Let’s Talk About Fender Strats [Sounds, Bridge Setup, Pickups & More] – That Pedal Show

[Applause] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] do [Music] oh [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] okay [Music] [Music] so [Music] wow [Music] beautiful beautiful hello welcome to that pedal show dan here mick here hello stratty i'm very excited about this i've been pestering you for ages to do this finally uh it's happening yeah i'm not quite sure what the title of the show is going to be something along the lines of i don't know get more from your vintage style strat or something like that but yeah the point of it dan keeps bugging me about strats and what to do with them and actually bugging me is unfair here asking very asking very valid questions about you know how do you approach a strategy i exactly i want to i want to learn every time you come up with these little nuggets of straight information i'm like i had no idea hmm you know so i'm really keen to learn the little things that help us track sound monstrous what we're going to try and do is is chunk this up into some common um issues that people who are either new to strats or slightly unfamiliar with strats will probably come across so if you know everything about strats this video is not for you um secondly we need to put some brackets around it so one of the brackets is i pretty much only play vintage style strats so we are going to touch a little bit on a humbucker in the bridge we are going to touch a little bit on um some other things that are non-vintage but generally i only deal with vintage type strats so those are the brackets those are the things we're going to be talking about the foibles of a vintage style strategy uh strat so you're saying we're not gonna be chiseling this out and putting a floyd rose in i think we'll do that off camera at the end so it's not about you know well it's not about the whole world of strats it's about the strap world as i live in it yeah and secondly obviously even then there are lots of variations on strats so for example the big one that everyone talks about um rosewood fingerboard or maple neck now again i'm a predominantly rosewood board strat player it's just what i've gravitated towards all the things we talk about today are relevant to maple neck strats but the tonality is slightly different and maybe that's the subject of another sure video at some point but this is you know strats in in my world which is generally slab board sort of let's say 59 to 65 spec strats that could be more specific do you think we i can be a lot more specific if you if you'd like that um so when you say slab board you mean it's not the round lamb it's the straight flat yeah a slab of rosewood definitely don't want to do a strut history lesson but in late 62 they changed from a slab so the top of the fingerboard sorry the top of the neck was flat the bottom of the fingerboard was flat and the board was stuck on the top right to a round lamming process where the top of the fingerboard was curved radius and so was the underside of the fingerboard top of the neck bottom of the fingerboard dan's telly is a round leg yeah i really like the sound they do sound different but they do yeah yeah we're not gonna we're not gonna get down that rabbit hole um quite so much um but one thing we one thing we were mulling over and you can you can you can discuss this and i don't know if we've really fully thought it through but most of the guitar heroes are strat players yeah there's a lot of them there's a lot of fantastic guitar players down the years who are heroes who don't play strats yes of course talk about jimmy page to begin with and many others but your virtuoso like just stand up there and play solo guitar players yeah are often strat players yeah so what why do you think that is i'm not sure i've got no i've got a theory go on the minute that i pick up a strat it's like oh this is comfortable don't get me wrong i love my telly but it's like okay well it hurts there it hurts there yeah it hurts there okay but just just crack on because it's awesome i picked this up it's like my hand is in a different position it's really comfortable here it's like i'll play this all day yeah um so i think it could be economics i think it's got something to do with it i think it's lovely lovely to play i think it's got a lot to do with jimi hendrix right okay buddy holly hank marvin yeah yeah so it could be that and and let me let me just state for the record and categorically i'm not saying that wes montgomery is not a guitar hero of course he totally is but if we think about simon brings up buddy holly hank marvin um hendrix clapton david gilmour stevie ray malmsteen uh eric johnson um richie blackmore yeah yeah it's pretty phenomenal eddie van halen hey van halen yeah because he was a buttering his threat butchered but yeah nevertheless yeah wow yeah yeah right green green meanie so and so have have fun in the comments section about all the other guitar heroes uh who aren't strap players but i do there is some there is something in that yeah i don't know whether it's just the the flashy guys guitar maybe whereas you know lots of i've i read lots of people going i just want to tell you because it's simple when i'm working and and i don't want all the flashy crap that goes with having a strat and having to be like this guy hi hold us track anyway discuss that let's get into something more practical um that's a really interesting point though we've got a bunch of topics to cover okay um i've written a list for you dan i say the list what what's interesting to you i mean we could go from the top if you want okay um what's what what's your first question about strats