Sounds pretty nice, but pickups interact with the other elements of your signal chain. Hard to tell how good they are till they’re in your guitar. But these seem like they’d be worth a try. I recently switched the Alnico 5 magnet in my burstbucker pro humbucker which is in my Les Paul, and replaced it with an Unoriented Alnico 5 magnet. The difference being in how the magnets are cast. With the unoriented one having a weaker magnetic field. The end result was a subtle reduction of the metallic, raspy quality, which was just what I was going for. So i’m guessing the sand cast magnets in these Whole Lotta humbuckers could have similar properties.
Seymour Duncan Announces Worldwide Launch of Whole Lotta Humbucker
Over a year ago Seymour Duncan launched the Whole Lotta Humbucker set as a limited edition UK exclusive. This set was based off Seymour’s experience working at the Fender Soundhouse with artists like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and many others. Seymour recalls, “When I’d work on one of those great old guitars for a client, I liked to rewind the pickups with 42-gauge plain-enamel wire. I’d also insert sand-cast Alnico magnets with a better-balanced magnetic field, which made the B and high E sound as powerful as the other strings. This modified pickup had more output and a higher frequency response. The Whole Lotta Humbucker set is a replica of these special pickups with 8.78k DC resistance for the bridge pickup, 8.20k for the neck, custom winding pitch, and a calibrated sand-cast Alnico magnet. I have such great memories of living in London, so I’m thrilled to be producing this pickup once again.” Guitar players around the world who are looking to capture the tone of an era will now be able to get Whole Lotta Humbucker at their local store or favorite online dealer.
Despite having some of the most iconic and popular electric guitars in the world, Fender is not the first company you think of when it’s time to buy an acoustic guitar. In fact, for many people they would be toward the bottom of the list as far as desirability goes.
I happen to own a Fender acoustic, it’s the T-Bucket-300CE. It’s a surprisingly decent guitar for $300. I mainly bought it because I just wanted to have an inexpensive acoustic, and the T-Bucket really stood out from the pack looks-wise. I’ll probably upgrade to something nicer eventually, but meanwhile it plays great and sounds good enough for my needs.
I imagine this new custom shop, is an attempt to elevate Fender’s whole acoustic line.
INTRODUCING FENDER® ACOUSTIC CUSTOM SHOP
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (January 22, 2013) – Fender is thrilled to announce its all-new Fender Acoustic Custom Shop, located in New Hartford, Conn. Operated by Fender’s most experienced guitar luthiers, the Fender Acoustic Custom Shop is committed to delivering the highest levels of acoustic guitar craftsmanship.
New from the Acoustic Custom Shop are the Pro Custom Series and Master designed models, which include the TPD-1 Dreadnought, TPDCE-1 Dreadnought, Traditional Triple-“O” Custom Shop Designed, and Newporter™ Custom Shop Designed.
The Pro Custom Series includes the TPD-1 Dreadnought and TPDCE-1 Dreadnought, which feature a solid Engelmann spruce top and solid mahogany back and sides, a convenient cutaway on the TPDCE-1, scalloped “X” bracing shifted forward for more traditional tone, a mahogany neck with soft “V”-shaped profile and dual-action truss rod, 20-fret ebony fingerboard with bone nut and mother-of-pearl inlays, bone bridge saddle and pins, a nitrocellulose lacquer finish, and Fishman® electronics on the TPDCE-1.
Part of the Master Designed Series, the Traditional Triple-“O” Custom Shop Designed and Newporter™ Custom Shop Designed feature a striking solid Carpathian spruce top, forward-shifted scalloped “X” bracing and solid figured walnut matched back and sides. The models’ two-piece neck in figured curly maple has a soft “V” profile with comfortably rolled edges, 10” radius ebony fretboard, bone nut and a traditional three-on-a-side headstock (Stratocaster® headstock on the Newporter Custom Shop Designed).
For more information and to find a dealer near you, go to www.fender.com.
Boss has just released 3 new pedals to their incredibly popular line of compact effects. All three incorporate a custom DSP(Digital Signal Processing) chip that has, what their marketing team decided to call “Multi-Dimensional Processing”, or “MDP” for short. Supposedly this new technology somehow senses the incoming guitar signal and adjusts the output of the pedal so that the effect sounds equally good no matter where your playing on the neck or in what style.
The 3 pedals include the DA-2:Adaptive Distortion, TE-2:Tera Echo, and the MO-2:Multi Overtone. The DA-2 seems to be the spiritual successor to the ubiquitous DS-1, in that it’s a strait ahead distortion box, but with the added benefit of this new MDP technology for improved sound quality.
The TE-2 has Boss following the trend in delay pedals of adding additional effects like “freeze” and “shimmers”. It also is Boss’s 100th pedal in the compact line.
The MO-2 is a bit different, in that it doesn’t seem to fall into any traditional pedal category. It seems to be a mix of modulation and synth effects, divided into 3 different “modes”.
All three pedals are based on digital technology obviously, but there is some interesting sounds here. I’d like to hear a lot more samples, or get a hold of them to try myself before deciding if this MDP stuff is just marketing speak, or it is an actual improvement. The 3 sample videos below give you a taste of each pedals capabilities, but they are annoyingly, a bit over the top in their production.
You may have seen guitar amps recorded with more then one mic at a time. This usually involves two different types of mics, like a dynamic and a condenser. The reason for doing this, is each microphone works in a different way and emphasizes different frequencies and other sonic characteristics.
If you’ve just started experimenting with using multiple mics to record your guitar amp, you may have run into a perplexing problem. When you combine the recordings from each mic, it sounds thin and anemic. Not the bigger, more complex tone you were hoping to get.
I ran into this problem years ago when I first started editing video. Often, a person on camera is recorded with two mics, a lapel mic pinned onto their shirt, and a boom mic, held just out of view of the camera. I wasn’t aware of this at first and thought the audio was just a stereo track. But it sounded terrible, very thin and quiet. I was ready to blame the sound guy, but looking at the waveforms, the volume seemed like it should be much louder. So I muted one of the tracks and it got louder and fuller. That made no sense!
So I asked one of the more seasoned editors if he’d seen anything like this. That’s when I learned about audio being out of phase. It can happen when two microphones recording the same source are at slightly different distances, or pointed in opposite directions. It’s a bit hard to explain what’s going on, but makes a lot of sense when you see it in action. Below is a video about exactly this problem and the simple way to fix it, put together by Graham Cochrane, from The Recording Revolution. It’s a great site if you want to learn to mix and record, and I highly recommend you check it out.
