Guitars... what you've got / what you want

If you'd like a less expensive "classic Tele" bridge pickup which sounds pretty great, I can recommend the Tonerider Hot Classic. I think it's the same factory that did the highly regarded original Classic Vibe pickups. They're under $50 new, or cheaper used.

certainly better than the stock 80s MIJs, I adore those guitars but not their pickups.

Very interested to read about the Godin + Porter pickups results

I tried using Godin for a while in the live setting before switching to an archtop. I play fingerstyle acoustic normally and wanted something that would approximate the feel and sound, while working at any viable volume. Their odd stratocaster hybrid was appealing on paper and in the hands but ultimately the sound just wasn't exciting enough for me to stick with it.

maybe a daft question, but are there any pick-ups where you can route the top and bottom sets of strings to separate channels and then have a stereo output so you can send bass notes to a different fx chain, so you could have dirty distorted bass with clean sparkly treble etc?

i guess the workaround is splitting the signal and sending it through high pass and low pass filters

I haven't tried this, but it looks like the Submarine pickup might be the solution - you could stick it under the low strings and send it to a bass amp, or under the treble strings and put them through high gain.

https://img.audiofanzine.com/img/product/normal/2/6/262828.jpg

https://www.submarinepickup.com/

ah, that looks perfect - thank you!

That’s a fucking cool idea

Are the stock 80s MIJ tele pickups just known to not be that great? If so it actually makes me feel better because I was starting to think “maybe I was wrong and I never really wanted a twangy tele after all.”

Crud, bad img tag but you get the idea. This work?

http://www.guitarsite.com/files/submarine-pickup.jpeg

It is a fucking cool idea, ngl. I can imagine someone who is deft with a loop pedal could go beyond sounding like two guitars. You could become a guitarchestra.

Very interested to read about the Godin + Porter pickups results

I tried using Godin for a while in the live setting before switching to an archtop. I play fingerstyle acoustic normally and wanted something that would approximate the feel and sound, while working at any viable volume. Their odd stratocaster hybrid was appealing on paper and in the hands but ultimately the sound just wasn't exciting enough for me to stick with it.

― flamboyant goon tie included, Friday, February 11, 2022 6:44 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm a huge believer in Godins in terms of quality vs. price. I don't think there's much out there that compares. However, they are 1) apparently incapable of making a guitar that doesn't look kinda dorky in some way and 2) their in-house pickups seem to be really dull and lifeless pretty much across the board

With you on point 1. I am also unconvinced about the utility of cutesy little EQ sliders on the front of a guitar (which, let's face it, you can't see and are unlikely to manipulate while playing). Especially since at any subsequent point in the chain there will be multiple opportunities to shape the tone.

rant: Which is its own problem! Even modest rigs have so many tone-shaping options that the mind reels. I'm like, hmm, should I mess with the graphic eq here next to my armpit? Or maybe the other knobs labeled "tone" at the bottom of the guitar? Or how about I mess with one of the 10 or 15 knobs labeled "tone" on one of the 6 to 10 pedals in front of me? But then I turn around and look at my amp and, shit, there are two or three or four tone knobs there too. Hmm. Oh fuck, the amp is mic'd and that mic is going into a channel strip with multiple tone knobs, then into a mixer. Are there tone knobs on the mixer? Yeah you betcha. Are we done yet? No, because the recording or performance will be mixed and mastered by people who are turning knobs and moving sliders that relate to tone.

Welp, guess we're done with tone but - no wait! Everyone listening to this music will be doing so on a device that has tone controls.

ha yeah it's funny, also why i'm a skeptic on "tonewoods" for electric guitars, though knowledgeable people that know way more about electric guitars than i seem to think it's something

though w/my godin, i've been in a couple stores in the last week casually shopping and this neck, fretwork, fit & finish on a guitar that retails for $850 (i got mine for $600) is good or better than plenty of $1500ish guitars i've played recently

Clearly the "literally only pickups matter" crowd is wrong and probably basing everything on some oversimplified scientific tidbit they picked up. Wood should make at least *some* difference, although I don't know how much or why. There's some interesting theorizing about it in this thread:

https://www.jazzguitar.be/forum/guitar-amps-gizmos/70017-how-does-acoustic-resonance-change-amplified-tone.html#:~:text=Changing%20the%20pickup%20height%20certainly,field%20the%20strings%20are%20in.

But if how the body of a guitar resonated literally made no difference, a les paul would sound exactly like an L5 as long as they had the same pickups and strings.

The test would really be whether a Les Paul and a L5 are as similar/different/uniquely identifiable from each other as two Les Pauls or two L5s are from each other no?

There are an enormous number of variables - pickup winding, pot values (10-20% variance on average IIRC) strings, string height, pickup height, etc. - where you can’t just throw out two differently-constructed guitars and say they sound different.

If there are audible differences (which I doubt to be honest), they’d be so minute as to be irrelevant when you’ve got a tone control and amp EQ.

