Who plays with their knobs?

[Anfontan]

MAN! That's wicked dude! I had no idea you could use it like this. I'll give it a try. I also see that I'm not the only who uses the neck pickups for leads, that's good. Is it just me or do the neck pick ups seem like they filter out some minor mistakes? I hate doing solos with the bridge PU, they make the guitar so screechy, unless its like a really bluesy solo that is mainly at the low end of the neck.

You should try lowering the bridge pickup it there are too many highs or 'screech' coming through. I like the middle position and blend neck & bridge together on a 2 H'bucker guitar.

 

[antichef]

I played through an Ibanez rg550 with EMGs, tube screamer, and marshall 2204 half stack for a decade (the 80's), and never touched the knobs - I even got them moved to be further away from the strings so my hand wouldn't keep hitting the volume knob. Recently, my main guitar is a gibson sg supreme, with a volume and tone pot for each pickup. I also have a few smaller amps, some of which don't have many features (like just a volume knob, for instance) -- I found the electronics and pickups on the sg to be very good, and along with the amps, some of which are trebly, the knobs come in handy.

I remember back in the day, a more experienced guitar player told me I should have backed off the tone knob a little on the ibanez, because I was searing everyone's ears off in the clubs we were playing. I ignored it, but looking back he was probably right.

When it comes to recording, though, the eq you can get later down the signal path is probably much better than what you can do with that tone knob.

I've found that the usefulness of the volume knob is highly correlated to the quality of the pickups -- if they're good (rich dense tone, if you call that good), you can get a lot of variation out of tweaking it, but if they suck, or they're only about high output, then it's pretty much just for shutting them down.

 

[faderbug]

i used to not touch the controls on my guitar but now i use both volume and tone extensively. i also switched from a solid state to a tube amp.

 

[sile2001]

I generally just use the higher-gain channel on my Orange AD30 and go from clean to edgy to balls-to-the-wall with the guitar volumes. I have yet to play with my tone controls at anything less than wide open...I just haven't ever had the need to take those highs out.

One of my favorite settings is to run the bridge pickup volume at 10 and the neck at 6-7 or so. It sets up the 3 different pickup settings with not only a change in sound (due to harmonics), but also an increase in volume. But then, I have been known to just stick with the bridge and play around with the volume.

 

[Unsprung]

I don't really know why, but whenever I test drive guitars, I'll always turn the tone knob(s) to 5 or 6, and go from there using the volume knob as needed. Of course I also have to fool with some of the amp settings, and I'll typically get that out of the way before I adjust the guitar. Probably from having developed a good bit of my guitar chops playing bass, and I love surf guitar instrumentals, so the only 2 knobs on an amp you'll NOT see me turn back, if up to "11" are the bass and reverb (if reverb is part of the amp already).

Matt