Pickups don't matter?

[Aceman]

It also just hit me that he may have simply lost his high frequency hearing.

I like to say "I just like bright tones"

But in reality....I can't hear them.

 

[Mincer]

I kind of feel like we, the video watching public, have some responsibility for this kind of behavior... I intentionally avoid the videos that say "ignore scales, just learn with your ear cause that's the cool way" or "learn scales cuz your ear doesn't work" examples.

But this extremism gets clicks and people take the bait even though it's possible, or even likely, that the videographer will say whatever gets them hits.

And it always makes sense to accuse someone of something and pointing fingers at pup manufacturers just gets the more visibility. So the less troll feeding the better

In this case, it's obvious that these were different pickups, it's obvious that if you've squared the edge off of every overtone, it's all going to sound similar, and it's obvious that none of this has anything to do with good guitar playing.

But I think it's even more important to recognize that your average guitarist almost certainly has no clue. Beginners are not expected to understand the difference in a clean tele and a clean humbucker, much less heavily distorted noise.

So I ignore this kind of messaging because anybody that has developed an ear will understand he's wrong. It's far more important to me to invest time with players that recognize pup differences and want to grow. In a way, he's helping the better players differentiate themselves from the mediocre.

I get a lot of students who watch videos like this (and the 'forget all you heard about music theory'-type videos) and I usually have to explain that not everyone who makes videos wants to actually educate people.

 

[Aceman]

I think "forget all you heard about music theory" and "Is there an audible difference to your ears (a real, not imaginary one)?" are two very different things.

 

[Demanic]

I like to say "I just like bright tones"

But in reality....I can't hear them.

I hear them. Constantly. So it takes a bit more of a bump to make intentional ones stand out.

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[Securb]

I play high gain. If I switch from the Dimebucker to the Jazz in my Iceman, even the layman can hear the difference. The same with my Hot Rails and TV Jones.

 

[PFDarkside]

Reminds me a bit of when Ryan Bruce said something along the lines of “at this point I’m getting tired of reviewing pickups, they are all sounding very similar”. And now he has a signature Fluence.

We are all here because we all believe that pickups heavily contribute to electric guitar tone. When you do plugins, you are now at the mercy of the plug-in sound.

Another thing I do think is that Duncan, Dimarzio and EMG basically cornered the market on pickup designs. All the boutique ones are more marketing than substance. Can you really not find your PAF vibe from Duncan, your high gain vibe from Dimarzio or your active Vibe from EMG? If Bare Knuckle didn’t have the thinly veiled names I doubt they’d be enjoying the success they are now.

 

[Demanic]

You seem to have left out Lace.

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[beaubrummels]

Reminds me a bit of when Ryan Bruce said something along the lines of “at this point I’m getting tired of reviewing pickups, they are all sounding very similar”. And now he has a signature Fluence.

We are all here because we all believe that pickups heavily contribute to electric guitar tone. When you do plugins, you are now at the mercy of the plug-in sound.

Another thing I do think is that Duncan, Dimarzio and EMG basically cornered the market on pickup designs. All the boutique ones are more marketing than substance. Can you really not find your PAF vibe from Duncan, your high gain vibe from Dimarzio or your active Vibe from EMG? If Bare Knuckle didn’t have the thinly veiled names I doubt they’d be enjoying the success they are now.

FWIW I tone chased a particular sound for several years, tried Duncans and DMZ and a few others, and for my needs settled on a Bare Knuckle Black Dog bridge as the ultimate, while a Duncan 59/A4 was the ultimate neck. They were all in the ballpark, but that one BK pickup got all the details right for me, rather than just 85-95% of them.

The boutiques are different and have their own thing going on. But none of them, neither the big names or the small ones, are really night and day different. It's that last 4-5% of quality in sound you are troubleshooting for, and you just don't know which winder will do it until you try them.

 

[Aceman]

. We are all here because we all believe that pickups heavily contribute to electric guitar tone.

Believe is the key word there. Just like guys on the Tonewood forum believe that the wood makes a difference. And the guys onItsinthefingers.com believe that EVH can pick up any guitar with any pickup and make that sound.

I BELIEVE that pickups make a difference, and would defend that even under gain, my A2P and Distortion have a different quality about them. But My Distortion, My JB, and my Custom....not so sure.

My little PG vs T-Top vs A2P vid showed pretty clearly people couldn't pick an A2P from a PG from a T-Top playing Sweet Child.

 

[Demanic]

Believe is the key word there. Just like guys on the Tonewood forum believe that the wood makes a difference. And the guys onItsinthefingers.com believe that EVH can pick up any guitar with any pickup and make that sound.

I BELIEVE that pickups make a difference, and would defend that even under gain, my A2P and Distortion have a different quality about them. But My Distortion, My JB, and my Custom....not so sure.

My little PG vs T-Top vs A2P vid showed pretty clearly people couldn't pick an A2P from a PG from a T-Top playing Sweet Child.

How's that Crunchlab under heavy gain? Just like a Distortion or X2N?
I think not.

