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Old 10-19-2013, 07:06 PM
Steve DeRosa Steve DeRosa is offline
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Location: Staten Island, NY - for now
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As you imply in your post, there are just so many variables that it's hard to isolate pickups as the sole determinant; IME good electric guitar tone is highly synergistic and, with few notable exceptions, it's a matter of zeroing in on and fine-tuning a given combination - decide what your signature sound will be, and determine which components need to be addressed to achieve it. It's generally accepted that a well-maintained blackface Twin/Super/Deluxe Reverb will make almost any guitar sound good, and that a set of PAF/P-90/vintage-wound Strat or Tele pickups will cover just about any style of music; once you step outside the basic building blocks, however, things start to become more stratified (no pun intended) and genre-specific. I'm not surprised that you found such a disparity in tone - and I'd be curious to know if the reverse is true, that the vintage-style pickups fall flat through the JVM. I've found Brit-style amps as a rule to be more narrow in their tonal focus/variety than those with an "American" voicing, and much more sensitive to modifications; my own Bugera V22 - an EL84-powered/1X12" Celestion-clone equipped combo in the mold of the Vox AC15/18W Marshall - required major dial-twisting every time I changed guitars, and really only sounded decent with my '64 Gretsch 6117 (nailed the early George Harrison tone, BTW). A speaker swap, new mil-spec tubes, and a mild bias tweak turned it into a plug-and-play amp after the old NYC studio "key club" Ampegs, that sounds amazing with anything I've plugged into it to date: P-90 LP, Taylor Custom Solid, Strat, Yamaha SSC-500, the aforementioned Gretsch, and an original-owner '58 PAF goldtop that I'm waiting out; while I can still get the Brit-flavored tones (now more "Shea '65" AC50/"brown" Plexi in character), unlike a pure British-voiced amp I can also do rockabilly, blues, surf, country, jazz, or R&B with few if any adjustments or tonal compromises. Don't get me wrong, as I stated before there's a lot to be said for a specialized guitar/amp combination - Duane and Dicky's LP/Marshall tones are iconic, and still give me chills - but IMO unless you're playing one style all the time a less niche-oriented, broader-based setup is in order...
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