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Topics - buddroyce

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31
News & New Guys / Server upgrades
« on: April 06, 2018, 02:24:06 AM »
Did some server upgrades over night.

Some things may break. Please let me know here if something went wonky and needs to be fixed.

32
The Pickup Place / DiMARZIO RELEASES PAF® 59 NECK & BRIDGE PICKUPS
« on: July 19, 2017, 05:48:49 PM »
Just got the press release from DiMarzio. Looks like they're expanding their vintage line up. Makes me wonder how different they are from the PAF 36th.

DiMARZIO RELEASES PAF® 59 NECK & BRIDGE PICKUPS

Staten Island, N.Y., July 19, 2017 – DiMarzio, Inc. announces the release of PAF® 59 Neck (DP274CR) and Bridge (DP275CR) hum-canceling pickups for electric guitars.

These days, it seems as if everyone’s looking for the legendary sound and dynamics of the original “Patent Applied For” pickups. Utilizing Larry DiMarzio’s 1959 Cherry Sunburst Les Paul® for reference, DiMarzio used the same materials as 1959, gifted ears, and decades of winding experience to create the new PAF® 59 pickups.

Larry says the PAF® 59 Neck and Bridge models were built following an “old family recipe.” We started with a 2-½-inch degaussed Alnico 5 magnet. The 42 AWG enamel wire coils are un-dipped and scatter wound. They’re tuned to capture the guitar’s voice and dynamics without coloring it.

The PAF® 59 Neck and Bridge models feature Double Cream™ butyrate bobbins on our long-leg nickel/silver base plate just like the originals.

All materials are made in the U.S.A. to the tolerances of the best of the 1959 pickups.
The PAF® 59 Neck model is very responsive, and harmonics leap out. Combined with the PAF® 59 Bridge model, it’s got that smooth, overdriven, classic arena rock sound.
Like the vintage “Patent Applied For” pickups, the PAF® 59 Bridge model has perfect harmonic range with exactly the right amount of oomph. It has a subtle roll off on the top end that sweetens the highs in the bridge position.

The PAF® 59 Neck and Bridge models have the open dynamics, bright attack, smooth midrange, and rich bottom end, along with the creamy distortion of the original “Patent Applied For” pickups.

DiMarzio’s PAF® 59 Neck and Bridge pickups are made in the U.S.A., and may now be ordered for immediate delivery. Suggested List Price is $129.99 each. For more information about the new PAF® 59 Neck and Bridge pickups, please visit our website at www.dimarzio.com.

33
News & New Guys / Site Service Disruption
« on: July 19, 2017, 05:45:29 PM »
Hey Folks,

The upstream provider for the server is changing and I'm slowly migrating everything over so there may be some hiccups with the site.

If the site goes down, please come back later.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Budd

34
News & New Guys / Forum updates
« on: January 30, 2017, 07:15:36 PM »
Been doing my rounds to updating everything and finally made me way around to updating the forum software here on the DF. Some of the changes include

-Tapatalk plugin updated. No idea who uses it, but I've updated it just in case.
--Tapatalk plugin disabled. Trying to sort out why creating new posts take a while.
-Core forum software patched up and up to date.
-Backend system upgraded.
-Added support for memcaching to improve the forum performance.

If there's anything that's broken on the site, please let me know here so I can fix it.

35
Just got this press release in my inbox. Looks like DiMarzio just released another pickup, this time another acoustic pickup. Here's the press release

========================

DiMARZIO RELEASES THE BLACK ANGEL™ PIEZO FOR ACOUSTIC GUITARS

Staten Island, N.Y., December 22, 2015 – Responding to requests, DiMarzio, Inc. announces the release of The Black Angel™ Piezo for acoustic guitars.

The Black Angel™ Piezo (DP235) is a stand-alone pickup that delivers a beautiful, natural acoustic guitar sound. It retains all the percussive resonance of the body, plus the transparent clarity of the strings. The Black Angel™ Piezo uses our new stratifying technology that stacks our piezo elements between layers of maple, spreading the energy across the entire sensor array. DiMarzio's approach is organic capture — eliminating the need for a built-in battery, preamp, EQ, or digital modeling.

The Black Angel™ Piezo attaches easily to the guitar’s internal bridge plate (inside your guitar) with our quick alignment bracket, and can be mounted with hide glue, super glue or any woodworking adhesive.