when i played strats they never always sounded weedy you know to a point but they they always sound when when i hear the strap players that i love and and hearing you it sounds like a steam train okay so let's let's do that then let's talk about um the weediness of the strap because i think it's absolutely fair to say if you plug a strat and a telly and a les paul let's talk about classic guitars 335 into the same amp the same cable and a clean sound the strat is definitely the weediest sounding of the bunch right it's this sound isn't it so i've got nothing switched on here amps are currently my two favorite amps to play my two rock um classic reverb signature and a 50 watt marshall plexi going through a cab that's got two celestian ruby alnicos in it which roll off a tremendous amount of high end which is kind of needed for that marshall so yeah works quite works kind of nice great we're also taking off um a little bit with a palmer attenuator just so it's not quite so fire breathing but they're set pretty clean right so here's the fabled position two [Music] because of the nature of the amps there's still a fair bit of mid-range there but if we go back onto this bridge [Music] we're nice and loud in here so actually it is thin but it doesn't sound that's that's not that's not my sort of thing doesn't sound clicky and no that's the thing because use the sam plinky yeah yeah and it would you know it is pretty pinky compared to what's going to come next one of the things that i've always gravitated towards is pet is getting pedals at mid-range okay so where you don't need all that extra mid-range push in a telecaster yeah right and in a les paul and in a 335 now this isn't to say that you can't use cheap screamers with those guitars but i do think it's one of the reasons that a lot of strat players gravitate in a tube screamery direction that's really interesting it's because the strap necessarily well not necessarily doesn't have that sort of doesn't have as much of that 5 100 to 800 hertz that a les paul or a tele or a 335 now let it be said that those guitars don't all sound the same but they certainly do have a lower mid-range thickness there which the strat kind of lacks is is that because of a double cutaway or is it just could be yeah right you know yeah single a particular kind of single pickup you could say the same of a jaguar you know okay telly much much beefier pickup yep yeah different construction that's so interesting okay so so so the tube screamer with that um yeah and you'll know this sound i mean um so this is a max on od9 which if you do your tube screamer history reading you'll massan made yeah yeah mr max on not that he's called mr max on but maxon designed the tube scream it was the original tube's groomer um made the circuit boards for ibnez yes and this is a modern remake modded by analog man but anyway it is a tube screamer it's an 808 mod in a 9 kind of body [Music] oh [Music] you know it's not the prettiest guitar sound in the world but my god it puts a nose on it yeah right is that what you're doing you're going yeah where that thing is and it and it pokes it out the mix it also rolls a little bit bottom end off which isn't particularly useful in that uh setting but certainly in when you go onto the neck pickup [Music] food it's such an awesome sound and it couldn't be anything else no it couldn't apart from some telly's do a really nice strap neck big up sound but but yeah so that push the tube screamer push there and lots of people really really dislike tube screamers for that very reason but if you're using both of these amps have got more mid-range push than something like a black face fender right which is where that really comes in yeah okay but even in this environment now if i do that again and i add more of that okay so i'm going to use my side of the dnm drive which has also has a bit of a mid push and i kick that on top what should happen is the middle's cut the mids kind of double up and you'll start to hear that bridge pick up starting to get quite fat [Music] [Applause] now [Music] so good and we gotta be a bit careful there because adding too much of that mid-range starts to make everything sound a bit muddy so you need to be a bit a bit careful so it's the nature of the strat that allows you to add that much mid-range i mean i couldn't imagine doing that with a telly i think so because if you think about like john mayer for example um big big fan of the two and four positions and this guitar this is something else we'll talk about in a minute but this guitar doesn't have a reverse wound reverse polarity middle pickup so it will sound a bit fatter than a guitar that does maybe we'll get one of those out in a sec um so position two and four is the in between positions yeah the pickups so again when a strap first came out and for quite a long time actually it only had a three position pickup uh select switch yep and then they discovered that if you jammed it in between you could get both pickups and of course that both pickup sound whether it's these two pickups or those two pickups right that's a real classic it is strat yeah yeah right and john mayer for one loves it in fact i'll do it on this guitar then i'll grab another guitar but so i'll go from the middle position to the position two as i call it which is bridge and middle and some people call it position four but it's position two [Music] again these amps have got fairly decent mid-range component in it but if we add a bit of tube screamer to that [Music] it's almost counter-intuitive you're scooping the mid-range away and then adding it back and adding it back and whether you use a clone or a tube screamer that is that is the number one way of adding