Played this for the entire morning yesterday before taking time off for lunch. This is the Ibanez SEW761FM, one of the standard offerings equipped with DiMarzio pickups from the factory: Tone Zone (b) / True Velvet (m/n).
I have no issues with the True Velvet when it comes to tone. These are some of the best single coil offerings DiMarzio has in store & would recommend them to those in need of both good cleans & overdriven tones with twang to boot. The Tone Zone is another story. It's a little finicky & does not cascade good performance into various guitars it's fixed into; hits & misses, mostly. I first had it in an RG560 & it sounded awful there - muffled, bass heavy. I tried a friend's RG3120 which had the TZ & it sounded awesome. This prompted me to move that spare TZ into one of my Les Pauls & it sounded amazing as well. Then I bought the SIR70FD & that TZ dislikes distortion, it prefers overdrive. In this latest episode, the TZ sounds a little grizzly & tends to fuzz out when the amp gain is turned up. I lowered the pickup a little more into the cavity & that helped somewhat. For some strange reason, this TZ isn't bass inclined like its other siblings, it has more top end.
This is mostly my experience with DiMarzio in general - unpredictability. When it comes to Seymour Duncan, I do not encounter this headache. The JB for instance, will sound like the JB in any guitar so I know what to expect & have not been proven wrong thusfar. I'm not dissing DiMarzio in any way, in fact, I really like what some of them have to offer for the music genre I peddle - extreme distortion.
2 comments:
love the TZ on my So-Cal
I t sounds darn good in some guitars for sure.
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