Inspired by the most sublime thing you can drop into a cocktail. Or maybe that and the cocktail.
The guitar is a random collection of Fender Strat parts with Duncan lipstick tube pickups. They sound a zillion times better than modern Danelectro pickups. (Plus I boycott Dano on principle because their parent company is a major supporter of homophobic far-right legislation.)
Here’s an explanation of my live looping rig.
Plato credited the invention of disco to his mentor, Socrates. However, most modern historians and classics scholars believe the style originated with an earlier, unknown Athenian proto-philosopher.
The guitar is a Steelcaster built by my pal James Trussart. If you’re not familiar with his breathtaking work, stop now and visit his site. (If you’re going to NAMM 2019 in Anaheim, you can meet us both at the same time, since we’ll be sharing a booth.)
Here’s an explanation of my live looping rig.
I’ve been following the story of Fishman Fluence pickups and their radical pickup design for a few years. From the beginning, I’ve thought Fluence pickups sounded great in the hands of some other guitarist, but this is the first chance I’ve had to experiment with my own set.
Most of the tech details are in the video. But in brief: These are active pickups with magnets, but no wire coils. Instead, the “coils” are printed on thin pieces of circuit board glued together like plywood. This design removes all noise and hum — chances are these are the quietest single-coil-sounding you’ll find. (Fishman also makes humbuckers and Tele pickups.) They can run on 9-volt batteries or (this is the other interesting part) a separately sold battery pack that replaces the trem cavity back plate. (There are other battery configurations for other guitars.) Another marquee feature: Each Fluence set includes a push/pull pot to switch between vintage voicing and a hotter “modern” sound.
This technology originated at an aerospace company. Someone there realized that their printed coils might work on musical instruments, and they contacted a leading pickup manufacture, who passed on the idea. Next it went to Larry Fishman, who was all over it from the get-go. He refined the idea and came up with lots of clever engineering to make it work in guitars. [DISCLAIMER: I have been paid in the past as a freelance contributor to Fishman products, but no one paid me to post this.]
To my ear these sound perfectly authentic, though the fact that they’re active is problematic for me personally. (That’s because I use so many retro stompboxes that don’t play well with the active pickups, which are buffered. The same goes for most of the pedals I sell.)
While installing this in my much-abused MIM Strat, I also added a heavyweight bridge, trem block, and claw from Killer Guitar Components. I’m not kidding when I say “heavyweight” — it’s a formidable piece of metal, beautifully tooled. It feels like a major improvement on the standard design, and I think it sounds great as well (though it’s hard to be definitive about that without side-by-side comparisons). My favorite feature is the way the string inserts are chamfered — strings pop in correctly every time, which. as any Strat player can tell you, it not always the case. Killer, indeed!
Fender’s Telecaster Deluxe has had an interesting and checkered history. Once regarded as yet another mediocre product from the company’s era of CBS ownership, these turn-of-the-seventies instruments now fetch huge prices on the collector’s market. I’ve never owned own. But when singer/songwriter Greer Sinclair loaned me one of Fender’s 2010 reissues, it was time for research — and experimentation.
The made-in-Mexico 1972 Deluxe reissue is a cool guitar. It replicates many details of the original: the oversized headstock, the Strat-like belly cut and fixed Strat-style bridge, and the big-ass pickguard. But its pickups are definitely a departure. In lieu of the original’s large-format “Wide Range” pickups, it employs a P-94R (a humbucker-sized P-90 spinoff) at the neck, and a conventional Gibson-style humbucker at the bridge.
The Wide Range pickup was a unique beast. Fender had commissioned Seth Lover, the man who invented the Gibson humbucker, to create a Fender humbucker in hopes of cashing in on the growing popularity of hard rock. With DC resistance in the 10k range, the new Wide Range pickup was a bit hotter than a vintage Gibson humbucker. Wide Range pickups appeared in several of the era’s models, including the Tele Thinline, Tele Custom, and semi-hollowbody Starcaster.
Gibson humbuckers have a bar magnet within, but the pole pieces are not magnetic. But on Wide Range pickups, the pole pieces are magnetic, as on Fender’s single-coil pickups. Situating individual magnets closer to the strings yield a brighter sound with greater note defition and string-to-string separation — characteristics we associate with vintage Fender pickups. So the Wide Range pickup lent a uniquely “Fender” twist to the Gibson design.
Wide Range pickups are slightly larger than conventional humbuckers. Most of Fender’s circa-1970 Tele reissues substitute generic humbuckers of the standard size. Standard humbuckers can sound superb in a Tele, but they’re horses of different colors. Fender has also created some reissues with the larger-sized pickups, but these are also garden-variety humbuckers — the larger format is purely cosmetic. The pole pieces of the factory humbucker on Greer’s guitar don’t align with Fender’s wider string spacing. (But one thing I’ve leaned from my various Fender/Gibson hybrid experiments is that sonically, this can matter very little.)