fatness back into those two and four [Applause] [Music] positions [Music] good [Music] so number one at mid-range number two as the gain goes up obviously the bridge pickup on a strat a lot of people just assume won't keep up with um a humbucker or another so we'll just put a bit of a gainer sign or psi uh sound on with downside of the dnm drive [Music] fizzy in it yeah which is no you know no slight on the d m drive it just is quite fizzy because it's a single core bridge pickup one of the ways in which vintage strats differ from modern strats is they pretty much always came without this pickup it's almost counterintuitive these two pickups are connected to tone controls right but this one wasn't and you'd think which is the pickup you need the tone control on it's that one but of course we're coming from an era of cranked well tweed amps really right which were dark so you needed that to cut through yeah you needed your you needed you but of course as amp technology's gone on and they became more powerful and less overdrivey this is just spiky so the classic mod that a lot of people do to their vintage style strats is attach the bridge pickup um to a tone pot it's a really simple mod maybe i'll put some diagrams up on screen so if that time pot is doing that one then this temp will do those two is that right um it depends how you wire it yeah there's there's four lugs on the okay so you can connect it yeah okay all right yep and okay uh the one lug is your master log lug and your other three lugs are the different pickups so if you bridge to what you just said happens but if you only connect it to that log actually it's that one it's the furthest one away um i'll put a diagram up uh and that can do it but it only gets you so far and it all depends on what value um the cap is the capacitor is on the control itself because how much high it rolls off and this is the real super vintage spec one so what you'll hear is it will go not much not much not much not much mud right so [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] that's so cool because i can still hear the pic and all that there's no it feels like there's no information lost so i can still hear everything yeah just get rid of that fizz so if you've bought your classic series strat or whatever it is and it doesn't have the bridge pickup connected to that tone pot and you go to that bridge pickup and you add a bit again then that's one way you can solve it because otherwise it's just so fizzy how often do you use that well so this is where it gets interesting because it really does depend on on pickup choice right what i find is that on medium gained settings like that i'll be on that all the time especially if you're like under a singer or something sure okay and then you can just sit out the way a bit and it gets a bit darker but what gets really interesting is when you put loads again on and most people not most people i don't want to make too many generalizations a lot of people who play les pauls and and telly's sort of assume that strats don't do high gain very well yeah and you know there is an argument for that when you look at a modern humbucker or even a really nice les paul however gonna stack quite a lot of gain on and well you'll see what happens [Music] [Applause] [Music] um [Music] oh [Applause] [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] so insane amount of gains absolutely and everything's crashing into each other but the the dynamics in the top end of that bridge pickup is actually remains remains is forcing its way through all that so that's what that that is that that's the learning point that took me a really long time to get my head around it's like a built-in troll booster almost it does the same job kind of but what you that's so interesting it's really hard to make a strap absolutely crap out yeah and it always retains dynamic and so when you get into that you know you step on your ds1 or your bd2 or and you think oh man this guitar is really thin what you need is a bit more volume and maybe a bit more gain and to have a look at that yeah right and just let the guitar you know don't be afraid to give the guitar a bit more than you would give a les paul or uh and then of course if you plug your les paul in now probably sound glorious but it would probably be a bit overwhelming and overpowering and bassy and and all of that actually one on eq i don't set my amps any different for the strat than i would set it for a vintage silent les paul or a p90 guitar it's completely the same right so it's not like those sorts of adjustments need to be made at amp level maybe a tweak or two on the pedal but not really so can i ask how much how much does volume have to do with and because that it just sounds so massive but yeah having you know we both talk about dynamics a lot and hearing the dynamics with the sound that has that much gain on it yeah it's like so how much does volume have to play into that well for me personally it's a big deal because those of you who play p90 guitars and guitars with vintage style humpbackers you'll know how much range there is back from 10. so one thing i've discovered more recently is certainly on p90 guitars and unbuckled guitars but especially b90 guitars i'm almost never on 10. wow because the the guitar is alive yeah especially if it's got 50s wiring now with a strat the that you can do that but there's a couple of there's a couple of crunch points and one is you know if you watch a lot of strat players if you watch stevie ray or phillips ace or even hendrix to some degree um a lot of guitar slinger strat players will leave gilmore out of it for a minute they're hammering the damn guitar right and and for years and years