Hello, hope you'll all help out in choosing for this guitar, a DBZ Cavallo Flying V:
-- Korean 22-fret 24.75 mahogany set-neck with "ebonized" rosewood board (I think this ebonization is probably just dye); neck is pretty thin and narrow unlike my usual preferences but it has a bit of a V-shape that adds a little mass relative to a strictly thin and narrow neck. Large peghead, currently with heavy-looking sealed tuners.
-- Mahogany body with maple cap, two humbuckers.
-- Fairly lightweight due to V shape plus some facet cuts on the body ( pictures here:
http://www.dbzguitars.com/guitars/electric-guitar/cavallo )
-- Floyd Rose "Original"
-- I tend to string pretty heavy (usually in standard tuning but I'm open to downtuning experimentation and enjoy baritones), and will try both Ernie Ball Cobalts and Thomastik roundwounds as likely suspects. "Heavy" on this guitar might end up a bit on the light end for me, like .011s, if the Floyd requires it or I feel like I need to do a lot of bending along with the Floyd activity, as seems likely, or remotely possibly .010s if I can't get the Floyd to be happy with .011s or my arthritis resists anything heavier.
I'm old but this is my first guitar with a Floyd -- I was on hiatus from buying and mostly from playing during that period. My idea is to learn whammy tricks and develop my styles in that direction to see what happens. My tendency is to play fingerstyle unless I really need a pick but I expect to need one more with this guitar. I'd like the pickups to be detailed and have good solid bass, while being generally wide range -- this has lead me in the direction of the HSP90 sets, and I'm liking the overdriven demo in the section for the Stockholm set, but while the demo fulfills my need for something like early Black Sabbath, I'd also like to get both sparkly/swirly cleans and tight/fast low-end capability (here think Fryette/VHT Ultralead if you've played one).
I also think the higher-register work in the overdriven Stockholm demo may be good enough although the music chosen there does not demonstrate it very well -- the Pig 90 "modern metal" demo sounds nice in that regard, with more demonstrative lead music having been chosen there). I don't want lead tones to ALWAYS be as compressed as in the Pig 90 "modern metal" demo but it's nice to go there at times.
The clean demo for the Stockholm set, I worry, might not be cleaning up enough and the Mississippi Queen clean demo sounds more immediately reliable as to achieving clear sparkly cleans, especially on the both-pickups position - and it seems there is no pickup set in between that would not be custom, although I'm open to mixed-set and custom suggestions. The cleans are important to stretch the set towards blues-rock and blues, and to work with such amps as the pushed clean channel on a Mesa Mark IIB, Voxes, etc.
I plan to wire at least for series/parallel options and wonder if an unadvertised tap option might be available on BKP single-coils to allow these very hot single-coils to act more natural by switching out some of the windings or even combining wire types. Is this a custom option? Any comments? From the above, if winding-suppression could achieve lead tone from the Pig 90 down to clean like the Mississippi Queen, with the Stockholm in between, that sounds really appealing. Please remember that all except the MQ neck of the MQ, Stockholm, and Pig 90 sets are Alnico V, with that MQ neck being Alnico IV. Pig 90s are 45AWG scatterwound, the Stockholm may be "hand wound 43AWG" like their Supermassive sibling (but wire is not specified on the Stockholm), and the MW set says "42AWG plain enamel wire"...so obviously the range of wire sizes and the one appearance of Alnico IV will probably keep a coil-reducing pickup from fully covering the range from Pig 90 to MQ, but I wonder what people think may be possible in this area to achieve desirable features of those three sets. I'm inclined to think that there might be some mixed or custom set that would optimize the MQ and Stockholm areas as best they could be combined, and one might then rely on pre-amps, boosts, compression, and noise boxes to cover the Pig 90 area because I'm doubtful that a compromise set can cover the whole range effectively. A mix knob or individual volume controls would of course probably help more if I were to wind up with a mixed set with much disparity between neck and bridge.
In short, I'd be happiest if I could move from the MQ both-pickups clean sound (although I like all three clean settings, and the MQ overdriven are also very nice) up through at least the Stockholm overdriven sound, and ideally as far as the Pig 90 modern metal sound. I fantasize that if I might be able to get Pig 90 with the coil tapped it might be made to match well with a MQ neck to get the MQ neck clean, and both-pickups and bridge settings akin to the MQ one, and that perhaps it might also be possible to build a neck pickup that would cover both MQ and at least Stockholm territory fairly well. To the extent that fantasy can't come true, I have to balance my desire to do Floyd things with this guitar vs. nice cleans.
Or maybe I should be using a splittable high-output humbucker in the bridge? I don't see demos or specifications of the pickups in coil-cut mode, but maybe some of you will think I ought to explore in this direction.
In the future I have a loose plan to modify this guitar by reshaping the body and headstock away from pointiness and towards the shape of a Dean V with the V-shaped headstock, drilling for lightness and for more electronics room, relocating the output jack to the vicinity of the output jack to the vicinity of the strap button, and covering a lot of the instrument with patinated steel somewhat in the manner of a Trussart guitar.
Does anyone know what the amps and guitars are in the demos, and whether I have it right that all the two pickup demos are switching neck, then both, then bridge?
Thanks for reading any or all that if you did, and for any advice you might provide.