The Black Angel™ Piezo comes with a Switchcraft® stereo endpin jack so it can be easily paired with The Black Angel™ Magnetic Soundhole Pickup (DP234). Mixing the ambient qualities of the piezo with the great bass response and harmonics of the magnetic delivers a huge, live sound.

DiMarzio’s The Black Angel™ Piezo is made in the U.S.A., and may now be ordered for immediate delivery. Suggested List Price is $159.99. For more information about The Black Angel™ Piezo, please visit our website at  www.dimarzio.com.

36
News & New Guys / Merry Xmas & Happy Holidays 2015!
« on: December 22, 2015, 03:49:28 PM »
Hello Hello!!!

Just wanted to drop by to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays this year! Thank you everyone for making this place what it is, it wouldn't be the same without you all. Looking forward to seeing what kind of gear people get for the holidays :D

Cheers,

Budd

37
The Pickup Place / New DiMarzio Eclipse 8
« on: October 19, 2015, 04:06:52 PM »
Just got this press release from the folks at DiMarzio. Too bad they don't make this in a 7 string version.

===

DiMARZIO RELEASES ECLIPSE 8™ NECK & BRIDGE PICKUPS FOR 8-STRING ELECTRIC GUITARS

Staten Island, N.Y., October 19, 2015 – DiMarzio, Inc. announces the release of the Eclipse 8™ Neck (DP813) and Bridge (DP814) hum-canceling pickups for 8-string electric guitars. The Eclipse 8™ Neck and Bridge pickups were designed for and with Javier Reyes, who uses them in his signature JR-608 by ESP.

Whether he’s gigging with Animals As Leaders or Mestis, Javier Reyes is a marvelous player. His diverse style contains elements of progressive metal, classical, jazz, and Latin sounds. With his masterful playing, Javier is on the cutting edge of extended-range 8-string guitars.

The Eclipse 8™ Neck Model is a unique combination of design elements. The coils are tuned to different frequencies with different inductance loading to create the unique Eclipse 8™ sound. The pickup has an output level similar to that of a PAF® but with a radically different sound. Lows and mids are very transparent, and the highs have the kind of glassy chime most often associated with single-coil pickups. Javier requested a neck pickup that allowed the lower and higher strings to be fairly equal in level so that the melody would be present as well as the extended chords underneath. The Eclipse 8™ Neck Model has outstanding headroom, and is equally effective with hyper-clean and heavily overdriven sounds.

Versatility is one of the primary elements of Javier’s sound. He wanted a bridge pickup that was great for clean and for semi-driven, and at the same time for high gain with a lot of punch. It also needed to be very responsive to how he picks. The Eclipse 8™ Bridge Model is hot, but it isn’t super-saturated. It has very clean lows and mids that maintain clarity even with extreme gain through the entire 8-string frequency range. Solos sparkle, and palm-muting really pops. Javier often uses the split-coil option, which is very clean and open sounding without brittle highs.

DiMarzio’s Eclipse 8™ Neck and Bridge pickups are made in the U.S.A., and may now be ordered for immediate delivery. Suggested List Price is $139.99 each. For more information about the new Eclipse 8™ Neck and Bridge pickups, please visit our website at www.dimarzio.com.

38
Just got this from the DiMarzio marketing team. Gotta love Joe.

===

Staten Island, N.Y. – DiMarzio, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of a new video with guitarist Joe Satriani. Filmed by Larry DiMarzio himself, the video spotlights Satriani showcasing his limited edition series of Ibanez® JS25ART guitars. Each is unique and features art hand-drawn by Satriani, along with his signature DiMarzio® Satch Track™ Neck (DP425) and Mo’ Joe™ (DP216) pickups.

The video can be viewed and shared here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhaDGoJsdU

Joe Satriani’s upcoming album, Shockwave Supernova, will be available July 24th, 2015 on Epic Records.

39
The Pickup Place / Custom Wound Axis Pickups
« on: June 29, 2015, 09:51:09 PM »
OK, I know this might be old news but I just discovered that the cheaper AX40D from the cheaper EBMM Sterling line actually has the custom wound DiMarzio's in them. Tempted to buy one to gut out the pickups and use as a beater guitar.

