DreX
New member
I've been trying lots of hot wound vintage single coil pickups, and I bought a set of True Velvets because they are wound 6.2k resistance with A5 and have a good stagger balance, but they actually sound more like a pickup wound in the 5k to 6k ohms range.
From DiMarzio's product copy:
This claim about "above the 12th fret" sounding good is actually true. If I strum like an a "D" chord on the 14th fret or there about on my other Strats, it decays fast and in a linear fashion. The True Velvets hang on just a little longer, like a Wright brothers glider, it coasts for just a moment longer before it crashes. It's a usable difference, because that moment gives you enough time to make it to the next note or chord without having heard much drop off.
The drawback to the "tuning" is that it has less high-highs than most other Strat pickups. It sounds to me a lot like a "noiseless" single coil, with that slightly lower peak resonance, and an absence of sparkling high frequencies. The low-fi audio of YouTube clips don't reveal this because it deal with frequencies that are out of reach of the recordings, but in all the clips I've seen it sounds like the player is plucking the strings really hard, and I think that comes from the prominent lower peak resonance of the pickup. I can thrash the strings with Fralins and it will never sound anything like that.
With the voicing of these pickups, I have a hard time playing blues, SRV type stuff with them and getting the right tone. They sound very tweed though I'm playing through a British amp. They're automatically in surf music mode, and I feel like I have to work hard to get them to sound like something else.
The product copy also says
Clarity with full chords is not really a problem I've ever had with single coils, except maybe Fralins, which are on the thin side.
DiMarzio obviously LOVES noiseless single coils, because they offers TWELVE difference single coil minimicking stacked humbuckers and six true single coils, and three of the six are the True Velvets neck, middle and bridge, and the three True Velvets are the only single coil they offer that is new to this century. I get the feeling that the development of the True Velvet was based on an observation that their stacked coils sound better in the upper frets than actual single coils, and so they worked backwards to make a single coil that had this particular attribute of a stacked humbucker, and the result was a single coil that sounds a lot like a stacked humbucker.
In conclusion, I'd recommend this pickup to Strat players you use a capo up high on the neck, because it flatters that end of the fret board, but I'd not recommend it to blues player, because it doesn't have that deep, gutty quality a Strat pickup needs for a convincing blues tone.
I expected more from these pickups simply on account of it being their own new single coil pickup since the 90's, like it was so good they threw away all their other ideas, instead it's like a self loathing single coil that wishes it was a stacked humbucker.
From DiMarzio's product copy:
This claim about "above the 12th fret" sounding good is actually true. If I strum like an a "D" chord on the 14th fret or there about on my other Strats, it decays fast and in a linear fashion. The True Velvets hang on just a little longer, like a Wright brothers glider, it coasts for just a moment longer before it crashes. It's a usable difference, because that moment gives you enough time to make it to the next note or chord without having heard much drop off.
The drawback to the "tuning" is that it has less high-highs than most other Strat pickups. It sounds to me a lot like a "noiseless" single coil, with that slightly lower peak resonance, and an absence of sparkling high frequencies. The low-fi audio of YouTube clips don't reveal this because it deal with frequencies that are out of reach of the recordings, but in all the clips I've seen it sounds like the player is plucking the strings really hard, and I think that comes from the prominent lower peak resonance of the pickup. I can thrash the strings with Fralins and it will never sound anything like that.
With the voicing of these pickups, I have a hard time playing blues, SRV type stuff with them and getting the right tone. They sound very tweed though I'm playing through a British amp. They're automatically in surf music mode, and I feel like I have to work hard to get them to sound like something else.
The product copy also says
Clarity with full chords is not really a problem I've ever had with single coils, except maybe Fralins, which are on the thin side.
DiMarzio obviously LOVES noiseless single coils, because they offers TWELVE difference single coil minimicking stacked humbuckers and six true single coils, and three of the six are the True Velvets neck, middle and bridge, and the three True Velvets are the only single coil they offer that is new to this century. I get the feeling that the development of the True Velvet was based on an observation that their stacked coils sound better in the upper frets than actual single coils, and so they worked backwards to make a single coil that had this particular attribute of a stacked humbucker, and the result was a single coil that sounds a lot like a stacked humbucker.
In conclusion, I'd recommend this pickup to Strat players you use a capo up high on the neck, because it flatters that end of the fret board, but I'd not recommend it to blues player, because it doesn't have that deep, gutty quality a Strat pickup needs for a convincing blues tone.
I expected more from these pickups simply on account of it being their own new single coil pickup since the 90's, like it was so good they threw away all their other ideas, instead it's like a self loathing single coil that wishes it was a stacked humbucker.