and years and years i thought the route to making a strat sound bigger was to hammer it right and some people are really brilliant at that i was alright at it for a minute but actually i think it's i think you can take some of that learning from from humbuckers and p90s and let the gear do the work a bit more okay so yes volume is really important but when you hit that ceiling uh and you're kind of there's nowhere else to go yeah yeah yeah then i think up the amp a bit more lean on your pedals a bit more heavily and if you've got a bit of discipline which i struggle with and you struggle with you can just let the gear do the work a bit more and i think that's where the dynamic comes from and i do think that dynamic is what makes any guitar but especially a strat really come to life yeah see um why don't we give you a strat dan yeah i i want you to start on one that's got single coil pickups okay um like this one for example and we'll do we'll do the pickup thing in a minute but oh that's lovely [Music] that was any flat i love this guitar so another thing i want to talk about in fatness is have a strat an e flat okay because it is a different world listen to this [Music] uh [Music] so slinky it's awesome pretty nice what i want you to do now is stop hitting the guitar so hard okay and enjoy this enjoy the volume control a bit so use this a bit more yep and just don't hit the guitar so hard okay [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] time some danisms [Music] mm-hmm [Music] so [Music] to oh dear oh dear so what we've done there we've we've and now i'll just take the gain stages off now do the same thing the reverb will stay on but just play some of the similar stuff you were playing [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so i just switched on a when when he started playing for the second time there he was just straight into the amps with the reverb and delay and then i switched on um an analog man bad bob boost just to give you a bit more top end back and and it's really interesting is it because i see so many strat players hammering into the guitar and i definitely did that for for a long time and i still do it from time to time but there is so much to be had by relaxing a bit by relaxing upping that upping your overall gain and volume and and you know obviously your band members might frown at you a bit if you accidentally hit a big transient but if you relax a little bit and you're playing let the guitar do a bit more of the work let the pedals do the work let the amps do the work i think that that range of dynamic in which you have to play gets so big it's it well it becomes a different instrument and of course you're an e flat and if you know anything about stevie ray or all the other great players down here who've tuned below concert pitch you know hendrix great example but lots of people choose to be flat it becomes a different instrument and it's just another way of making the thing fat if if if you want it to be fatter there's a self-conscious thing of getting over immediately when you turn the apps up yeah you know like when we filmed today doing my board i was like really conscious of being too loud you know yeah um because i thought man because if i lay into it like i'm so prone to do yeah it's just gonna go everywhere but playing like that yeah where you're relaxing and letting the gear do the work it's so much easier to flow why was so much less tension i was kind of forced into it a bit when i started playing the 335 a bit more and certainly the casino more recently those guitar the casino especially is so alive right that if you approach it like that sort of hammering and just don't get me wrong there is no nothing wrong with that approach it's just if you're doing it and you find that you're constantly trying to get more and it's not coming then laying off a bit and just increased letting letting the gear do the work a bit more that that alone worth price of admission is yeah it's amazing it's a good way to do it really amazing um okay so look we've let's finish the week thing by saying well what about a stronger pickup in that bridge position then because probably the most popular mod for a strat um certainly in in ye oldie days was to get rid of this weak bit of rubbish but it seemed like an invader yeah or a whatever it was actually that's a good quarter pounder super distortion or in eddie van halen's case the neck pickup for me i was 335. um now personally i'm not a fan of it because i like the strat as is but if you do find that pickup too spiky we've got a couple of guitars here that do have um you buzzed me over that do have stronger bridge pickups so this is hardly an apples for apples comparison these guitars are very different in terms of um well the most obvious one the neck would but what we've got here is a seymour duncan jb humbucker um and here we've got a andreas klotman 60 single coil should we hear the difference yeah please um let's just do no gain pedal [Music] okay a little bit fatter in the midst didn't seem massively louder to me no because i mean the dynamics in that thing is ridiculous um let's try some [Music] boost [Music] now we're starting to hear the nature of that humbucker a bit more yeah with the mid-range let's add some more mid-range [Music] hmm and at this point 90 of people on the internet are going wow that guitar sounds much better because it's fatter in the bass it's fatter in the lower mids yeah okay but like we did before when you had all that gain on yeah well i i think this is why it was such a popular mode and why so many hss strats get sold because when you play it in this environment and you a b it with that single chord pickup it always sounds better it