40
The Pickup Place / DiMarzio Black Angel Review
« on: June 17, 2015, 07:31:55 PM »
DiMarzio Black Angel Review

Assuming you’re a guitar player, when you hear the name DiMarzio, what images does it conjure up in your mind? If you’re like most people, you associate DiMarzio pickups with the words along the lines of metal or shred, but did you know DiMarzio also makes acoustic pickups?

New for 2015 is the Black Angel pickup. I just received my evaluation pickup in the mail last week and being a guy who doesn’t own an acoustic, I decided to do the next best thing. Borrow one! But not just any acoustic, I ended up using a 1970’s Gibson Dove that belonged to a client of mine. It originally had a LR Baggs M1 passive sound hole pickup which is what the Black Angel is going to be compared against.

If you’re an acoustic guitar player or have looked into acoustic pickups, the name LR Baggs is probably going to sound very familiar as they are produce some of the finest acoustic pickups out there, so the DiMarzio Black Angel is going up against some seriously tough competition

THE PICKUP

There’s nothing really too fancy about the Black Angel. It came with a cable with a switchcraft ¼” jack to plug in a regular cable with. But since the pickup used the same cable as the LR Baggs pickup it was replacing, I just kept the existing cable.

One thing I did notice though, was that even though it was a passive pickup, there was this little switch on the side of the pickup which turned out to be a phase switch. This is really handy when I gotta deal with feedback. How much of a difference it has in tone, I’m not too sure, but I’ll have to test it.


INSTALLATION

Seeing that this is a vintage Gibson Dove I’m messing around with and since it’s not exactly my guitar, I decided to just run the wire externally. The original LR Baggs pickup was also installed that way so swapping it was easy. The pickups were swapped several times back and forth to provide a better test so I’m VERY glad that swapping the pickups were fast.

The Rig

At first I was thinking of just plugging it into a proper acoustic amp, PA or keyboard amp... but since I didn’t have any of those around, I had it tested through a midget Marshall stack. While this isn’t the most ideal setup, if you’re like me and most electric guitar players I know, running an acoustic into an electric guitar amp for a gig is pretty normal since it’s only going to be used for a single song or even just part of a song. It works, it’s all I care. The mids on the EQ were already reduced to flatten out the signal when testing with the LR Baggs. Ultimately, I’m judging the quality of the pickup against the LR Baggs which is already an awesome acoustic pickup.

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS

After getting the pickup installed, I plugged the guitar in and just played a couple of open chords in the first position. The first thing I noticed was a very natural sounding tone, almost like the guitar was being mic’d. The highs came out nice and everything was very well balanced. It wasn’t boomy, it was noiseless and it didn’t produce any of the annoying squeaky string noise when shifting chords. Overall, it sounds great. It wasn’t so awe inspiring that it made me want to switch from playing electric to acoustic exclusively but it was a great tone none the less. I didn’t think it was any better or worse than the LR Baggs M1 it replaced.

Before I swapped the pickups back again, I decided to flick the phase switch on the pickup. With the phase switch flipped over, the tone became louder and fuller sounding. All the highs were still there but the bottom end just filled so much more. Clearly the midget Marshall stack was out of phase before or something but the tone it now had really showed that this pickup was really a solid contender when it comes to sound hole pickups for acoustic. As I wanted to keep listening to the Black Angel, I decided to switch back to the original pickup for a comparison.

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL

Switching back to the original LR Baggs pickup, the first thing I noticed was that the M1 wasn’t as loud and there was a lack of highs that was present with the Black Angel. The bottom end was bigger on the LR Baggs but it had this boomy muffled vibe going. While it had a great rhythm tone, it just didn’t have the top end the Black Angel did. Needless to say, the original pickup came off pretty quick.

THE BLACK ANGEL RETURNS

With the Black Angel back in again. The amp was cranked as high as it would get to see if it would feedback. The LR Baggs M1 like a lot of acoustics has feedback issues and I wanted to see how well the phase switch would work. However, I couldn’t get the thing to feedback! Even with the switch on both positions, the pickup didn’t squeal which was a definite plus in my book. I don’t know what kind of magic DiMarzio did but there was clearly some sort of magic going on in that pickup!!

