G’Day, I believe my Blog readership is up to about 4!!!… and that really has me chuffed to keep on writing! First thing, I just have to post a pic of a sign I saw at a store in Parkdale (a Toronto neighbourhood) the other day…
“Milk, Eggs, Cereal, Guitars…” All the essentials!!!
OK, Now down to business… Last night my friend RD and I got together for a little Tone Fest and we turned our attention to the much heralded Paul Reed Smith DGT guitar. We had 3 in the room (two all mahogany Standards and a maple topped DGT), and I must say that – last night anyway – they seemed to kick all the other more traditional humbucker equipped guitars to the curb. If you haven’t tried a DGT (co-designed by David Grissom and Paul Smith), you owe it to yourself to do so. It’s fairly universally accepted that the coil splits on these great guitars are just the best you can get – no big volume drop and very cool Tele and Strat style tones. One of the things we noticed is that these great humbuckers have a whole range of tones that you can coax out simply by manipulating the 2 volumes and the tone. Lots of Gibson players do this – just by leaving the pickup selector in the middle and manipulating the volumes (my friend JL recently mentioned that Clapton used to leave the selector in the middle on his “Fool” SG, open everything up and then roll the tone on the neck pickup to “0” – then you get the articulation of the bridge pickup with the fat rolled off quality of the neck pickup – “woman tone”! … but I digress!) . We got some great “horn-like” sounds simply by manipulating the 2 Volumes! And it certainly brings to light the fact that you don’t just run a pickup at “10” all the time if you’re trying to get musical sounds! RD is totally sold on “11”s on his DGT Standard – and he ain’t swapping them out for 10s anytime soon! (as many of us do). Comparing the two Standards, my DGT sounded a bit “zingier”, and RD’s was a bit “chunkier”… perhaps due to three factors… strings (I use 10s), pickup heights (RD’s treble pickup was lower), and guitar weight (RD’s was a pound heavier). Also – and you only really notice it when the guitar is turned down – I took out the 2 treble bleed caps because I felt that they imparted a tinny, thin tonality. 2 minute job, big improvement IMHO.
So that’s the latest foray into the bottomless pit of guitar tone… please enjoy the “guitar-porn” featured below… and maybe I’ll be up to 5 readers by the time I’m ready for my next post!!!
Sea Foam Green PRS DGT Standard
Here’s the maple topped DGT Custom… a little more top end and a little more bottom end than the standard! This one’s for sale on my site!
“None More Black” PRS DGT
Here’s the original “None More Black”…
The Original “None More Black” ’55 Custom Wraptail LP