[Ronkirn]

I would urge you to contact Lindy Fralin, Jason Lollar, Owen Duffy, Curtis Novak, Bill Lawrence, Don Mare (Buck), Budz Guitars, Kinman, in no particular order. Be careful though, there are some more obscure “winders” that know how to wrap wire around magnets, and that’s about the extent of their knowledge. The guys I listed all are superb. And those guys KNOW pickups but anyone that would suggest one of those guy’s pickup sounds “better” than another’s is just whacky. There are just too many other variables to factor in the calculus.

Let me state this again… the pickup does NOT make the sound of your guitar. You plus everything else does. Changing the pickup to get a specific sound is like changing your car’s steering wheel to go to a different location. If you don’t know how to drive, what difference does it make? So while a pickup is necessary, as is the steering wheel, there are just too many other things that must be considered.

I rarely recommend a specific pickup for a specific sound; simply because I have no idea what the person asking can hear. If I suggest “whatever” for a certain sound, and you’re hearing is marginal at certain frequencies (everyone’s is) and you are hearing something different from me, then I become the “goat”.

I often get a “chuckle” out of posts asking what works for a special sound. Ya got 50,000+ members offering 50,000+ different opinions, with 50,000+ different hearing abilities. Most just “parrot” the commonly know suggestions… humbuckers for bluesy sound, single coils for Twang, without ever giving any consideration to all the other factors in the sonic equation, or all the great guitarists getting the exact opposite results.

Far too many try to “adjust” the “tone” by changing the pickup, that’s crazy; you have a tone knob or two on the guitar and a few on the amp. To get a “bluesy” tone, turn the treble down and the midrange up. That’s easier and cheaper than replacing pickups, but it’s just not “sexy”. No one wants to say, “Hey, I got this great sound by turning my tone pot.” The want to say something like, I got this great sound by installing some exotic, esoteric gizmo, no one ever heard of, so I’m cooler ‘n you.

There is also the capacitor EVERYONE plugging in, places across the output of their guitar…. It’s more commonly called the guitar cable. It affects tone as much as your tone pot. That goofy cable can make a far more dramatic sonic change than the pickups.

When I chat with guys, it’s obvious they are looking for a sound change like going from dark muddy brown to vivid Ferrari red, when in reality, the guitar as a “whole” has a specific acoustic signature to start with. So changing something is like going from Ferrari Red to BMW Red. We’re talking subtleties here because that acoustic signature establishes specific parameters that dictate the final sound. You can “move around” within that “circle”, but you aren’t going from dull brown to intense red without doing some major “brain Surgery”.

It’s fascinating to me how whenever one of these “how do I change the sound” threads takes off, it always has “myopia” relative to whatever was first discussed, in this case pickups. There is another thread going right now about Maple fingerboard’s sound vs. Rosewood’s.

Here’s a thought, what if you change the “mellow” rosewood fingerboard and add a “brighter” pickup, do you wind up with a Shredder’s delight, a screamer, or remove the Maple fingerboard and add rosewood and a PAF Humbucker… does it now sound like an L-5. That’s what the “grapevine” would suggest. If you really want quality sound.. and a quality sound is ALWAYS better than marginal quality of a specific sound, get rid of that POS amp you have and get a good one. The amp is so much of the total, everything else falls to single a single digit percentile.

Here’s my “philosophy”… everyone wants the same thing when they whip out their guitar…. The audience may be only a few or a room full, but we all want the same thing. We want those hearing us play to be stunned by our ability. We want them to stand there slack jawed, amazed and what we just did with 6 strings and 20 +- frets. There is only one “mod” you can affect that will accomplish that, and it has nothing to do with hardware.

I hope no one takes this personally, this thread just presented a forum for a discussion of the content above. There is just so very much that is so often overlooked. Too many discussions about rather significant topics never get much deeper than a parking lot puddle, when often, changing a screw can present a bottomless pit.

And thanks for the kudos about the Premiere Guitar article.

Ron Kirn