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m not going to lie, like most people, DiMarzio isn’t a name that comes to me when I think about acoustic pickups, but after testing out the Black Angel, I’m actually seriously inclined to recommend them over a lot of other brands. The tone was nicely balanced with all the strings coming out nice and clear. The phase switch on the pickup is a real nice bonus. Even though I wasn’t able to get the guitar to feedback during testing, I know for a fact that just being able to switch the phase of the signal is going to kill any feedback that gets picked up on stage. Being on stage and having to deal with feedback sucks, with this, it’s just a flick of a switch on the pickup which is really easy to get to.

The only downside? The black soundhole pickup didn’t quite look as nice the cream LR Baggs pickup it replaced. But looks aside, I think this is quite the winner.

The LR Baggs M1 soundhole pickup isn’t an easy pickup to compete against but the DiMarzio Black Angel is definitely able to keep up with it. I’m pretty sure there are going to be people who would argue which one is better but so far to my ears the DiMarzio Black Angel has the LR Baggs M1 beat. Heck, I actually had the owner of the guitar test the pickup and she liked it enough to want to keep it in there for her show in a couple of weeks. Maybe she can get the thing to feedback. Either way, I’ll get you her opinion of it after she bashes around with it on stage in front of about 8,000 people.

-Budd

41
The Pickup Place / New DiMarzio Black Angel
« on: May 04, 2015, 01:07:57 PM »
I just got this press release from the folks at DiMarzio. I figured I'd share. I'm not much of an acoustic player myself but it's nice to see that DiMarzio is catering to the acoustic players as much as they are the electric players.

###

DiMARZIO RELEASES THE BLACK ANGEL™ ACOUSTIC SOUNDHOLE PICKUP

Staten Island, N.Y., May 4, 2015 – Responding to requests, DiMarzio, Inc. announces the release of The Black Angel™, a new passive magnetic soundhole pickup for acoustic guitars.

In keeping with its name, The Black Angel™ is matte black in color. Like The Angel™, The Black Angel™ “hears” the entire range of the acoustic guitar from top to bottom, with no gaps anywhere. Its “feel” is just as important. The Black Angel™ tracks right- and left-hand dynamics and responds immediately to the sound coming off the string.

The Black Angel™ is quiet, and although it’s magnetic, it doesn’t sound electric — there’s no hum and no battery. Both coils are on a parallel axis to the strings, featuring a humbucking magnetic circuit that is acoustically isolated to reduce unwanted finger and pick noises. Players who like to mix two or more pickups together will appreciate the built-in phase switch makingThe Black Angel™ ideal for use in any dual or multi source system, and it can be easily combined with any piezo or microphone.

The Black Angel™ installs easily and quickly in the soundhole with no modification to your guitar, and it fits soundholes of 3-1⁄2 inches (89 mm) and larger. The 2-1⁄16 “E”-to-“E” string spacing on The Black Angel™ easily accommodates guitar nut dimensions ranging from 1-11⁄16 to 1- 3⁄4 inches.

Both a 1⁄8-inch to 1⁄4-inch Switchcraft endpin jack (install version) and a quick mount 10-foot cable (standard phone jack) are included with The Black Angel™.

DiMarzio’s The Black Angel™ acoustic pickups are made in the U.S.A., and may now be ordered for immediate delivery. Suggested List Price is $229.99. For more information about The Black Angel™ pickup, please visit our website at www.dimarzio.com.

###

42
Everything you wanted to know about .... / PAF MASTER SET REVIEW
« on: November 05, 2014, 05:19:26 PM »
PAF MASTER Neck & BRIDGE REVIEW

So… I woke up on my birthday to the sound of the mailman knocking on my door to be pleasantly surprised by a parcel from DiMarzio. It turns out they were nice enough to send me an evaluation set of the awesome new PAF Master humbuckers!!



PAF Master neck with the worn nickel cover and the bridge in the ever elusive double cream vintage glossy bobbins. Both standard spaced with vintage long legs and single conductor cables. Basically, a true vintage set.

Side note: This is the first time I’ve ever got the worn nickel covers from DiMarzio and I gotta say, I kinda like them!