sounds fatter let's stick some more going on [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh and if that's the sound you want if you want a rock you know heavy rock guitar sound then definitely go for that for me once when you start using fuzz pedals when you want the clarity of that bridge pickup yeah in i think we're being invaded um one of the many reasons why it's so hard to buy a guitar isn't it if you heard that in a guitar shop which guitar are you going to buy yeah sure that one every day of the week yep but i find that then once i get into a musical context in a band i can't deal with that because this one limits so much quicker yeah yeah and it's it's not the sound that my ears are attuned to yeah sure um but yeah that can work the other one we've got is um a p90 in the bridge position oh yes this is a guitar made by a friend of ours carl longbottom it's got slightly unusual construction there are some other things going on in this guitar different body words and stuff however you're predominantly hearing this p90 bridge pickup so um let's have a go on that dan if you go first with that setting we just had [Music] [Music] definitely introducing some of that midhonk sure is really nice really really yes lovely so it's you know if you if you really really can't live with that single or no if you just don't like that single core bridge pickup thing and you will have options yeah and it's you know i'm telling you what you already know it's been done for 50 years right so um yeah different pickup in the bridge position or any indeed anywhere else on the guitar and that's why john sir sells so many hss strats right okay s-shaped objects um anderson you know line them up all the boutique s-type builders sell lots and lots of those see i had my um the strat that i played for years had uh simila duncan um there's that classic combination there's the 59 and the jb yeah and and it was great especially the gigs i was doing it was great but uh it lost so the position two gone straight away um [Music] and there's something about approaching the higher gain differently with the original bridge pickup like you did before it's like and it sounds yeah it's a different thing it's a different thing i mean the humbuckers are really cool but there's something about the sound there's a dynamic with the vintage bridge yeah which is just classic yeah unbeatable classic v classic richie blackmore isn't it yeah um yeah it's an absolutely stylistic choice not saying one is better than the other but it's a way to make your strap fatter if um some of these other options don't work for you right you said bridge and i think it's going to be interesting to have a conversation about bridge one of the questions uh in fact you had it on that guitar yes so um just clip me on for one second if i play a chord and have a bit of a wiggle [Music] so this guitar is has the bridge floating okay it can go up and down but you don't set yours up like that no so the the correct setup for a strap i've got a couple straps here set up differently is with the bridge floating okay uh for fans of the show this is transit van this is a 2012 american vintage 59 strat the vibrato system tremolo system as it's called on the headstock original synchronized tremolo um it's actually verato floats right so it can bend down and up and if you buy a factory standard strat with a floating tremolo with a vibrato bridge it will come set up set up like that and you can go onto the fender website and you can read just various specs for how much it should oh okay be off the guitar so that's that's part of the spec as it's supposed to be floating yeah and that much as well no way way wow yeah pretty much i can't say it's bang on fender spec and of course what you get what you get is that lovely springy sound let's put some reverb on shall we down [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes [Music] do [Music] the action's going to mile up because i haven't put the action down and the bridge has gone up and that's that's how they come and it is it's it's the sound of the strap i had a bit of a boost on there if we take the boost off and just [Applause] and you know it's the sound of the strap however it does cause it creates a couple of problems right one is if you don't have it set up very well or you're new to strats and when you get your strap you get it out the box you do the wang and the thing goes horrifically out of tune [Music] this is a whole other video okay but the way to set the strat trim up is make sure every single point of contact is friction free and the strings are wound on tightly and you tune up to the note secondly the way you set the bridge screws is crucial so the the two on the outside need to be pretty much all the way in but not too tight and the middle four need to be undone a half turn okay so if you have a look at that you can see that and again i'll do it oh wow i'll do a um that's cool i'll do uh so the outside tool doing the the heavy lifting they're doing the yeah they're they're keeping the bridge on the body and doing the predominance of the and that's significant because a great many modern strats come with a two-point vibrato and i would almost argue that if you're gonna have your tram set up to float and you don't want you're not slavishly chasing a truly vintage sound i would say the two point is a much better choice because it's way more efficient and it doesn't require the same sort of um fettling that the six screw one needs okay in order to keep it in tune you know these poor guys have watched me change the strings on this this afternoon set it up to float just spent five minutes trying to get it in tune once it's there you know and you've lived with