New pickups and general tone ramblings

[Simon Underwood]

I finally admitted defeat with my 56 NOS Strat. As good as the pickups are, I've been constantly frustrated by the magnet stagger on them, as they're just not suited to modern string gauges (I use Regular Slinky 10-46, I can't manage anything heavier than that for a two hour gig). The (plain) G was too loud and the top E too too quiet. I noticed that the current crop of Fender Vintage Reissues have different models relating to different years, more than just the 57 and 62 reissues of previous years, and that the parts on these are meant to be more 'vintage correct', allegedly using old tooling. These parts are available under the 'Pure Vintage' name, and I noticed that the the 56 Pure Vintage pickups have the correct 54-56 magnet stagger with a lower G pole and a higher top E pole and use Alnico III magnets, so I thought I'd give them a go. The difference is incredible. They suit the guitar a lot better than the originals, the string balance is much better, and the sound is warmer without the cutting top end that I had before. And they're also under £100! I'd recommend these to anyone else who's a wimp like me and doesn't want to go to heavy strings with a wound G.

I've got a Stanley eTap2 pedal which is on my pedalboard and gets used for a couple of Shads numbers in my rock & roll band, but I use a Quad Plus with EFTP for Specs Appeal gigs. What I did for our last Specs gig was to leave the eTap2 in circuit but with the echo turned right down so I was just getting the dry signal, but still using the valve emulation of the pedal, which then went into the input of the Quad Plus. I think it was the first time I've actually been 100% happy with the sound I was getting. Indeed, one comment afterwards was how good my TVS3 sounded!

Simon

[shadowtonio]

hello simon,

Very clever solution, as you maybe know the input of your alesis is not ment to be used direct as guitarinput,
so you have to f.i. a pedal before it and then go to the alesis, in your case you did use the stanley etap2HW,
wich is a very good pedal.
The Alesis GT quadraverb seames to be allright and made for direct guitar input.
I gess you have the new baby blue stanley, with the 4 fets inside ?? its sounding very good

cheers, tonio