Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with it!!

[alkeys]

So here's something I've been thinking about. I own quite a few more modern Dimarzios and Seymour Duncan pickups.

I always find my self going: "How do I get the sound on this one Judas Priest album." or "How do I get the sound on this one Ozzy album"

For me most of the music I love most was made from about 1975 to about 1985, with a sweet spot of about 77-81 for me give or take a few years.

The solution? Tell me if anyone else has ever thought this. Why don't I just use what they were all using back in the day and not worry about the Nortons and the Freds and the Breeds and the Crazy 8s and the PATBs etc...

If all the albums that I like - the only pickup they had at their disposal in the late 70s and early 80s was a JB and a Super Distortion for the most part, then why don't I just buy JBs and Super Distortions for my guitars?

Does anyone feel me on this one?

I mean in the olden days all they really had were Gibson PAFs a Dimarzio take on it called the Dimarzio PAF, the Dimarzio Super Distortion, the Duncan JB, the Duncan 59 which was also a Duncan's take of the original Gibby PAF and the Duncan Distortion and maybe just maybe a Pearly Gates was around then but I'm guessing it wasn't- I definitely could be wrong though. The PAF Pro didn't show up on the scene til like 87 or so.

Sometimes I find myself just getting lost in the various ammount of possibilities of what pickup to put in what guitar with there being so many choices. Is there anyone like me that said- enough is enough already I'm sick of analyzing pickups and if all I want is the sound of my old favorite records, why don't I just buy what they were all using at the time which was mostly a JB or a Super Distortion.

I'm not sure if my thinking is right and I'm not saying it is- but I am saying I have felt this way many times.

I would love to hear your comments. Thanks

 

[crusty philtrum]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

Im with ya....and, as a 51 year-old, i've been around long enough to have been there, used that kinda gear and of course seen and experienced a lot of what has come since.

First thing i thought when i read your post was....yes, but also the amps would come into the equation big-time. A lot of those sounds were pre master volume controls. I think in a way, that's why we were trying to slam the front of our amps with more signal, with simple things like one-transistor boosters, treble boosters, fuzz boxes etc. That's where the original DiMarzio's and other early aftermarket pickups came in, originally concentrating giving us more output without toooo much consideration of tone changes.

Of course since then we have wanted heavier and heavier sounds, and learnt to expect greater TONE from pickups at the same time. Amps of course got master volumes, which in a way has become a whole spectrum of new sounds in it's own right. I still feel however that most amp sounds we hear still follow a line all the way back to the old Fender, Marshall and Vox lineage of the 50's and 60's.

But yeah, i reckon the very best way to get sounds from a particular era is to use the gear, or at least the type of gear, that was used in the first place. Using more contemporary gear to get older tones usually seems to be a complicated way of doing something that was originally much simpler, and is usually just a close approximation at best.

As a side-note, i have found BachToRock's hybrid humbucker pickups (his recommended 59/Jazz for the neck and Custom/59 bridge) to be an incredible pickup, not just in their sonic complexity but it terms of how they can cover early 70's rock up through Van Halen and onwards.....

Also lately i have been wondering about curly guitar cords, hehe.....does anyone make any high-quality ones these days?

 

[Empty Pockets]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

well yeah. you use the right tool for the right job.

you use a Fender with single coils and a Twin for cleans, you use a Les Paul with P90s into a Marshall full stack for distortion, and you use a Strat with a JB to sound like all those 80's metal guys who didn't get it.

 

[hanumanlangur]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

Me. My favorite pickups are vintage Strat single coils, 59's, and JB's. Those pickups cover most of the tones I like.

 

[Franluthier]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

I agree with you man, in some cases.

I definitively agree that if you love a player you should go for the same pickup, guitar and equipment. Although every guitar is different cause every piece of wood is different, so a piece of mahogany is different from other mahogany piece. But, seriously talking I guess the % of difference in tone shouldn't be so much...

The other thing I believe is most of the tone come from your fingers + ears, most players make a different guitars sound like that particular player. I had a friend that played blues and he could get mostly the same tone from a Strat and a SG, so his tone was in his hand and ears definitively.

I'm a vintage guy, so I like low output pickups, even some of the vintage catalogued buckers from Duncan seem to me too fat for what I can hear in records from that era... love to drive from the amp, and use a booster maybe to drive more, but now I'm strating to like Super Ds and JBs cause they give you a little extra, compared to the crazy output race developed by pickup builders.

Any way what it is really hard is when you love different players from differente eras... let's say you love hendrix and kurt cobain... haha how do you select a pickup for this!!!

I think at some point is stupid... for example Warren Haynes is in the list of Pearly gates pickup user, but the Gibson Warren model comes with Burstbuckers so... what should do a warren lover??? take out PG and install BBuckers??? Do you really think you won't be able to play Warren songs without that??? Should you get PGs for the past records, and get BBs for the new ones??? haha see that this is really stupid, isn't it??? I think you could use PGs 59s Seths and you'll get a great tone...