it for a minute it'll stay there but it's not too bad i mean [Music] um [Music] proof positive that it's totally possible if you uh lubricate your knot um if you lubricate your nut slots and do all of that set it up properly it can absolutely stay in tune and sound great yeah so that leads us on to a couple of other questions how many springs yeah springs i always think when it's floating three or four okay and three preferably right set up like that like a claw i've done that because i didn't want to screw the screws any further into the guitar i'd already screwed them in quite a long way okay so yeah there's a bit more tension there from the outside and clearly you could put you could put four screws in and just pull the screws out a bit it's a very you know it's a genius bit of design but it's also pretty crude you know you've got springs being held in by by screws um and it counteracts the tension of the strings simple as that um and i think if you're going to have it floating three springs is quite a nice place to be if you use like normal gauge 10 strings for example right um or indeed nines once you get up to 11's you might find that in order to counteract that tension of the strings that four springs might be the right thing okay but it's totally possible now for me this causes two problems one is [Music] so as you bend that note yeah everything else goes flat so you bend a string it pulls the full down so if you want to do something like this [Music] just hear it just ducking down it's not too bad you know you can um and if you do string on string bands [Music] you can certainly modify your technique to deal with it but if you come from a telly or a les paul or 335 where you're not used to fighting against the springs it's really weird similarly if we stack on a load of naughty uh [Music] hey i'm having to work crazy hard to bend those strings because you're because you're you're fighting against those springs and i'm having to pull them pull them bend them further than i normally would because look yeah yeah right see so that's confidence so the added tension that you're putting on the strings the springs are compensating for that you're bending against that yeah we're still in tune yeah that's pretty good it is proof positive that they that these six point vibratos absolutely can work so that's issue number one issue number two is this is contentious i think the classic springy strat sound is with slightly lighter strings and the bridge floating sure the pickups in this guitar and the blue one that i'll pick up next aren't that different they're a little bit different but they're not they're pretty they're pretty they're not worlds apart yeah it might be that the blue one has a tiny bit more mid-range but what you get here is nice springy [Music] oh lots of nice springy yeah great for that and if you want to use the wang bar wang away that's the way to do it hang off but i i think if if you like strats not so springy a bit more sledgehammer-like and in my opinion and it's not just me goodness me i think you'll find john mayer agreeing i think you'll find lots of strat players down the years agreeing he's very agreeable that number of springs oh my goodness completely decked um well here's the next thing you see it looks like it's decked yeah and we'll discuss that in a minute is actually i have this with just enough tension to keep that on the body for a big bend because it's in my opinion that they sound bigger fatter thicker fuller if that is resting on the body yeah okay and you might not want that you might want the springy sound yeah and if you want the springy sound get it floating but for me the sledgehammer straps out on the body right and that that then um has two positive knock-ons one is when i do my string on string bends [Music] yes you can already hear the sound isn't as springy it's thicker it's thicker now for sure these pickups might make a difference yeah okay but i can tell you that the fundamental i've done this on many many strats and i can tell you that it's the bridge that has an effect five springs has a tonal effect wow and what the springs are made out of has a tonal effect yeah right you think that's a reverb chamber yeah of course you can probably hear it um turn the reverb off in the amps a minute yeah yeah yeah just put some put some love on [Applause] [Music] uh oh my goodness you know again i think these pickups have a little bit more mid-range but that's that is doing the that's doing some of that yeah yeah of course and the springs definitely have a sound so that's one thing it solves is being able to do the string being able to bend strings and you might not do string on string bends but it will save you that having to really bend against the against the springs all the time um oh yeah god yeah if you break a string this probably would because it it there is a tiny bit of movement in it but if you've got it properly decked the rest of the guitar won't go out but if you break a string on a floating bridge then you're in trouble there's this amazing video of guthrie uh playing with han zimmer and is in the middle of a solo breaks the string whole guitar goes out of tune so he grabs a slide you and you hardly notice it he hardly misses a beat and plays the rest of the solo with the slide unbelievable i've seen him be get to the end of a song and you know absolutely amazing guitar playing all the way through this is guthrie govan if you're not if you're not familiar um and then you'll hear the song on london he'll sort of play an e chord and he'll think that it's like so far out of tune and he's been he's been pitching it yeah oh far out there there are devices you can get um in fact guthrie is a good example