because the tone is rather like the voice of a female vocalist (and personally it makes me think of Kate Bush’s voice). So what’s it sound like? Well here’s a little video of the Woman Tone (plus a few other pickup settings for comparison):

Here’s how to do it:
1: On a 2-pickup guitar such as a Les Paul or SG, select the ‘bridge and neck’ pickup setting. In my case I’m using a Gibson Les Paul Traditional with Seymour Duncan SH-55 Seth Lover humbuckers.
2: Turn the bridge pickup’s tone control down to zero.
3: Get some overdrive happening, with a decent amount of midrange. In my video I plugged straight into my Marshall DSL50 tube amp with the gain on about six.
4: There is no 4.
Of course, there’s no rule that says you have to stick with that exact control setting: you’ll get a different texture if you roll back the neck pickup’s tone control instead of the bridge pickups’. And you can fine-tune the sound by adjusting the volume controls of each pickup in different relationships to each other. And you can get some pretty great Woman One on a Stratocaster by rolling back the middle pickup’s tone control and selecting the ‘middle and bridge’ setting. You can also get about 3/4 of the way there with any humbucker guitar by rolling the tone knob all the way down, although the value of your tone capacitor is going to have an effect on the resulting tone.
There are some things to note though: for instance, the Woman Tone makes a big difference to the note envelope; you’ll find that your attack is smoothed out and smothered a bit. You’ll also notice that the note itself seems to swell up from the initial attack, then hang in the air at a particular volume for a while, then tail off (unless you have plenty of volume happening, and then you could get Tufnel-esque infinite sustain). So you’ll have to adapt your playing style a little bit to take advantage of these characteristics. But once you get a feel for the particular quirks of this setting it can feel very expressive.
Have you tried to create the Woman Tone? What gear did you use?