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[AdrianSD]

How does the conclusion drawn in the video stack up against other pickup comparisons which clearly reveal differences between pickups even under high gain? Such as the famous Keith Merrow SD comparisons published quite a few years back? I'm not a pro player but I pump enough gain to reasonably assume I play high gain. Yet, I can clearly hear the differences between pickups like BW, JB and Custom.
What I found was that the choice of amp and/or speaker make a much bigger impact than the choice of pickup to shape a particular tone, but there are definitely difference between pickups that are clearly audible even when going chugga chugga for you life.

 

[Mincer]

How does the conclusion drawn in the video stack up against other pickup comparisons which clearly reveal differences between pickups even under high gain? Such as the famous Keith Merrow SD comparisons published quite a few years back? I'm not a pro player but I pump enough gain to reasonably assume I play high gain. Yet, I can clearly hear the differences between pickups like BW, JB and Custom.
What I found was that the choice of amp and/or speaker make a much bigger impact than the choice of pickup to shape a particular tone, but there are definitely difference between pickups that are clearly audible even when going chugga chugga for you life.

I just think sometimes people make videos just to make them and get people to watch them, and there isn't anything deeper than that.

 

[JOLLY]

I can't stand his videos. He's an over opinionated know nothing that thinks he knows it all. If I wanted someone to yell at me for know reason, I'd go hang out with my dad.

 

[idsnowdog]

Maybe he makes everything he produces sound generic and bland?

 

[Mikelamury]

Well, this is gonna be controversial....

Give it a watch, then discuss.

Not only is he specifically talking about high gain metal but he is talking about RECORDING high gain metal. He's not just playing the guitars through Amps he is recording it and whatever that entails for his specific rig. I agree that with that much gain there is not much difference because all the frequencies are almost maxed out and compressed and with less gain the differences are more apparent but when your recording tones it's going through whatever EQ, compression- whatever your setup entails and that's going to sound different then just playing it through an amp. But I don't know if anyone picked up on that he's talking about recording metal tone with high gain. I agree not a very scientific video.

 

[Aceman]

I just think sometimes people make videos just to make them and get people to watch them, and there isn't anything deeper than that.

Some people make music just to make it and get people to listen to it, and there isn't anything deeper than that

 

[Aceman]

About RECORDING high gain metal. But I don't know if anyone picked up on that he's talking about recording metal tone with high gain. I agree not a very scientific video.

Agree. I think a lot of people are missing that. I think a lot of guitar players are also oblivious to that point. Easy example is the legions of people who thought Led Zepp was recorded with a Les Paul and a Marshall. Just because guitar player X said in an interview they used thus and such doesn't mean anything. Case in point - ed would either lie, or be too loaded to remember. I have said many times that we have no idea what actually made the noise we heard after an engineer gets done with it.

FYI I did see a guy who did a pickup into an amp into a Shure 57 as a response to this.

But also - are guitar players' opinions any more scientific? Less so I'd say. We are a superstitious bunch at best, and completely oblivious on the typical day.

 

[misterwhizzy]

I think this is a decent response and addresses what Glenn may have left out of his video, whether intentionally or not.

 

[Aceman]

That is the FYI guy.

 

[woodsnstrings]

He was REALLY specific about this: it's a metal production channel. The guitars may have different levels of output, but not tone. And the reason for this is because they're all going though a heavily distorted, high gain amp. In fact, he makes this point on every single video where he compares different things that purportedly affect your tone.

In the original video he does a blind track with 10 different guitars playing the same riff through the same setup, and challenges the listener to identify them. In the follow up video (shared by OP), you can see the demonstration. He plays all 10 guitars back to back onscreen, all using the same EQ settings, drive, gain, speaker, EVERYTHING. And he reiterates the point AGAIN that this is in reference to YOUR HIGH GAIN METAL TONE, and that the point is to demonstrate that guys on his channel who chirp about having such highly attuned senses they can pick out any one of those guitars in a lineup by tone alone are full of shit.

THEN he shows what the pickups sound like with no gain, and how, yes, they DO in fact sound different and have unique tones. HE SAYS THIS IN THE VIDEO. But again, as he points out, when producing METAL recordings, those differences in clean tone account for about 10% of the total recording time. Because of that, if you're going to be spending 90% of your time with highly saturated overdriven gains, the bigger impact on tone is going to come from the speaker and the mic placement than the pickup.

Really, it's OK to be critical of the content. But you have to actually watch it and pay attention to what's being said, and the conditions around the experiment and demonstration. I would love to see someone here do a counter demonstration with the identical parameters and see if they can reproduce the results. THAT'S WHAT SCIENCE IS. He proposed the hypothesis, created a method, performed the experiment, and published his results. Now it's out there: you can use his methodology and determine if his conclusions were correct, or if his experiment was an outlier. But you MUST work within the parameters of the experiment.

I'm curious to see if anyone here is going to publish. To quote Glenn, "Evidence, or STFU."