he's that's what made me think about it he used to use or maybe still uses something called a tremmel no okay which is a little device that sits in place of one of these springs and you can just lock it off oh wow and it's it's like a sliding thing and you can just twist the knob and it locks it so it physically can't move so there are devices like out there if you want to employ that kind of thing so benefit number one you can do your string on string bends um you know you might bend against open strings i don't know or you might not do any of that but you might not want to fight against that springs of the trailer all the time yeah so the next question is well then hang on a minute i would like both of those things i want to be able to use the trend bit but i i would prefer either the tonal difference of having the flat on the body or i don't you know i want my string bends to be better yeah that's how i have mine set so i haven't checked it in the last couple weeks but what i try and have it i have enough tension on those five springs so that when i do my biggest bend everything else is the same in terms of the screws and all that yeah yeah when i do my biggest bend it just lifts off the body okay which i'm not going to do this is a new string so we'll do that at the end but i can still use the bar a bit oh okay so um i'll just stick that i'll just stick that little boost on again that we had there not the tube screamer but the bad bob for a bit of sparkly [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] i [Music] [Music] pretty sure it'll be out of tune now because there needs a lot of new strings and there's a lot of wang in but [Music] i get to the end of song with that yeah but with another hour or so is playing on it and the strings bedded in a bit yeah that would be more in tune than it is so that that is how i set the bridge sure and there have been many players down the years who go one step further clapton i think i don't know if he was the first to do it but he's famous for doing it you put a little block of wood in there oh and just jam it down just block it flat it can't move okay that all the things i just spoke about makes it even more so sure so your string on straight string on string bend start to feel more like a telly at this point okay in terms of string tension because you're still you know even with it even with plenty of tension on the springs you're still pulling against it a bit sure um but it will start to feel more like a fixed bridge guitar if you actually block it and i get you know it must necessarily must have some effect on the tone and you put a bit of wood in between there and the guitar's body stands to reason to me at least that there's some resonance sure relationship yeah happening there maybe um okay what about the saddles is is there i mean are they you know as far as tonal variation stuff is there saddles that you prefer that help i think there's a good point to be made here every single part of this guitar i mean bear in mind with the maple neck it came out in 1954 yeah call up 1954 on wikipedia or whatever you want to and just have a look what was happening in 1954 look at the cars look at the technology look at the computers they didn't have look at the mobile phones they didn't have look at the internet that didn't exist you know it's 1954 is almost unimaginable by today's standards and yet this which actually looks a bit more like that made its debut so that every single thing on this guitar has been improved okay tuning pegs yeah two-point vibrato instead of the six point the six-point more powerful pickups noiseless we'll come on to that in a minute pots switches even oh the most ergonomic guitar in the world they've even made it more ergonomic by making this yeah right shaved off so every single thing about this guitar has been improved and saddles there are many different types of saddle you can get so tiny tiny history um they were bent steel saddles at first and then like all guitar companies or big guitar companies when fender was trying to save money in the 70s they swapped those out for cast yes ones which were soft metal yeah um and they were wasn't there a reaction between the strings and the cast metals and the rust and i don't know if it's that or just the fact that the metal was pretty soft so the strings okay breaking dug right into them uh i was talking to azlister just recently he's got a 74 strat which has got the car saddles he took them off he put some of these on much prefer the sound of the cast ones really so okay there's no now for me these things i've been through saddles i've been graphtech saddles um one's made out of different hardnesses of steel titanium been through them all and i'll just come back to the most vintage possible ones i can find because the point of that whole tangent about everything on this guitar has been improved that means it's necessarily changed sure and that change is either to your taste or it's less to you yes okay and personally speaking it's less to my taste okay i don't think you can beat these bent steel saddles yeah and for functionality weight tone i don't think you can beat these old slot head tube songs yeah but you know you me you might be a um a locking tuner devotee and that's all good if you if you find them more useful then nothing wrong with it so sure um so yeah the one really annoying part about the old arm is that it screws in right and what happens is it over the over the over time it wears sure so you'll get a knock where the threads the throttle where against the the internal thread the fix for that if you can find it the guitar probably came with one um but you've since lost it as long as there's no hole in the bottom of