I definitely think some of the unplugged acoustic sound indirectly makes its way into the final amplified sound. Regardless of whether the pickups are microphonic or not.
When you strum an unplugged guitar, you are hearing the string vibrations die away, and they clearly die away differently on different guitars. This implies that different guitars will subtract from the initial attack in different ways. So the pickups are still going to pick some of that up regardless of whether they can detect the acoustic vibrations or not.
It might not necessarily be the wood species playing the biggest part, it could be other factors like the guitar's overall construction style. But I am fairly sure that some of the unplugged sound does indirectly go through the pickup.

Yeah I feel pretty confident it does too, in some indirect way if not microphonically, and I doubt guitar makers have simply been wrong for decades as proven by experiment guy on youtube or whatever.

Artisans are a terrible place to turn to - see: audiophile snake oil thread - because whatever they were taught and what they've done has been successful for them so it must be true. Thomas Keller will tell you to rest your steak on the counter for half an hour before cooking, despite the fact that this does nothing and if it did it would be negative. But Thomas Keller has 20 Michelin stars and you don't, so who's the better chef?

Sustain, pick attack, etc. are introducing a lot of outside questions to the idea of tonewood ie 'can you hear a difference in ash and alder or between a rosewood fretboard and a maple fretboard.' The way a guitar is built changes your approach to picking and strumming, some bridges will have more sustain than others.

Just thought I'd throw in a tangent here:
What's everyone's take on double neck guitars?
Are they irrevocably associated with 1970s rock star indulgence in a way that would always lend them a certain comic air?
I don't have any immediate plans to buy one, but I have sometimes thought that you could do cool stuff with them. Like, if you had an open tuning on one neck and a standard tuning on another one, the combination would probably be interesting.

The comic air is the cool part.

bass/six-string double necks are the way to go

http://www.first3songs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/boris-sydney-first3songs-olga-0933.jpg

Always thought it was cool that those were built for Takeshi by the high-end custom shop at First Act

For all those times when you want the bass to drop out during the guitar solo

Juliana Hatfield has a high end First Act too. It sucks that the company collapsed, because they could've put some cool stuff in the mid-range market if they'd ever gotten their shit together.

https://bigtakeover.com/images/21943.jpg

xpost I had thought it would be cool to have a 12/6 string double neck and do a live loop pedal thing, layering 12 string stuff over the base of 6 string loops

When I think about double neck guitars my mind immediately hears four seconds of a tv show that aired 27 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n1l-_UiWbs

Followed by remembering how much my cousin and I used to make fun of this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZbSDuS4Pyg

Batio! He's absurd, but I just recently watched a video of him doing a guitar clinic and he seemed like a super nice guy.

https://abernethyguitars.com/available-builds/sonic-empress-thc119

I like these that are half Fender offset, 25% prewar acoustic and 25% 1950s department store guitar.

ffs why would you choose to do a slotted headstock

It's provocative, it gets the people talking

Have:
Gretch country club 1961
Ibanez,dunno but it's black
Hondo, it's a Gibson copy I think, but a good one.

Want:
Nothing really. Maybe a bass.

― Mark G, Friday, 28 May 2021 22:44 (eight months ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/y161/MarkGrout/IMG-20220221-WA0003.jpeg

I has a BASS!

*pops Seinfeld sting*

(which were all done on keyboard anyway I guess)

i love it when dudes use ad titles like "vintage 1993 Samick Stratocaster"

xpost - SG basses are some of the most badass looking instruments

It's an Epiphone, but yes it does look of.

Buttload of new Yamaha Revstars just dropped.

https://www.sweetwater.com/yamaha-revstar/series

some wild colors

Mark G, my 15yo son bought exactly the same bass as that on saturday - he loves it!

new revstar colours look super btw

vg++

nice, those sunset bursts are interesting looking.

I like the ones with the little racing stripe down the middle

same

one thing about them - all the single coil models have the funky tailpiece thing that i'm not such a huge fan of, but none of the ones with humbuckers have that. anyone know what's up there?

yeah that tailpiece is weird, it's not necessarily a bad idea but something about how it's shaped doesn't quite sit right

it's irritating when one design decision is tied to another like that for no clear reason--like i'm not sure i could be convinced that the tailpiece is somehow complementary to the p-90s.

an SG tremolo might work, i wonder if that's what they were going for?

The RS502 from the first gen had the P90s without the tailpiece, but I haven't seen a new RS502 for sale anywhere online in a couple years (and only a few used ones). I guess the RS502T was more popular (it's what I bought, and what most videos you see about them on youtube are featuring), so I guess they didn't bother making a P90s/no tailpiece variant for gen 2.

I've thought about redoing mine and taking off the tailpiece and putting in a stop bar, but I'd need to do pay someone to fill the holes and refinish it and I'm not sure it's worth it right now.