Posted: Thu May 04, 2017 1:43 am Post subject: Good tone!
Hi Scott!
I've been following your playing for a while and, despite that I may not play nearly as good or even understand what's going on with it, I enjoy it very much, and I also always look for your opinions regarding good tone, more so than others. I own a Suhr SH Signature, which has been my favorite guitar since I got it 5 years ago give or take, and playing 6-10 gigs a week, it's the only one I actually use all the time, while the others just gather dust... I have a copule of questions, hoping you might be able to help a bit Smile...
1) I saw you posted the measurements of the pickup heights on your strats. I was wondering, these measurements were taken by fretting down the strings at the last fret as recomended by most companies? Also, how do you manage to have such low action without "drowning" the strings's sustain when hitting them harder (blues style playing)?
2) Most of the gigs I play down here (Pacific Coast in Mexico), the venues are kind of small, and it gets pretty hard to get a nice fat tone before the crowd starts throwing stuff at me 'cause of the high volume. I own mostly Fender amps (Pro Jr., Blues Deluxe, Deluxe Reverb) and a Blackstar HT-Club 40. Obviously, the bigger amps have a better and more pleasent bass response than the small ones, put is hard to get the tubes working at such low volumes (around 3 on the BD) for the pedals to sound nice and fat. Have you ever been in a situation like this before? What would you recomend to do in this situations?
BTW, went to see your HBC show twice in Mexico City, awesome gigs! _________________ Good judgement comes from experience... Experience comes from bad judgement
Thanks - those shows were a lot of fun! I'm not pressing down the string to measure pickup heights. I don't think my action is that low - it's 1/16th from the last fret to the bottom of the string - that's how they set up the action on all Suhr guitars. Bottom of the string is important, especially on the wound strings - if you measure from the middle of the string, the action is noticeably lower.
I've definitely experienced people throwing stuff at me, especially the sound man. I just turn down and deal with the amp not sounding as fat. I hate attenuators - they make the amp sound pretty bad. One option would be to bias one of your amps for lower voltage and use a variac. I had a non-master volume plexi Marshall and it was so loud that I couldn't use it without blowing my speakers. I used my variac and lowered the voltage from 110 to 80, and had the amp biased for 80 volts - that made it a lot quieter and didn't change the tone at all.
Last edited by Scott Henderson on Thu May 04, 2017 4:48 pm; edited 1 time in total
LOL!!! Yeah, we don't need that! Story goes that when Eddie (Van Halen) told people about cranking the voltage UP rather than DOWN, he felt bad because people were blowing amp transformers left and right!!!
Lol good thing I couln'd find a Variax then xD... Yeah I don't like the attenuator either, good thing I got a variac here, I'll give that a shot! Thanks a lot, you're the man!
Btw, also with my Suhr guitar, when I opened it up to take a look, I remember it having some stuff at the volume knob. Then I asked the guys at Suhr about it, and they said it was a 500k volume pot with a resistor to bring it down to 300k. And it also had a treble bleed instaled. Then I read you used just 250k pots with no extra junk on it, like a vintage strat, so I decided to give it a shot, see what it sounded like. The tapper did change in a pleasent way, and I ended keeping the treble bleed in there, just works for me I guess. Thing is, I've noticed that the first string actually drops the volume quite a lot compared to the other strings, in all pickup positions. I wonder if you ever had this before, maybe it's normal (I hear a lot of people have the same issue, in a lot of different guitars) or maybe theres something wrong, maybe the pot or something? _________________ Good judgement comes from experience... Experience comes from bad judgement
I've never had that problem with the E string. I've only heard of using a resistor to change a pot's value when the guitar has both single coil and humbucking pickups. I used to have a SSH guitar and the volume pot was wired to be 500K with the humbucker and 250K with the single coils. I don't know why they'd wire it at 300 - that seems strange to me.
Gibson uses 300K pots in their guitars, to lower the harsh treble coming out of their horrible pickups. Most people buy better pickups and change the pots to 500K like the old Gibsons had - it makes a world of difference.
I understand having a treble bleed on the volume pot if you're using a long cable - otherwise the tone turns to mud when you turn down. I still prefer using a short cable.
I did have a Gibson which I changed the pickups and pots, using 50's style wiring and made the tone that much better. Although in the end I guess I'm a single coil kinda guy, never bonded too well with humbuckers, or maybe I don't know how to set up for that ... Thinking also about trying out those ML Suhr pickups, I got the V60LP on mine and they are just great! But I head the ML have more midrange and a little more edgy present sound. That coud probably help when playing at low volumes.
Btw, I have had your signature RC Booster for a while, but only recently I noticed there was a card with a code for downloading your Vibe Station album, so I did. Gotta tell ya, it's amazing! Put it in my car all the time, damn good stuff, and damn good tone!
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply! I appreciate it a lot!
_________________ Good judgement comes from experience... Experience comes from bad judgement
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... Thinking also about trying out those ML Suhr pickups, I got the V60LP on mine and they are just great! But I head the ML have more midrange and a little more edgy present sound. That coud probably help when playing at low volumes.