Pic of the front of the neck pickup with the worn nickel cover
http://www.buddroyce.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/NeckFront.jpg
Back of the neck pickup.
http://www.buddroyce.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/NeckBack.jpg
Long legs with the awesome DiMarzio sun logo on the side!
http://www.buddroyce.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/BridgeSide.jpg

Seeing that the majority of my guitars are either routed for the triangular ears that are standard on most DiMarzio pickups, the number of guitars I could fit these pickups in were pretty slim. Since the pickups were probably a perfect fit in an old Les Paul that I don’t own. I decided to put them in the next best thing, My ESP Potbelly!!

http://www.buddroyce.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/HostDone.jpg

The setup: ESP Potbelly, 9-50’s strings (yes I'm weird that way), tuned E-Standard to a concert pitch of A432 (I said I was weird right?). The amp is my ever trusty Egnater seminar amp I built a few years back with a DiMarzio cloth covered cable in between. No effects, amp EQ set wide open.

First Impressions

Time to plug in the guitar, turn the amp to 11 and whacking the E power chord!! My first impression is…. :D (yes, the smiley face is the first impression. If a picture is worth 1000, an emoticon is worth at least 200). It’s got some really nice crunch, tight bottom end and enough roar to scare away little animals in the vicinity or at least my dog. It’s 110% Rock N’ Roll attitude.

In more detail

Compared to the PAF 36th, the bridge is definitely brighter with more bite and definition. The added upper mids gives the illusion of having more output than the 36th. The bottom end feels more defined and rounded than the 36th but doesn’t quite have the body that I’m used to having with the custom DiMarzio on the EBMM EVH. It’s great for everything from blues to Hard Rock but not so much for modern metal but definitely can pull off more of the vintage metal stuff.

I’m really impressed by how well the bridge pickup reacts to pick dynamics. Easing up on the attack almost feels like I’m rolling down the volume or cutting back on the presence, making it really easy to take everything down a notch or building up energy in a song really easy. What I used to do with my volume control with the higher output pickups I’m used to, I can do with my picking alone.

Switching over to the neck pickup with a decent amount of gain, the first thing that came to my mind oddly enough was… Slash.

I’m normally not one to refer to Slash and his tone but busting out pentatonics high up the fretboard just had a tone that screamed Sweet Child o’ Mine. Which is great for those that wanted that Slash sound but wanted to stick with the DiMarzio family of products. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the PAF Master was really DiMarzio’s take on the Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pro Slash pickups. It’s got nice body but with enough bite for a really smooth throaty tone. Dig the pick harder and you can hear the tone get a bit more aggressive, lighten the attack and it gets rounder. Very nice!!!!

(Now that I think about it, the bridge pickup through a modded JCM800 did have that Appetite For Destruction vibe to it).

It’s not quite as smooth and liquid like the Air Norton or liquifire but definitely can hold its own with the shredders. Especially for those looking for something closer to what Joe Satriani has without being too much like Joe, although I can totally see him using the bridge pickup in the neck position.

Going to the clean channel and staying on the neck pickup, it has the same bell like top end I found in the PAF 36th but with more body. Very nice for blues and jazz without any harshness. The low notes are clear and well defined without getting muddy. Multi note chords ring through without the notes getting lost. This gives the bluesbucker a run for the money as my go to pickup for clean tones.

The bridge on clean is a bit harsh as most bridge position humbuckers normally are, but crank up the gain on the clean channel and it’s got this fantastic sound when you just want a semi-clean tone with just little bit of break up. Here I can really feel how much my picking affects the tone. The notes break up while picking harder and then quickly clean up as I ease up. Normally I don’t typically use the bridge pickup on clean much but the PAF Master is slowly making me change my mind.

That’s it for my initial impression of the pickups. I’ll definitely have to give it another go, but I can definitely see the PAF Master set as having a permanent home in my guitars and definitely a pickup I’ll be recommend to others. If you wanted something like the PAF 36th bridge with a bit more attitude and bite while still maintaining that vintage PAF vibe, this is it!! Now if only they made a 7 string version.

43
Everything you wanted to know about .... / Gravity Storm
« on: January 14, 2013, 05:40:00 PM »
OK, so I got these the same day I got the Transition pickups from DiMarzio to review and to be totally honest, I had mixed feelings about them right from the beginning. This was mostly because all the YouTube reviews I found of these really sounded REALLY bad to my ears and not offense to Steve Vai, but I wasn’t really too stocked about his tone on Gravity Storm. Hearing a bunch of people playing the same song poorly didn’t really help sell me on the pickups even though the folks reviewing them were saying great things about them.

