61 Reissue SG - pickups doing weird things
Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 3:44 pm
Wondering if anyone else has had experience with these pickups and what's normal and not normal functionality for them.
I got my SG off ebay about a year and half ago. Guitar was in great shape, hardly played, but one thing I noticed right away was that if the volume on the guitar was all the way up, and the distortion on my Rat pedal was too high, and I strummed hard (not ridiculously hard, but with some.. gusto) I'd get this sort of 'clipping' effect where instead of getting aggressive attack from the guitar, the note/chord would sort of clip out a bit initially and then quickly fade in. If I lowered the distortion knob to about 2 'o clock on the Rat, this problem went away, but so does some of the gain I enjoyed from it, of course.
At first, I figured this was the rat pedal. Last week, I got a Shoe Gazer fuzz pedal from www.deviever.com. One thing I noticed was that if I had both fuzz circuits running, and I strummed aggressively with this SG, the note wouldn't clip, per se, but it sounded noticably different in tone than it does when I play with exactly the same settings with my Jazzmaster. Sort of a touch of a fuzz octave effect that makes the distortion sound sort of synthy. This synthiness is not evident when I switch to the JM.
If I play the guitar completely clean, I don't really hear anything obviously suspect from it, though honestly I'm not sure I know what to look for. I know these particular humbuckers are supposed to be "hot" ... or something - is that what's causing this? The effect happens on both the neck and bridge pickups, and seems more prominent when switched to the bridge pickup, which is closer to the strings than the neck pickup is, but both of them do it to some extent.
Any suggestions/insights?
I got my SG off ebay about a year and half ago. Guitar was in great shape, hardly played, but one thing I noticed right away was that if the volume on the guitar was all the way up, and the distortion on my Rat pedal was too high, and I strummed hard (not ridiculously hard, but with some.. gusto) I'd get this sort of 'clipping' effect where instead of getting aggressive attack from the guitar, the note/chord would sort of clip out a bit initially and then quickly fade in. If I lowered the distortion knob to about 2 'o clock on the Rat, this problem went away, but so does some of the gain I enjoyed from it, of course.
At first, I figured this was the rat pedal. Last week, I got a Shoe Gazer fuzz pedal from www.deviever.com. One thing I noticed was that if I had both fuzz circuits running, and I strummed aggressively with this SG, the note wouldn't clip, per se, but it sounded noticably different in tone than it does when I play with exactly the same settings with my Jazzmaster. Sort of a touch of a fuzz octave effect that makes the distortion sound sort of synthy. This synthiness is not evident when I switch to the JM.
If I play the guitar completely clean, I don't really hear anything obviously suspect from it, though honestly I'm not sure I know what to look for. I know these particular humbuckers are supposed to be "hot" ... or something - is that what's causing this? The effect happens on both the neck and bridge pickups, and seems more prominent when switched to the bridge pickup, which is closer to the strings than the neck pickup is, but both of them do it to some extent.
Any suggestions/insights?