DrewPeterson7
Sage of the Order
Ok, I have this Strat... It was my first "good" guitar, bought new back in '98, and while I play mostly seven strings these days I'm still head over heels in love with the guitar and it's been slowly creeping back into my playing rotation - the album I'm working on now probably will have the Strat playing the lead parts on, oh, 30-40% of the material. However, it's had Fender Lace Sensors (gold) in it for about the last decade, and after a decade I just got a little bored. Plus, they fit me as a player way better back then (when I was an 18-year-old blues rock guy just discovering shred) than they do today (where I've become a 29-year-old prog/shred geek whose roots are still in blues/rock). So, since recently I was blown away to discover that Andy Timmons was getting all of those awesome Strat singlecoil tones out of a mini humbucker, I figure the set he uses would be a good place to start:
So far, I dig the hell out of them. The Cruiser bridge pickups in the neck and middle sound shockingly close to singlecoils, I think the Lace Sensors might have been a hair more singlecoil-y clean, but in a blind test I'd never know they were mini humbuckers, and they record excellently. And distorted, they slay - I'm getting a much more responsive attack, and they still have that vocal singlecoil quality to them but with a hair more output. And the bridge humbucker is just awesome - it's hotter, but tonally integrates very well with the singlecoils so that when I switch from the neck to the bridge mid solo, it's very musical.
I made a quick video with the thing last night, demoing the pickups through my Mesa Roadster over the raw tracks for a song I'm working on that I think I'll include in my album. I'm a little rusty on the Jimi-esq chordal stuff here, I used to play this stuff pretty much nonstop in my teenage years but haven't done much of it since. I've been dusting off the cobwebs though and it's just a fun approach.
[video=youtube;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vw9rQnUE48]video[/video]
Sorry for the occasional slop here and there - I was thinking about being sure to change pickup positions a lot, which means I wasn't thinking about not sucking, with predictable consequences.
So far, I dig the hell out of them. The Cruiser bridge pickups in the neck and middle sound shockingly close to singlecoils, I think the Lace Sensors might have been a hair more singlecoil-y clean, but in a blind test I'd never know they were mini humbuckers, and they record excellently. And distorted, they slay - I'm getting a much more responsive attack, and they still have that vocal singlecoil quality to them but with a hair more output. And the bridge humbucker is just awesome - it's hotter, but tonally integrates very well with the singlecoils so that when I switch from the neck to the bridge mid solo, it's very musical.
I made a quick video with the thing last night, demoing the pickups through my Mesa Roadster over the raw tracks for a song I'm working on that I think I'll include in my album. I'm a little rusty on the Jimi-esq chordal stuff here, I used to play this stuff pretty much nonstop in my teenage years but haven't done much of it since. I've been dusting off the cobwebs though and it's just a fun approach.
[video=youtube;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vw9rQnUE48]video[/video]
Sorry for the occasional slop here and there - I was thinking about being sure to change pickup positions a lot, which means I wasn't thinking about not sucking, with predictable consequences.