With the Evolution, Evo2 and Breed all being really awesome pickups, I really had high expectations from the pickups and really hoped all the video reviews were just doing a bad job at show casing them.

Seeing that if I’m not too sold on them, there was no way I could ever recommend them to anyone and there was no better way to prove myself wrong than to test them out myself. Because honestly, I can’t be the only person out there that thought the YouTube video reviews of the Gravity Storms sucked.

So before I start the actual review, let me set the stage by saying right off the bat that these pickups completely restored faith I had lost from those videos. They definitely lived up to any expectations anyone would have for a product associated with Steve Vai.

44
The folks at DiMarzio Inc. were nice enough to send me an evaluation set of the new DiMarzio Injector pickups along with an Area 67 a couple of weeks back and they've been sititng on my desk waiting to be installed in a guitar. Wish I had the time to do this earlier but it seems like everyone wants to bring in guitars for setups and upgrades RIGHT BEFORE Christmas and everything, anyways I finally got around to doing it (only because I came down with the flu and stopped taking clients).

NOTE: This review is long and boring, so if you want the summary go right down the end

THE TEST GUITAR:

The guitar the pickups went into is an ESP Vintage Plus strat with a floyd rose trem. The pickups that were on there before the injectors went in were the DiMarzio Cruiser, some stock ESP single coil that I never used, and a Duncan Hybrid that I was going to yank out sooner or later and replace with an AT-1. Needless to say the fact that the Injector Bridge pickup is actually a single coil meant that I wouldn't be using this pickguard. So I went and got myself a stock 11-hole Fender pickguard, but sadly, because this is an ESP strat with a Floyd, the pickguard needed to be *ahem* "modified" to fit. So after about 30 mins of reworking the pickguard with a dremel tool to route out the space for the floyd and the neck pocket (for some reason the neck pocket is actually spaced out like a Tele and not a strat... go figure..)

THE ELECTRONICS:

Anyways, since this was a fresh pickguard it gave me the liberty to screw around with the electronics and since your standard strat config is 1 Vol and 2 Tones it gave me a lot of things to play. However seeing that I never used the tone control and I was too lazy to figure out what I actually wanted I just went with a single 500k volume pot, a tone pot that wasn't conencted to anything and a master TBX tone control (only cause I had it lying around). Also went with a fancy Schaller E+ Megaswitch so I could get the middle position to run both neck and bridge pickups at the same time.

Although the pickups worked with both 250k and 500k pots, the only reason why I chose to go with the 500k pots was simply because I found the 500k pot first so it wasn't done for any tonal purpose although using it will yield a slightly brighter tone.

THE BRIDGE PICKUP:

Ok, first let me say that I have NEVER been a huge fan of single coil pickups in the bridge position. Every guitar I've ever had either had a humbucker in the bridge position or a single coil sized humbucker. Standard single coils just never really cut it for me, until I plugged in this guitar and turned up the volume on the Injector bridge.

The first thing I noticed different about the bridge pickup is how much fuller it sounded in comparison to most standard singles. Where as most singles have a lot of top end, the Injector has a lot of beef to it, which is fantastic for me since the thin bottom end was always my problem with single coils in the bridge position. Clean its got the nice sparkle and jangle you'd expect from a strat single coil but definitely fuller sounding. It's not over the top bright and handles clean jazz stuff fine. With a tad bit more dirt, the pickup starts to really shine. Cranking the gain up yield an awesome crunch tone that's perfect for any kind of blues/rock rhythm tones. Lead tones coming out the bridge pickups cut through easily but aren't over powering. It's got great harmonics and is very responsive to pick attack.

With the gain cranked up to metal levels, the pickup starts to sound a litle buzzy. The girth is there so palm mutes are still good but chords just sound way too buzzy. It's like plugging in a metal zone into a tiny amp. HOWEVER, turning down the tone control fixed the buzziness and the pickup becomes totally usable for metal applications. (thank GOD I had a TBX Tone Control installed!!!). With the top end rolled down a little bit, its starting to sound a bit more like a Crunch Lab with less bottom end and you could totally swear that this was actually a humbucker and not a single coil. Metal/shred lead tones are very articulate and cut through easy and you dont lose out on the harmonics. All and all I'd say that the injector bridge pickup is by far one of the most versatile single coils pickups around. It's not going to win awards for vintage tones but if you're looking for something that can handle a wide spectrum of stuff and always found humbuckers muddy, you should seriously try this out.

