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Low output guitar pickups

22 April, 2013 Reply

This is a very new thing for me. My custom guitar by Adrian at Ash Customworks has pickups that are much lower output than I have previously used. I have a Rio Grande Texas in the bridge position, and a Rio Grande Buffalo in the neck position. Prior to this guitar, I’ve not had experience with lower output pickups. Maybe the standard pickups in some of my guitars might have been low(ish) output, but I honestly wouldn’t know, as I don’t leave standard pickups in guitars ;)

My first replacement pickup experience was changing the standard bridge single coil in my Samick stratocaster copy for a DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker. That must have quadrupled the output. Then I replaced the middle pickup with a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails…. Then I wired them in series with each other ;) I’m kind of surprised I didn’t split the earth open with that level of output :P

After that, the DiMarzio Breed and PAF Pro in my Ibanez S470 didn’t seem particularly hot ;) Nor did even the DiMarzio Evo I put in my Yamaha RGX-112 when I did it up. Basically, I’ve never “done” low output pickups.

Until now.

I had my first direct comparison today, when after playing the Ash custom through my Rat, I plugged in my S470. None of the settings were changed at all, but the tone was dark, and muddy, and over-distorted and breaking up – and really a bit unpleasant. :| And that’s a guitar (and pickup) that usually sounds really nice … when using the right settings, clearly.

It must be said, I’m not driving the front end of an amp, and maybe for that the high output pickups would come into their own. I’m using distortion pedals, and impulse responses on my iMac ;) However, the extra clarity of the Rio Grandes was really marked – and it allowed much more depth and complexity to come through, compared to the high output Breed.

I would put here my latest video with the Ash custom (a cover of “I Need You Tonight” by ZZ Top), but YouTube seems to be taking 16 aeons to upload anything :x – and it’s not there yet. So I’ll make do with the last one that I have uploaded: a cover of ZZ Top’s “Rough Boy”.

My new custom guitar!!

22 February, 2013 15 comments

Oh. Baby. Yeah. I’m here today to tell you: there is nothing – nothing – like a custom guitar. No way will a production instrument compare. To illustrate, I will describe the guitar I have just collected.


Oh. Hell. Yes.

This is truly a fantastic instrument; I can hardly keep my hands off it. It plays like a dream, and the tones it produces are fantastic. It looks awesome, and is mine – all mine. Everything about it is how and what I wanted. It’s not the product of corporate compromise, or appeal to the lowest common denominator; the good stuff isn’t kind of “averaged out”. The care and attention to detail is something that of course doesn’t happen in a mass-produced instrument, and it really does make a difference.

Anyway …

Mostly custom

This all started some years back, when for the first father’s day after our daughter was born, my wife and I agreed that I’d get a custom guitar made by Adrian Hamilton – a friend, and wonderful luthier in Auckland, NZ. The result of that was actually more of a mostly-custom, as it involved a body from an old Rockson (though Adrian made it about a googleplex times better: fixing up screwy bits, putting in beautiful bevels in the cutaways, staining it up …) and an Ibanez neck (also modified, with the locking nut gone, and replaced by a graphtech nut – and little paua buttons in the back where the screws for the locking nut used to come through). Starting points/limitations notwithstanding, it’s a fantastic guitar, and attracts a lot of comments and questions on my YouTube videos.

When we had our son then, my mind was full of plans for the fully-custom guitar that I would get for him. (N.B. by “for him” I mean that if he wants it when he’s old enough, he can have it … and I haven’t yet decided how old that is. ;) Same deal goes for my daughter and the guitar I got for her.) Anyway … looking at what I had already, what was most obviously missing was a 2 humbucker fixed-bridge set neck sort of affair. Kind of like a Les Paul, only not – since I don’t like Les Pauls (except for Billy Gibbons’ Pearly Gates; Pearly is awesome, but all other LPs seem to have a weird fizzy, honky, quack thing going on – even with replacement pickups). Read more [+]

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