Tuesday, March 19, 2013

DiMarzio: PAF 7

No, I've not retired my Duncans to embrace DiMarzio & nobody had paid me to say this. This is about reflecting the obvious & accepting what works. This is also a further understanding of the fact that Duncans & DiMarzios work differently. As I am currently looking at DiMarzios to address some tonal concerns, my approach to this was to scout for DiMarzio equivalents of my favourite Duncans but it's quite a futile exercise. It doesn't work this way. Why would a manufacturer offer the world a close alternative of their competitor's product? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of being different?

This was perhaps the reason why I find DiMarzio tones rather unagreeable; I've been looking too hard at the higher output offerings believing the products in that end would manifest the Duncans in the same output selection. Today's encounter with my Ibanez SIR27F made me realize that I've overlooked what works for me- the lower output DiMarzios. The default pickups in this guitar are DiMarzio 7s, the lowest output passive humbuckers in the manufacturer's range. They are splendid in this guitar & they will stay resident for a simple reason- they are the right pickups for the instrument. Have I come across the PAF before? Of course I have, there's one in the bridge position in my RG560, it's the pickup that replaced the Tone Zone & made me happy. A delightful episode escaped me, maybe I was distracted but today came the reminder.

To be continued.

2 comments:

Benja said...

haha yes! lower output pickups different right? i changed my tonezone to an airzone, by right they're supposed to be voiced the same, but i much prefer the airzone, which is less hot than the tz!

subversion.sg said...

DiMarzio not my kinda pickups but I definitely fancy the lower output stuff... :-)