FuseG4
Our Neighbor Totoro
I've had a dimarzio Air Classic neck model for a looong time and I've gotten to know it. In my Tele it was sweet and chimey but still had a fairly open quality to it. Low end wasn't as focused but still there was ample bass. Well I switched that tele to being my high gain guitar so out went the air classic.
I stuck it into my 335 copy to replace the stock washburn pickup. It sounds great on cleans but in all honesty is a bit too chimey in the top end but the bass strings and particularly the low E sound like crap...single notes, 5th chords, barres, whatever all sounds fuzzy and boomy and it gets worse closer to the higher frets or when getting into medium gain and is intolerable at anything like high gain.
The guitar's setup seems to be just fine, and the clean sounds are nice and the Duncan CC kicks butt. It's a maple-laminate semihollow with a maple neck/rosewood fretboard. The action is medium, the intonation is good, and there's no fret buzzes outside of the occasional user error. It's got pure nickle .11's on it right now. These aren't the strings I usually use with this guitar but the ernie balls and other strings I've tried do the same thing.
First I tried lowering the pickup height to varying degrees and messing with pole piece height. Everything gets worse the further away from the strings it is. I looked at the tone cap value and it's actually .022 on a 500k pot so I guess it's not that?
Checking my amp...when I turn the bass knob almost all the way down (to 1 or 2) it begins to get better, but none of my other 3 guitars make me wanna do that! I usually keep the bass knob between 4 and 8. In 3 watt mode the big fuzzy tone is a bit less noticable but in 5W mode it stands out.
Is there some tonal remedy for this besides a pickup swap?
If it's a pickup swap, what are some recommendations?
I stuck it into my 335 copy to replace the stock washburn pickup. It sounds great on cleans but in all honesty is a bit too chimey in the top end but the bass strings and particularly the low E sound like crap...single notes, 5th chords, barres, whatever all sounds fuzzy and boomy and it gets worse closer to the higher frets or when getting into medium gain and is intolerable at anything like high gain.
The guitar's setup seems to be just fine, and the clean sounds are nice and the Duncan CC kicks butt. It's a maple-laminate semihollow with a maple neck/rosewood fretboard. The action is medium, the intonation is good, and there's no fret buzzes outside of the occasional user error. It's got pure nickle .11's on it right now. These aren't the strings I usually use with this guitar but the ernie balls and other strings I've tried do the same thing.
First I tried lowering the pickup height to varying degrees and messing with pole piece height. Everything gets worse the further away from the strings it is. I looked at the tone cap value and it's actually .022 on a 500k pot so I guess it's not that?
Checking my amp...when I turn the bass knob almost all the way down (to 1 or 2) it begins to get better, but none of my other 3 guitars make me wanna do that! I usually keep the bass knob between 4 and 8. In 3 watt mode the big fuzzy tone is a bit less noticable but in 5W mode it stands out.
Is there some tonal remedy for this besides a pickup swap?
If it's a pickup swap, what are some recommendations?
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