The P-94R’s cream-colored top looks wicked against the guitar’s finish. It’s a warm, full-sounding pickup from the mellower side of the P-90 spectrum. Actually, it doesn’t sound all the different from a traditional Telecaster neck pickup. (Like that pickup, it works quite well for jazz.) Note, though, that its dimensions differs substantially from those of a Gibson P-90, as you can the in the photo where it sits alongside a historically accurate Lollar P-90. When you change the size of a pickup’s components, you inevitably alter the sound. The tones can be for better or worse — but they will be different.
I should have been out buying nice presents for you all. Instead I sat around inhaling solder fumes. When the smoke cleared (mostly, anyway) I’d tested ten unusual Strat pickups in the same poor guitar.
Tested pickups sets:
• Jason Lollar Gold Foils
• Lindy Fralin Big Singles
• Seymour Duncan Antiquity II Mini-Humbuckers
• Jason Lollar Staple/P-90 set
• Allparts Gold Foils
Verdicts? I dig them all, and not just ’cause I’m too polite/chicken to say otherwise.
I love the Lollar Gold Foils so much I’m assembling a new parts guitar to surround them. I’m going to keep the Fralin Big Singles in the demo Strat, at least till the next Mongrel Strat Project. I’m going to try putting the mini-humbuckers in a “parts” Tele at some point. I originally reviewed the Lollar P-90 set for Premier Guitar (where I evaluated them the “right” way: in a Gibson guitar), so they go back to manufacturer, though I’d sure like to own a set someday. Meanwhile, the Allparts set isn’t in the same league as its high-end competitors, but at a mere $30 per pickup, it costs about 1/4 the price of its expensive rivals. You could definitely do a lot of lo-fi damage with a pair of these surprisingly solid-sounding pickups!
This article joins the long list of experiments in the Mongrel Strat Project archive.
And how about you? Have you but stuffing any pickups into places where they don’t belong? Maybe that’s why Santa left you sucky presents this year.
As threatened, here’s a closer look at Strat with PAF humbuckers used for my recent “God Only Knows” cover. Most parts are from the long-suffering guitar used for all the Mongrel Strat Project experiments. And this one is especially mongrel-ific, with its blend of vintage Fender and Gibson.
Obviously, Gibson pickups is a Strat is far from a new idea. But usually, that arranged marriage is designed to spawn macho, high-gain solos minus the characteristic shrillness of vintage Strat bridge pickups. While many players I love have used humbucker-equipped Strats, I’ve always loathed playing them myself. But what, I wondered, if you didn’t use a hot humbucker, but an über-vintage PAF?
Like many players my age and younger, I was astonished when I first encountered a vintage-voiced humbucker. It was nothing like the dark, over-overdriven tones I associated with the word humbucker. A good PAF is sparkly, resonant, and perfectly capable of gloriously bright and clean tones. Here I used a Seymour Duncan Joe Bonamassa signature set, the same one heard in a more Gibson-like context here.
The results are … compelling. As expected, notes have far more mass than on a conventional Strat, and the bass response is vastly increased. There’s no shortage of top-end either, though the big lows can overwhelm the highs at times. So while I’m pretty much always obsessed with bass-cut controls (especially the high-pass section of the PTB circuit I’ve written about approximately 37 zillion times), it’s especially invaluable in this case. Since lows disproportionately drive distortion, even modest bass cuts clean up the tone and make highs speak more clearly.
I’ve also incorporated the dual-capacitor treble control I wrote about here. It creates a Vari-Tone/ToneStyler effect in a simplified way: Instead of using a clunky rotary switch to choose from a large set of treble-trimming capacitors, it fades between a large cap and a small cap, yielding the same resonant effect as the more complex options. I’ve incorporated this circuit in several guitars now, and it’s still working for me. It’s especially nice here, when paired with a Steinberger JackPot potentiometer, which lets you bypass the entire tone circuit for absolute maximum volume and brightness. I chose the small cap based on the minimum amount I’d ever want to remove from the signal, and the larger one based on the maximum cut I’d use.
I would have included a photo of the project in progress, but I didn’t because I’m embarrassed about how awful it looks inside. I needed to route out the pickup cavities to accommodate these larger pickups. But instead of taking it to a professional, or getting a proper router and learning how to use it, I chipped away with the tiny routing bit on an inexpensive Dremel tool. Do yourself a favor, kids, and don’t follow my lazy-ass example.
