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Gravity Storm

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buddroyce:
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.

buddroyce:
With regards to the actual pickups, I ended up getting a complete set of the neck and bridge humbuckers with the really awesome black covers and black bolts. I’ve installed countless DiMarzios and while this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this as I’ve had Bare Knuckles with the same look, it is the first time I’ve had DiMarzios with this look and do these ever look super awesome!! They have this great aggressive look that just screams METAL and definitely an option I highly recommended for those of us that are looking for something different.

The guitar I decided to install these pickups in was my Caparison Dellinger II MC Titanium. It’s a mahogany bodied super strat with a true metal finish and black hardware.  It was the only guitar I had that seemed like a natural candidate to complement the look of the pickups. The guitar itself was plugged straight into my Egnater Seminar amp as well as through a Diezel preamp for really high gain stuff and a Fender Blackface preamp for really clean stuff and now, the actual review.

Plugging into the low/medium gain channel of my amp, I was very impressed with the tight crunchy tone I was getting. It had the presence and punch you’d expect from something like the Evo2 but with more body and a smoother top end. I can totally understand why Steve Vai described the sound as a thunderous cloud of ice cream. It’s got the roar you’d expect from a thunder cloud but the sweet smooth texture of ice cream. I know I’m talking abstractly here but it’s definitely a great definition of it. The lower gain setting was really great for blues/rock tones where you want solid crunchy distortion that doesn’t sound thin.

The note definition the bridge pickup has is fantastic. When playing complex chords, all the notes ring through without any problems. Moving over to some higher gain sounds, the tone got thicker and meatier but still had that awesome bite that cuts through without any added fuzz, perfect for any hard rock or metal application. I actually had so much fun playing that I actually forgot I was supposed to focus on the subtleties of the pickup to do a review on.

buddroyce:
Lead tone wise, the tone from the bridge had enough cut but wasn’t piercing and quite ear pleasing. The neck pickup had a much smoother rounder tone but is nowhere near as round as an Air Norton or a LiquiFire and definitely rounder than the Evo neck while being thicker than the Breed Neck. Great for solo instrumental playing, which makes a lot of sense since this was a pickup designed for Steve Vai.

Rolling down on the volume to get a cleaner tone though, I wasn’t really all too impressed. No matter how hard I tried to get a nice clean sound using my volume control, I just wasn’t able to get anything that I would consider acceptable for a clean sound. The bridge rolled down had this brittle crackle to it and the neck was only a marginally better.  Usable for some dirty blues but not really a clean tone worth I’d use. Seeing that it’s something I actually do a lot, I probably wouldn’t use these pickups in a guitar when I’m using an amp that doesn’t really have a real clean channel. They are however, definitely pickups I’d use for recording any kind of stuff where I want my tone to sound like I’m getting hit by a brick wall.

On a proper clean channel, the bridge pickup actually impressed me quite a bit. Normally bridge pickups sound too brittle and piercing for clean sounds but surprisingly, the Gravity Storm bridge had this sound that reminded me of a thicker single coil neck pickup which was really awesome. The actual neck pickup on clean wasn’t quite as impressive tough.

On the plus side the neck pickup isn’t very boomy sounding. Something I find as an issue with a lot of neck pickups but on the downside, the top end sounded a bit muffled to me. Single notes jazz lines on the neck maintained a very consistent fat tone throughout the fretboard with a softer attack, almost like a semi hollow body with some flat wound strings. Although I did find that I had to cut back on the bottom end and mids a bit to help make it shine a bit better though. Using the same wide open setting as I was with the bridge pickup, the neck pickup sounded a bit dull.

buddroyce:
Overall, I’m quite impressed with these pickups. They have the power, tightness and crunch that you’d want from a pickup design for hard rock/metal or anything you’d play with a bit or a lot of distortion from blues right up to really aggressive metal. The bridge pickup definitely blew me away here and I do see the neck pickup taking over a lot of the recommendations that the Air Norton and LiquiFire tend to get, especially for solo instrumental/shred stuff. The inability for me to get a clean sound just by rolling down the volume takes a bit away from the versatility of the pickups, but that’s easily remedied by switching to a proper clean channel.

If you’re looking for a set of pickups for instrumental metal/shred but want something more aggressive than the Tone Zone and don’t want the darker rounder sound from the Air Norton in the neck? Get the Gravity Storm set. If the key words in your tonal description includes tight, aggressive and crunchy, get the Gravity Storm set. Heck if you have a single humbucker guitar and need an awesome bridge pickup that’s got versatility, GET THE GRAVITY STORM. It’s that good!

mi2tom:
Awesome review budd :)

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