RevDrucifer
Fractal Fanatic
It was my pursuit of achieving as many tones I possibly could with one main guitar that taught me I don’t dig high output pickups as much as I do medium output ones. There’s that symbiotic relationship between the output of a guitar and input of the amp where too much of one or the other takes you further away from what you’re going for.
My main guitar for 20 years was my Ibanez JEM with Dimarzio Evolutions; high output/boosted mids. It worked well with certain tones, but when really trying to dial in what I wanted, I found they were slamming the input too hard and backing off the distortion didn’t bring me the results I wanted because they’re just unrelenting pickups. (This was when I was using actual amps, namely Mesa’s). I had a couple older JEMs back in the day with Dimarzio PAF Pros and I remember how big and open they sounded for high gain rhythm stuff, because instead of slamming the front end so hard, it was like the guitar was doing 50% of the work and the amp was doing the other 50%. With the Evolutions it was like 65% guitar, 35% amp, but I was stuck there at 65% with no way to compensate.
All my biggest influences tend to stick with one guitar with variations to their tones throughout the years, but I don’t think I could ever do that. There’s just too many I love, so instead of getting multiple versions of the same guitar, I just started getting different guitars that would suit the tonal ‘needs’ more proficiently.
My main guitar for 20 years was my Ibanez JEM with Dimarzio Evolutions; high output/boosted mids. It worked well with certain tones, but when really trying to dial in what I wanted, I found they were slamming the input too hard and backing off the distortion didn’t bring me the results I wanted because they’re just unrelenting pickups. (This was when I was using actual amps, namely Mesa’s). I had a couple older JEMs back in the day with Dimarzio PAF Pros and I remember how big and open they sounded for high gain rhythm stuff, because instead of slamming the front end so hard, it was like the guitar was doing 50% of the work and the amp was doing the other 50%. With the Evolutions it was like 65% guitar, 35% amp, but I was stuck there at 65% with no way to compensate.
All my biggest influences tend to stick with one guitar with variations to their tones throughout the years, but I don’t think I could ever do that. There’s just too many I love, so instead of getting multiple versions of the same guitar, I just started getting different guitars that would suit the tonal ‘needs’ more proficiently.
