Posted on Tuesday, 29 March 2011

I Like Odd Guitars Okay I admit it, this one isn’t as odd as the others.  It is a typical Gibson SG Standard with a mild twist.  When I tried this SG at Guitar Czar I noticed that acoustically it had great resonance and a cool snappy attack.  When I plugged-in it sounded really dark and all of the snappiness was overwhelmed by the craptastic stock Gibson A2’s.  Cleans sounded thuddy and when distorted it got really wooly and the neck pickup sounded strange.  Prime candidate for a pickup change.   By the way, I rarely judge a guitar by how it sounds plugged-in.  In my humble opinion it is far more important for the guitar to sound good acoustically; pickups and electronics can be changed, resonance and tone can’t.  When you slap a big ol’ open A chord and you can feel the headstock vibrating just as much as the body, and the guitar feels like a living thing trying to squirm out of your hands - you know you’ve got a keeper.  So this very unassuming, dare I say - normal guitar, called out to me.   I kept it stock for quite a while, through a few months of rehearsals with a couple of bands, ruminating on what kind of pups it needed.  I didn’t want to go with my usual PAF Pro choice, I think I’ve got that sound covered.  What I really wanted was a pickup that sounded like the guitar itself sounded, snappy and aggressive.  When I think snappy and aggressive there is only one pickup that comes to mind - P90s.   I did a lot of research on what types of P90’s are available.  Let me tell you, now is a great time to be a P90 player, there are a lot of options from pretty much every pickup manufacturer.  I listened to a shit-ton of official clips and a shit-ton of user clips, read user and magazine reviews, re-read user and magazine reviews, y’know unhealthily obsessing about it.  One pickup kept grabbing my attention:  The Guitar Fetish Mean 90.  If you go by online reviews GFS makes the greatest pickups in the universe so it was a little tough to sort through all the horseshit.  There was a lot of honeymoon phase stuff online but the GFS Mean 90 was the only model that seemed to keep player’s interest over time. So I gambled and bought a Bridge/Neck pair and soldered ‘em in.  In the process I discovered the reason the stock neck pickup sounded so weird was because Gibson put a bridge pickup in the neck position, doy! This is where this normal SG gets odd. These pickups are great!  They sound very much like the acoustic tone of the guitar but louder.  I’m not gonna lie though, the tonal change was very dramatic and it took me a while to get used to it.  It is a very unexpected tone from this type of guitar.  When I see an SG I expect Cream/Clapton tones and 70’s era Allman Bros type dark cleans.  Sporting GFS Mean 90 pickups this SG is odd now - it sounds like a fucking Rickenbacker!  I was expecting some Pete-ish tones but the Mean 90’s don’t really sound like Soapbars, to me they sound like Toasters. Odd guitars are cool. 

I Like Odd Guitars

Okay I admit it, this one isn’t as odd as the others.  It is a typical Gibson SG Standard with a mild twist.  When I tried this SG at Guitar Czar I noticed that acoustically it had great resonance and a cool snappy attack.  When I plugged-in it sounded really dark and all of the snappiness was overwhelmed by the craptastic stock Gibson A2’s.  Cleans sounded thuddy and when distorted it got really wooly and the neck pickup sounded strange.  Prime candidate for a pickup change.  

By the way, I rarely judge a guitar by how it sounds plugged-in.  In my humble opinion it is far more important for the guitar to sound good acoustically; pickups and electronics can be changed, resonance and tone can’t.  When you slap a big ol’ open A chord and you can feel the headstock vibrating just as much as the body, and the guitar feels like a living thing trying to squirm out of your hands - you know you’ve got a keeper.  So this very unassuming, dare I say - normal guitar, called out to me.  

I kept it stock for quite a while, through a few months of rehearsals with a couple of bands, ruminating on what kind of pups it needed.  I didn’t want to go with my usual PAF Pro choice, I think I’ve got that sound covered.  What I really wanted was a pickup that sounded like the guitar itself sounded, snappy and aggressive.  When I think snappy and aggressive there is only one pickup that comes to mind - P90s.  

I did a lot of research on what types of P90’s are available.  Let me tell you, now is a great time to be a P90 player, there are a lot of options from pretty much every pickup manufacturer.  I listened to a shit-ton of official clips and a shit-ton of user clips, read user and magazine reviews, re-read user and magazine reviews, y’know unhealthily obsessing about it.  One pickup kept grabbing my attention:  The Guitar Fetish Mean 90.  If you go by online reviews GFS makes the greatest pickups in the universe so it was a little tough to sort through all the horseshit.  There was a lot of honeymoon phase stuff online but the GFS Mean 90 was the only model that seemed to keep player’s interest over time.

So I gambled and bought a Bridge/Neck pair and soldered ‘em in.  In the process I discovered the reason the stock neck pickup sounded so weird was because Gibson put a bridge pickup in the neck position, doy!

This is where this normal SG gets odd.

These pickups are great!  They sound very much like the acoustic tone of the guitar but louder.  I’m not gonna lie though, the tonal change was very dramatic and it took me a while to get used to it.  It is a very unexpected tone from this type of guitar.  When I see an SG I expect Cream/Clapton tones and 70’s era Allman Bros type dark cleans.  Sporting GFS Mean 90 pickups this SG is odd now - it sounds like a fucking Rickenbacker!  I was expecting some Pete-ish tones but the Mean 90’s don’t really sound like Soapbars, to me they sound like Toasters.

Odd guitars are cool. 

Notes