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  #16  
Old 10-20-2013, 05:12 PM
Dru Edwards Dru Edwards is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by muscmp View Post
i'm real picky. i'll go thru a few of my guitars and amps until one of the setups work exactly how i want it to.

and, i just went thru that situation. i tried a les paul with a gibson ga5t, replaced with weber speaker. too dark. tried the strat but still not what i wanted. after trying a couple more setups, i ended up with the rks dave mason(humbuckers) with a 66 deluxe reverb.

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Experimenting is half the fun. Dave Mason? Is he a US boutique pickup winder?
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  #17  
Old 10-20-2013, 07:24 PM
dovetail dovetail is offline
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Dave Mason


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSQr8BF5zDY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdd1EefQW1g
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  #18  
Old 10-20-2013, 11:52 PM
el_kabong el_kabong is offline
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Short answer: Yes, I think so too.

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Originally Posted by Steve DeRosa View Post
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...
Lots of good info and insight here, IMO.

Interestingly and coincidentally, I spent a little time today at the studio testing a new amp cabinet mic'd up with a KSM-32 and plotted on SMAART along with a direct signal straight into the board. This is but one step in the continuing process of isolating specific causal relationships between what I'm hearing and, of course, what I want to hear.

As Steve correctly notes, there are quite a lot of variables. There are also fairly typical prescribed solutions and combinations of gear that tend to produce specific types of sounds, which he neatly outlined. When you color outside the box or, better yet, try to put a system together to do something unique, it takes a certain amount of experimentation.

So, when you look at frequency plots like we were producing today, one of the things you'll discover is that your guitar's straight signal will have little spikes and dips all through it. Those spiked frequencies will tend to overdrive earlier than the rest of the signal, with the dips lagging well behind. Depending on what tonal characteristics you're actually seeking, that can be good or bad, but would suggest that the smoother the frequency response of the pickup, the smoother the rest of the signal will be, including when overdriven.

It's just speculation, but I'd have to guess that those active pickups just exacerbate that particular problem with their higher output. The differences with each amp may, obviously, reflect a wide array of differences in their circuits or cabinets or speakers, etc., etc., etc.

By the way, for me, the advantage of a hot pickup is that when looking for overdrive I have a bit more flexibility with gain staging...both at the guitar's volume knob, the preamp, or power stage, each of which has a distinct impact on the structure of the harmonic distortion.

Of course, those pickups might also suck.
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  #19  
Old 10-21-2013, 10:02 PM
muscmp muscmp is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dru Edwards View Post
Experimenting is half the fun. Dave Mason? Is he a US boutique pickup winder?
dave mason was in traffic and even played with jimi.
dave was co-founder of RKS guitars and they produced a limited edition of a dave mason signature guitar. that is the particular guitar i was talking about. it is a great one!!

play music!
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  #20  
Old 10-22-2013, 06:31 AM
pietro pietro is offline
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I've been using a modeler for quite a few years, so I have a different perspective...

I find that one particular guitar sounds best, generally, through one particular amp model. For instance, my Tele sounds great through a Dr. Z model, my LP-ish guitar sounds great through a Plexi, and my Crowdster Plus 2 sounds great through a Bassman model.

I've found that the modeler I'm using today, however (a POD HD 500) is way more forgiving than the first one I ever got (a POD 2.0 YEARS ago). In other words, I can actually play any guitar through any of the amps that suit my style and get away with it.

That said... When I was playing amps and when I was playing both I found that a truly great amp is far less picky. In other words, I could get any good guitar to sound really good through any amp I've ever owned that I really loved, including a Fender SuperSonic 60, Dr. Z Maz 38 Sr., and a really old DRRI.
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