Jackson Distortion
New member
Well, I think you can now count me among all of the normal guitarists: I have finally given up on floating bridges.
After pretty much exclusively buying guitars equipped with floating bridges for the last decade, the run has ended.
The main reason for not using them for the forseeable future: Tone suck.
Now, I'm not a firm believer in the phenomenon of tone suckage, but that's essentially what the problem is.
For the past four or five years I've had to regularly equalize my amp to make up for the tonal loss. Hundreds of variations with eq and it wasn't until last night that I realized that it's gotta be the floating bridge. It was confirmed this afternoon that a stop-tailpiece gives me the attack that I was missing.
I've suspected a few times before that that could be the culprit, but you've gotta let it ride for awhile. I thought that it might be the JB's bass frequencies, but I messed about with pickup height and stuff, but the results still weren't favorable.
To be precise, the problem lies in the fact that once I'd kick on the distortion channel, the flat attack of the bridge couldn't punch through the heavy sound. The attack was very slight and ping-y and the body was muddied. What I needed was a punchy and solid attack which I get with a stop-tail.
I looked at Brass Blocks and other ideas, but that didn't seem to appear on paper to be the cure. I looked up videos and while the tone increased due to that upgrade, I could still tell that it's not what I'm looking for.
I'll miss the good times I've had with floating bridges, but now I can move forward and spend less time on the fruitless knob tweaking sessions that have dominated my playing sessions.
I see alot of musical ideas coming to fruition with my recent turnaround.
Man, it feels so good to now play and just rip it up like the rest of the world's guitarists. Not that I couldn't rip it up before, but my future sessions should be way more consistent overall.
After pretty much exclusively buying guitars equipped with floating bridges for the last decade, the run has ended.
The main reason for not using them for the forseeable future: Tone suck.
Now, I'm not a firm believer in the phenomenon of tone suckage, but that's essentially what the problem is.
For the past four or five years I've had to regularly equalize my amp to make up for the tonal loss. Hundreds of variations with eq and it wasn't until last night that I realized that it's gotta be the floating bridge. It was confirmed this afternoon that a stop-tailpiece gives me the attack that I was missing.
I've suspected a few times before that that could be the culprit, but you've gotta let it ride for awhile. I thought that it might be the JB's bass frequencies, but I messed about with pickup height and stuff, but the results still weren't favorable.
To be precise, the problem lies in the fact that once I'd kick on the distortion channel, the flat attack of the bridge couldn't punch through the heavy sound. The attack was very slight and ping-y and the body was muddied. What I needed was a punchy and solid attack which I get with a stop-tail.
I looked at Brass Blocks and other ideas, but that didn't seem to appear on paper to be the cure. I looked up videos and while the tone increased due to that upgrade, I could still tell that it's not what I'm looking for.
I'll miss the good times I've had with floating bridges, but now I can move forward and spend less time on the fruitless knob tweaking sessions that have dominated my playing sessions.
I see alot of musical ideas coming to fruition with my recent turnaround.
Man, it feels so good to now play and just rip it up like the rest of the world's guitarists. Not that I couldn't rip it up before, but my future sessions should be way more consistent overall.
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