But hey, what’s a Strat pickguard for if not to conceal your shoddy workmanship? The guitar looks okay in the end, and I’m digging its sounds, even though it was far harder to get accustomed to than I’d anticipated. I had to recalibrate my right-hand dynamics to prevent treble notes from screeching. I was almost ready to chalk this up as a failed experiment, but after a few days of noodling around, I started to get the hang of it and enjoy the results. I think I’ll keep it this way for a while — or at least until the next Mongrel Strat concept wafts up from the bowels of Hell. 🙂
I’ve been using my Carr Skylark amp incessantly for the last 18 months or so. I’d originally reviewed it for Premier Guitar magazine, and then I bought one for myself. I dig the fact that, while Skylark is inspired by 1960s Fender amps, builder Steve Carr made numerous departures from the Fullerton template. To my ear Skylark sounds better than my ’60s originals. That’s especially true of its re-voiced tone stack, where the ranges are smaller and subtler than on vintage Fenders, with more of a Matchless-style “no bad settings” sensibility.
For better or worse, history repeated itself earlier this year when I reviewed Carr’s Lincoln in PG. Lincoln is to Vox what Carr is to Fender — not a clone, but vintage-inspired model with its own character and unique twists. Its dual EL-84 architecture makes it a cousin of the AC-15. But I think of it more as a “fantasia on a theme by Vox.” It’s captures the Vox qualities I dig, minus the ones that can make dealing with vintage Voxes a major drag.
If you’ve listened to many of my videos and demo clips from the last year or so, you’ve heard these amps, so I figured I’d focus on them. For tech details, see the reviews. This video is more about how the amps inspire me musically.
From their flawless cabinetry to their ravishing tones, these amps are simply stunning. Cheap, they ain’t, but I felt like I was (RATIONALIZATION ALERT!) investing in musical art. Or maybe I’m making up for not buying a Trainwreck amp back in the ’90s when they were affordable.
I especially love how these Carr amps sound with my flatwound-strung guitars, and I used them on most of the demos for my pedals because they’re so very flattering. Ironically, I thought I’d given up buying new amps, because I was having so much fun building from kits. But trust me — both these instruments sound way better than any of my kit amps. Have a listen!
I’d like to call out several items of interest in the November issue or Premier Guitar. The first one is personal: As head honcho Shawn Hammond mentions in his monthly editor’s letter, I’m changing roles at the magazine. After two years as a part-time senior editor, I’m going part-part-time as a contributing editor.
It was a tough call for me — it was a fun gig working with awesome people on subjects I love. But I’ve felt an increasing need to dedicate more time to my own projects: playing, recording, writing, developing gear, and trying to make my tonefiend.com blog and YouTube channel seem a bit livelier than something you’d encounter at Urban Ghosts. (It’s one of my favorite websites, but not the attitude I’m aiming for here.)
If you’ve enjoyed the articles I’ve contributed to PG, well, first of all, thanks! And second, note that I’ll actually be contributing more columns and reviews than before. That may sound contrary to the laws of physics, but it’s possible because I will no longer be editing material by other writers. (I’d been processing an average of 35 stories per month in addition to my bylined pieces.) Picking up the slack will be new hire Ted Drozdowski, a fine writer and player, a lovely guy, and one of the music journalists I looked up to when I got into the guitar mag racket decades ago. (Ted was part of the now-legendary Musician magazine of the ’80s and ’90s.) Meanwhile, I’ll be contributing my Recording Guitarist column and at least three major gear reviews per issue.
Also in the issue are several tech-oriented pieces that I found particularly interesting. My old pal Frank Falbo — a leading pickup designer and master luthier — contributed a great piece on pot and capacitor substitutions. More than anything I’ve read, Frank’s article nails down exactly what changes to expect when swapping out part values, documented via audio files.
For me, the most fascinating part is how varying tone-pot values change your guitar’s tone, even when the tone knob is wide-open. Yeah, a lot of us would expect some change, because pots of varying resistances exert different loads on your pickups. But as far as I know, no one has ever nailed down the exact differences the way Frank has.
Spoiler alert: The differences are massive — it’s a far bigger deal than I’d always assumed. Check out Frank’s first set of sound clips and prepare to be impressed.
It’s not a new idea that you can shift the overall tone of a guitar “bright-ward” or “dark-ward” by swapping pots, but Frank makes explicit how dramatic such changes can be, and what to expect from the likeliest substitutions.
I also learned much from two articles I wrote. The first is a shootout between five sets of ultra-vintage-style Strat replacement pickups, featuring models by Amalfitano, Fender, Klein, Manlius, and Mojotone. (Spoiler alert #2: They all sound pretty great, though the Kleins and Mojotones were my personal faves.)
I only realized after evaluating tones that the two sets I loved most don’t deploy a hotter pickup in the bridge position, while the other three do. (I don’t mean some blazing-hot bridge pickup, but one just a tasteful tad louder than the others, an approach many Strat players seem to love.) In the Klein and Mojotone sets, the middle pickup is loudest. Food for thought.
