Biu
New member
Hahah, well, a little ASS METAL MAKEOVER! The thing seems so terribly '80s butt metal, I love it. The pups are a Tone Zone in the bridge, stock middle, and Fast Track 2 BRIDGE in the neck position. I initially stuck the Fast Track 2 in as a joke since it's freaking upside-down and whatnot, but it actually sounds pretty good (well, under distortion, of course)! Kinda has that Iron Maiden neck pup feel.
Before, I didn't really like the Tone Zone. I had it in an Ibanez RG3120 Prestige (mahogany) with 500K pots, so it was really muddy and overly aggressive, AKA no dynamics and incredibly ugly sounding. But this time, it's in a poplar body and wired with 250K pots. This pup sounds much sweeter with these pots and wood combo, yet extremely wah-wah-like in dynamic! It's seriously my favorite bridge pickup now...simply BLISS to solo on, and oh dear, the CRUNCH! You can really hear the Alnico 5 in there and it just adds so much dimension and body to my tone, which is probably why it kept my undivided focus for 3 hours straight... It's pretty versatile in the realm of distortion--the full bucker mode has that nice polished lead sound and when you split it, it's still powerful enough to crank out some nice vintagey crunch tones. For the time being, I think I've found my holy grail distortion tone, boys and girls.
As far as getting clean/vintage sounds, the 2 and 4 notch positions are very twangy and sparkly on this guitar, so it's not completely a one-trick-pony. It's more like a two-trick-pony
Anyway, the moral of the story is, spandex and hairspray are far from cool, but when your wanker guitar makes you think of how completely ASS the '80s were, why, it is just worth it. Hope you old-school metal fans can appreciate my axe...I know my ears do!