THE NECK PICKUP

Now to the neck pickup. Clean, the neck pickup does jazz stuff very nicely, almost like what you'd epect out of a P90 with a tad bit more sparkle, playing rock oriented clean passages, the pickup had a lot of the clarity and glass that you'd expect from a single coil in the neck position. Although I personally preferred the DiMarzio Cruiser that was in there before as it had a more fluid tone.

Cranking the gain on the neck pickup produces a nice fat rhythm tone for blues rock stuff. The bottom end is nice and tight with a fair amount fullness. Think of it as a strat pickup with bigger tighter bottom end or a humbucker with tighter bottom end and more top end sparkle. Blues Rock lead tones are nice right across the fretboard. It handles so well that you could literally get away with just using the neck pickup for an entire song. With the gain reaching metal levels, the pickup starts to sound pretty crappy as a rhythm pickup, but then again, why in the world would you be using a neck pickup for metal rhythms to being with?? For metal/shred style lead stuff and all the Paul Gilbert-esque neo-classical shred stuff, the pickup works REALLY REALLY well. Clean and articulate are two words that come to my mind when it came down to it. The extra brightness DiMarzio added to the neck pickup really helps it cut and when I had someone else shred on my guitar (cause my shred skills aren't exactly up to par anymore), the notes come out very clear and well definited. If you're into the metal shred thing and want something different than the Air Norton or YJM, you should seriously give this a try. To be honest, I actually like the Injector neck a whole lot more than the YJM/HS-4's I used to have in this guitar before I put the cruiser in.

COMBINED WITH THE AREA 67 AND TOGETHER

When either pickup was combined with the Area 67 in the middle position, the tone was very much what you'd expect from any strat in the # 2 and 4 inbetween positions. Nothing truly out of the world note worthy, just exactly the spank you'd expect (it was better than the cruiser and that stock single middle pickup that was in this guitar before). Great clean or with light amounts of distortion. I'd never use the in between positions for high gain applications personally.

With both pickups on, the clean tones sound very nice with an almost acoustic glass like quality. A very note worth combination IMO.

OVERALL OPINION/SUMMARY

Overall, I'm VERY pleased with how these pickups are, and coming from a guy that's predominantly humbucker driven that's saying a lot. I find that the bridge pickup outshines the neck pickup but thats probably because I spend more of my time on the bridge pickup. If you're looking for a set of pickups that are very versatile to handle everything from Jazz, Blues/Rock to Metal (without going super over the top) these pickups are really something to consider. The Injector bridge has given me new faith in my strat to bring as my only guitar out to a gig in how well it handles everything. My only beef with the pickuips is that the bridge pickup can be a bit buzzy when the gain is cranked (and you can hear it off the Fuzz Universe album), but with the tone control rolled down it's totally awesome. The pickups aren't very 'vintage' sounding, so if thats what you're looking for, you're best off elsewhere but if you're out for a modern rock tone or a metal shred tone I'd highly recommend these and I'm sure I'll be recommending them a lot more around here.

 :madness:

45
Everything you wanted to know about .... / Uploading Soundclips
« on: October 13, 2009, 10:05:10 AM »
This section is fantastic but I've been asked by a few of you here about uploading sound clips, so I've allowed mp3 file attachments with a maximum file size of 512kb. That's more than enough for sound clips. But if you can upload clips between 96-128kpbs, joint-stereo and variable bitrate, that would help keep the file sizes down (if you can't do VBR, 96kbps-128kbps CBR is fine too).

If you want to upload something larger, I would HIGHLY suggest using the built in Windows Movie Maker or the built in movie maker on Max OSX and turn your sound clips into a video that can be tossed up on youtube. Otherwise there are many other places that can host and share mp3s. I just wish I had more disk space and bandwidth on the server (the ad revenue barely covers the server).

Anyways, I hope to check out the sound clips demoing some of the pickups in this forum!

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