I guess no one would read this cause it's too long!!! hahaha

It's all about music first...

 

[BigAlTheBird]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

well yeah. you use the right tool for the right job.

you use a Fender with single coils and a Twin for cleans, you use a Les Paul with P90s into a Marshall full stack for distortion, and you use a Strat with a JB to sound like all those 80's metal guys who didn't get it.

What a great post!

 

[hanumanlangur]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

We all know that other peoples' preferred pickup tones are failed versions of your own. Single coils are always best, P90's are better than humbuckers... blah blah blah.

After all, what did Dave Mustaine know about metal tone? Or Jake E. Lee? You could have taught a thing or two to Kurt Cobain about grunge tones. If they had only known...
:smack:

 

[crusty philtrum]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

Hi

I think Franluthier makes some great points just above, and i do agree. If you love a certain style, player etc, eventually it will begin to seep out of you regarless of your gear. But i guess the 'vintage correct' equipment for a certain style does help, the icing on the cake maybe, and probably helps 'getting the vibe' to inspire the playing.

It did occur to me that if you had interests and aspirations to sounds and styles from several era's, it would be hard to cover all the bases with one instrument and one set of pickups. Same with amps. I guess that's where it can be fun if you have interests in a bunch of styles and like amassing gear.

An example....... I remember years ago, i had my trusty old Tele and acquired my first ever Fender amp, a Super Reverb. I had been making some basic attempts at rockabilly (i was easily able to play the notes, but i had not listened much to the genre and had really no knowledge or feel for it). I plugged my Tele directly into the Super Rev and, WHAM, there was the sound....i was right back in the 50's, despite my scratchy attempts at playing the style. But it was very inspiring to hear that sound.

(and, having said that, i imagine a great rockabilly player could probably still get their sound reasonably well with modern gear........hehe, so i guess it goes round and round and round......)........

 

[uOpt]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

Most of those rockstars played hundreds of guitars to find the ones they were using on stage and in the studio. And amps, too.

You need some pickup variance to dial in what comes out best for your particular guitar. Even if you just count PAFs, Seymour Duncan has what - 7 or 8 variants not counting the custom shop and still they don't cover all PAF clone's sound with those variants.

I think the more appropriate thing to say is "just get a good setup, not the good setup" and shut up and play.

 

[alkeys]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

Crusty- you hit it right on the head man when you said:

"Using more contemporary gear to get older tones usually seems to be a complicated way of doing something that was originally much simpler, and is usually just a close approximation at best."

I'm more of a newby being only 30yrs old so I was not around to really witness stuff that came and gone- but yeah I understand there were alot of peeps trying to slam the front end of the amp back in the day etc...

 

[blueman335]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

Most of those rockstars played hundreds of guitars to find the ones they were using on stage and in the studio. And amps, too.

You need some pickup variance to dial in what comes out best for your particular guitar. Even if you just count PAFs, Seymour Duncan has what - 7 or 8 variants not counting the custom shop and still they don't cover all PAF clone's sound with those variants.

I think the more appropriate thing to say is "just get a good setup, not the good setup" and shut up and play.

+1. You can drive yourself crazy trying to duplicate everything from 30 or 40 years ago. Like uPot says, sure many of the greats used original PAF's, but who knows how they were wound & what magnets were in them? And if you can somehow match that up, do you have 1960's Plexis & vintage custom-made effects boxes?

You may be able to get close to your hero's tones, but odds are you'll have to take a different route to get there. If the end result is good, that's all that matters.

 

[LtKojak]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

Nobody ever thought that those guys getting those classic tones didn't get'em BECAUSE all they had were those krrappy SC and PAF-like suucky p'up but DESPITE the fact they only had that?

One of the single most sought after tones in the history of music was the one Jimmy Page got in the "Stairway to Heaven" solo. The quintaesential of all humbuckers' sound, isn't it? Well... how would you dig it if it actually was the bridge p'up of a stock Telecaster?

If you don't believe me, just ask Jimmy 'bout it... or just ask Google.

The best sound you can get is the one you get with the equipment you own and KNOW... B.B. King never ever thought about "what if I put an A8 magnet bar in my neck p'up?"... or... "what if I raise the cathode voltage, would I get close to that brown sound"? As a matter of fact, his Gibson amp was and still is a solid state one. He just played the darn thing.

Bottom line: stop talking and start playing... or you don't do that just to avoid to hear how bad you suck at playing?

Your honor, I rest my case!

Pepe aka Lt. Kojak
Milano, Italy

 

[Zhangliqun]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

a) The truth is that very often your own playing technique is so vastly different from that of your hero that you have to use totally different gear to get anything like the same sound.

b) If we stop talking, isn't that the end of this forum? And all others like it?