There are good reasons why few guitar mags run serious pickups reviews, and almost never compare models directly: It’s labor-intensive, and it’s damned hard to establish a level playing field. Here, I tried to remove as many variables as possible, installing all the pickups in the same test guitar, scrupulously measuring everything from pickup height to mic position, and laboring mightily to create identical demo performances for each set. My favorite part appears on the final page of the article, where you can directly compare each pickup from each manufacturer side-by-side.
Finally, you might find interesting the audio clips in my latest Recording Guitarist column. It’s about is direct recording, a topic I’ve been covering since this blog began. I got cool sounds using a JHS Colour Box (a dumbed-down Neve channel in stompbox form) and especially with the Neve preamp simulations in the latest Universal Audio software. I’m hardly the first to point this out, but wow! Some recent plug-ins are so stupefyingly realistic that they can mimic analog gear pushed to extremes — a longstanding weak link in faux-analog plug-ins. I found it easy to create cool and compelling sounds without amps or amp simulators. Let me know what you think.
Okay, now I’m nodding off from jet lag. I just returned from a two-week trip to Italy, which generated some interesting musical thoughts and discoveries that I’ll share here soon. 🙂
I’ve been breathlessly awaiting one of these since I saw this. It’s Korg’s Miku Stomp, a spinoff from the company’s Vocaloid voice synthesizer. It tracks your pitch as you play and responds with a synthetic voice that forms various syllables and phrases.
There’s some cheating here: The effect’s latency is quite severe, so I had to slide the Miku track back in time while mixing. Its triggering is also inconsistent, so I replaced a few notes. Miku tracks best when playing melodies on a single string, hence my awkward, position-jumping fingering. (Actually, it tracks pretty well when you play slow melodies full of sustained notes. But steady eighth-notes at 155 BPM as heard here is a major challenge.)
One of the pedal’s most interesting aspects is the way it interprets slurs. When there’s no break between notes, Miku sings a sort of pseudo diphthong. Detached notes get a syllable with a clear transient.
IMHO, the inescapable facts that Miku is silly and doesn’t work terribly well doesn’t diminish her total awesomeness. No doubt about it: heaviest stompbox ever.
The tune, of course, is “Georgy Girl,” which I’ve loved since forever. It was a blast recording the backing tracks with classical guitar, ukulele, ukulele bass, 12-string, toy piano, M-Tron Pro, and a mix of live and sampled percussion. And of course, gobs of my favorite reverb effect: Universal Audio’s EMT140 plate simulation. Yum.
Okay, it’s not the ultimate lipstick-tube guitar for everybody, but it probably is for me. It’s my third lipstick-tube pickup experiment — and definitely my favorite.
You may have heard some of these parts before: I used the neck for all my Mongrel Strat projects, and the Strat-sized Seymour Duncan pickups appeared in my previous lipstick-tube experiments. (I love Duncan’s lipstick-tubes. To my ear, they sound way better than the ones in new-school Danelectros.) The new body is Warmoth’s Hybrid Tele model, in purple with butterfly stickers. It’s très macho. (Better not use if for gigs in Indiana and Arkansas.)
My previous lipstick tube experiments used a MIM Strat body, but I wanted something a little more distinctive, and with a built-in battery compartment (because nothing is a bigger pain than changing batteries in a traditional Strat control cavity). Also, I like how the design evokes both Strat and Tele, since the guitar has three-Strat sized pickups and a whammy, but is wired more like a Tele.
About that wiring: The 3-way pickup selector chooses neck, bridge or both pickups, like on a Tele. Meanwhile, a SPDT switch toggles the middle pickup on and off regardless of the pickup selector, so you get six settings: neck, bridge, neck + bridge, neck + middle, bridge + middle, and all at once. It’s a pragmatic variation on “Nashville Tele” wiring with a switch rather than a pot. That means you can’t dial in varying amounts of middle pickup—it’s all or nothing. But on the plus side, I can jump instantly to an out-of-phase sound from any pickup-selector setting, and it freed up space for the other weird crap I put in this guitar. (Yo, electrical engineers: Don’t bother telling me that combined-pickup settings aren’t really out-of-phase True, they’re not out-of-phase electronically, but they are acoustically, and the distinctive “hollow” sound of combined settings is precisely the result of phase cancellation from two pickups at different positions.)
The weirdest detail is what I call a “cap-fade” tone control. It’s an idea I speculated about back in January, and to which many of you contributed cool perspectives. I pretty much followed the scheme in the original diagram:
The idea again: Instead of sending varying amounts of signal to ground via a tone cap, the pot here fades between a small-value cap (which defines the minimum cut when the control is engaged) and a larger one (defining the frequency of the maximum cut). In other words, instead of sending varying amounts of signal to ground, this circuit always sends everything above the cutoff frequency to ground, with the pot determining the frequency.