wow, that was a great clean clip, ( and dirty clip as well, )but , being not much of a fan of single coil bridges, I am very amazed at this sound. Please tell us how you had your tone knobs on the guitar. any tone rolled off, or volume turned down? Man, that was awesome! loved the length of it, too> I heard some bill frisell, Jeff beck and albert lee, as well as lotsa YOU, very original playing. I always wind up replacing my strat bridge p/us w/ humbuckers, but I might just trade my Apache bridge for a trilogy, and get the zinc plate. Do you think the plate made the major difference?
Thank you lifted...my tone control is actually disconnected and out of the circuit..has been since my brother replaced the mid pup for a Fender and wired it with it's own volume control a few years ago, so it's all picking dynamics and volume.
@1:35-1:44 the volume was full up ..but I was not striking the strings with full force ( I play with a Jim Dunlop 3mm Big Stubby) while plucking the strings between the 21st fret and the neck pup- I rarely pick behind the middle pup unless I intend it to be "bright" or "snappy" and generally have a light touch except when "pinching" harmonics-
and @ 2:40-3:56 it was constant at about 6 and 1/2 on the volume...the rest of the recording I varied greatly.
I did get a variety of tone just by changing the volume control though and thru the 2nd clip I used about 5 on the lowest setting and you can hear it get a bit darker and "middier" as I turn it up to full.
I believe that the zinc plate makes a MAJor difference, when you back off the volume you get into Strat and Tele tones but bring it full up and it can get HB and P-90 tones and bite. Tim Mills is a genius. I was never able to get a Fender bridge pup to sound good switching from neck to bridge without compromising the EQ before but this pup plays nice with both my Middle (Fender) and my neck (original Hondo) pups.
Oddly, the original Hondo neck pup (which I love) has a thin zinc or maybe aluminum (?) plate on the bottom and sounds better to me than any Fender I've had. For whatever reason it does match up really well and that's the only reason I haven't put a BKP in the neck position but I wouldn't hesitate to do so if I could afford it right now. BTW the price on the BKP Trilogy bridge pup alone is
extremely reasonable.
I probably should have improvised on the Brian May tune but darn, the notes he played were so perfect ..what on earth would you sub them with? lol.....I approached that more like a classical piece out of respect for BM. Actually I did have to improvise a bit on that...the Hondo only has 21 frets (Brian's having 3 more) and for the last notes on the tune I had to use a glass slide.
Before I got the BKP I used my neck pup an
awful lot and would never have attempted doing a full song with only the bridge unless it was strictly called for (R&R and the like).
You can hear what the neck pup sounds like on this clip>
http://boomp3.com/m/88b179079c17/machine-gund-watsonica and also a lil bit of what the Fender bridge pup sounded like (if I rememeber right) before I changed it to the BKP, most (if not all) of
that tune I did with the Hondo neck pup cuz it sounded so much better (to me) than the Fender, obviously if I'd had the BKP at the time there would definitely have been more bridge playing in that one.
Watsonica~