Yes, it can easily be overdone swapping pickups and gear, but if you go into it knowing that the gear is really only a small part of getting "that sound", you won't overdo it. Or maybe you will, but you don't care because you see it as just part of the fun. We're 99.99% guys in here, and guys like to tinker, mod, and hotrod. It's in the DNA and has to have an outlet somewhere, deal with it. The very purpose of forums like these is to cater to that part of us, to allow us to gather and mindlessly obsess on Evan's "tone solutions", and I think it's the greatest thing since the plain G string.

Anybody who has a problem with that, log off and get back to practicing.

 

[Jackson Distortion]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

I answered to this same topic over at the DiMarzio board, and now my perception is completely changed lol. Good thing I've always wanted to sound like "me".

 

[Sludgenutz]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

I agree. There are some generational differences, "gain" being about the most obvious. But...

I think 95% of it has to do with emulating an artist/band's studio tone, rather than replicating an artist/band's live tone. This especially true of any performance played beyond a smaller intimate venue.

I'm guilty of this, as much as anyone else. Live performances are so freakin' smeared by everthing else going on, you often just pay your money for a ticket, be entertained, and hopefully remember a fraction of what just happened! It's like this: How many times have a group of freinds seen a concert...and each person's opinion of an artist/band in completely different!

IMO, there are few people who could identify a live tone by almost any particular player...if the particular guitarist or other guitarist played a different song on the known gear of the target artist/band's tone!

Case and point: How many times do people love one album tone, by an artist/band, and seriously dislike another recording? It happens ALL the time. Does this matter live? Me thinks probably not.

 

[Robert Delahunt]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

If all the albums that I like - the only pickup they had at their disposal in the late 70s and early 80s was a JB and a Super Distortion for the most part, then why don't I just buy JBs and Super Distortions for my guitars?

Does anyone feel me on this one?

I mean in the olden days all they really had were Gibson PAFs a Dimarzio take on it called the Dimarzio PAF, the Dimarzio Super Distortion, the Duncan JB, the Duncan 59 which was also a Duncan's take of the original Gibby PAF and the Duncan Distortion and maybe just maybe a Pearly Gates was around then but I'm guessing it wasn't- I definitely could be wrong though. The PAF Pro didn't show up on the scene til like 87 or so.

Sometimes I find myself just getting lost in the various ammount of possibilities of what pickup to put in what guitar with there being so many choices. Is there anyone like me that said- enough is enough already I'm sick of analyzing pickups and if all I want is the sound of my old favorite records, why don't I just buy what they were all using at the time which was mostly a JB or a Super Distortion.

Sometimes, yes, I feel like there are too many choices. However, the same pickup doesn't work for everyone, and tone is a quest.

Sometimes I think I need to sound 100% like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, etc, whatever band. However, practice is more important than obsessing about gear, and who cares about the last 1% difference?

Still, I feel you. I'm sick of analyzing pickups and trying to sound like any specific person. I'm just going to use whatever I want. I'll start collecting guitars after I'm rich lol.

Case in point: Lincoln Brewster has custom shop Seymour Duncan pickups, wound by The Man. He got those after he started earning money playing guitar, not before.

 

[idsnowdog]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

I wouldn't type cast specific pickups as being X or Y musically. There are relatively few pickups that are 100% genre specific. A Dimarzio X2N probably won't do country, but many pickups cover the vast majority of styles.

 

[Jackson Distortion]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

A Dimarzio X2N probably won't do country,...

There's a sound clip on the DiMarzio site of a guy playing country/Jazz/swing or some type of non-metal with an X2N. Crazy.

 

[SAVAGE DISTORTION]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

I get a little crazed with all the possiblities out there
but between asking questions here and elsewhere i can narrow things down
to a more relaxed mode.
like with paf's i like the new dimarzio 36th
why? because even though it is not built like a old original it has that old school vibe with the newer technologies that seth did not have back in 1955
another real winner is the blackouts
why?
because seymour took a concept that EMG got famous from and made the active perform/sound like passives with all the benefits of actives like the emgs
so I think that even though it gets a bit "too many to choose from"
you can narrow it down pretty easily with some research

 

[pzaxtl]

Re: Has anyone said: This is ridiculous! Let's just go old school and be done with i

a) The truth is that very often your own playing technique is so vastly different from that of your hero that you have to use totally different gear to get anything like the same sound.

b) If we stop talking, isn't that the end of this forum? And all others like it?

Yes, it can easily be overdone swapping pickups and gear, but if you go into it knowing that the gear is really only a small part of getting "that sound", you won't overdo it. Or maybe you will, but you don't care because you see it as just part of the fun. We're 99.99% guys in here, and guys like to tinker, mod, and hotrod. It's in the DNA and has to have an outlet somewhere, deal with it. The very purpose of forums like these is to cater to that part of us, to allow us to gather and mindlessly obsess on Evan's "tone solutions", and I think it's the greatest thing since the plain G string.

Anybody who has a problem with that, log off and get back to practicing.

+1 Spoken like a real man! And, of course, it's also true that if I posted here and there a little less, and practiced a little more, I'd be a better player. With that thought in mind -- gotta go....