Greetings Tone Chasers! This Thursday’s podcast we covered 2 topics that I thought were most excellent!
Consistent Sound With Multiple Guitars: So if you’re using a Les Paul, a Strat, and a Telecaster through one amp – and want to get consistent tone – how can you achieve such a feat? If you are just looking for changes in volume – Brian suggests a volume pedal. You can change it on the fly and is a super easy fix. You can also create consistent tones form guitar to guitar by using an EQ pedal. Billy Gibbons’ guitar tech, Elwood Francis, actually has a big EQ rack set up that has lots of different presets – for Billy’s guitars for more homogenous guitar tones. Premier Guitar has an excellent Rig-Rundown that shows it in action. Check it out!
Hand-wound vs Machine-wound pickups: We also discussed the difference between Hand-wound pickups and machine wound pickups – whats the difference and does it matter? Well depends I suppose. You can program a machine to count a certain number of winds on a pickup bobbin – or it can be programmed to scatter wind -or even programmed to create a very specific impedance output. When you “hand-wind” pickups you are manually controlling the speed on how fast the pickup bobbin is moving around an axis – and also manually controlling the copper spool of wire as it goes around the bobbin. Hand wound pickups aren’t always as consistent from pickup to pickup. With that said – master craft – men and women (like Seymour Duncan, Jason Lollar, Abigail Ybarra- just to name a few) have turned it in to an art form and get pretty awesome results! So which one is better? That’s totally up to the player. Let your ears your be your guide!
Until Monday Tone Chasers!
– Max