that block there a tiny little compression screw about that big did they come with them originally usually wow yeah oh i don't know about originally but certainly modern fenders one would assume they do and that sits in the bottom there and it's a super high tension tiny little screw they're usually black in color and uh it just pushes options against the throat the bottom of the arm and stops it from wobbling quite so badly modern manufacturers like callahan and others have created a much more much better approach to that but anyway if your thing is wobbling a bit you can find one of those compression screws and put it down in there if you have got a hole in the bottom of your block and it would just fall out the bottom you can do things like wrap plumbers tape around the threads right okay been through all of that down the years um yeah and there are other many companies out there who've have come out with new versions of this bridge that address all of those problems but as i said earlier you know every every improvement is a change sure and it's whether you want that change or not let's talk about pickups um we touched on you know you can have humpback as the bridge and stuff one thing i want to talk to you about is that those positions two and four which is such a massive part of the strat thing now the strat that i had originally you had it was hum cancelling in 204 but they didn't come like that originally right yeah so this what we're talking about here is is noise really big problem with single coil pickups if i do the same thing with the handbag on this [Music] yeah um you've you've only got to go onto wikipedia or something and read what a humbucking pickup is if you want to understand why that happens but it's not just a clever name no so noise obviously is a problem and originally strats came with all of these three pickups with the same winding direction and the same polarity for the magnets what somebody realized and i don't know the history of this somebody will helpfully add it to the comments they and they realize that if you made this middle pick up something called rwrp reverse wound reverse polarity it becomes hum cancelling in positions two and four i will demonstrate that almost in tune down actually the other thing i didn't mention about the old wang bar the other reason i can't play the two pivot thing is one that's very good i often rest my hand on that secondly it doesn't happen on these six screw bridges but it definitely happens on the two pivot ones when you hit the guitar it wobbles like steve right i'm not sure i'll be able to get this one to do it but i'll try [Music] no another benefit of the six pivot bridge over the two pivot one they don't warble some players if you listen to ariel pose and play when he plays this sir he uses that effect oh wow that wobble effect and you hear vi do it as well i mean he might do it yeah he does the flicky thing yeah yeah it's a similar effect to when you flick the bar on a floor but it happens on a two pivots um strap bridge if you hit the guitar too hard so just two more little things there that means fascinating i can't use that yeah but we were talking about positions two and four so [Music] because in a humbucking pickup the two coils are one of them's reverse and reverse polarity and that's exactly what's happening here so you um you buck the hum yes and that is a great benefit i use that on the show a lot all of my guitars to date have had rwrp until i got the 61 which unfortunately is not here today it was a guitar that i had on loan for a long time an original 61 and that guitar did not have rwrp and over a bunch of conversations down the years try not to go too much into this because it's already a long video but um it is believed that they sound quite different rwrp and non-rwrp yeah johnny marr did loads of research on his jag when he was doing the signature guitar with fender to try and get the right pickups worked with his tech bill public and tim mills at bare knuckle pickups and they discovered they much preferred the sound of the two guitars the same wind and polarity two pickups yeah right and when they tried rwp for the home counselling they just didn't like the sound of it so much and and the conversation goes that maybe it does affect the resonance of the strings don't know about that okay anyway so here's a guitar with rwp and i my personal belief is that it hollows out the mids sure a little bit more yep so yeah i don't know let's see if we're still in tune [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] what a great sound so these pickups are different they don't have that wrp these ones are not vintage okay um [Music] i tell you what's really interesting i mean i know they're two different guitars but they're both american vintage strats with slab rosewood fingerboards older bodies maple necks everything else is the same this one resonates very differently to that one and i don't know how much of it is down to that bridge being on the body yeah anyway just do that same thing [Music] hey [Music] it's almost an extension of what we were talking about before that guitar sounds much springier yeah much lighter much thinner so how much of that is down to rwrp i don't know this guitar clearly has quite a bit more lower mid totally but there's a there's a hollowness in the position two and four yeah this doesn't do yeah yeah you know it definitely doesn't scoop it out as much doesn't know i knew [Music] [Applause] [Music] it sounds spectacular it's still well dan's been listening to this guitar for six years now so um they are new pickups today in fact um killer it does nice a lot of sparkle on the top yeah as well isn't it yeah so yeah whether i don't know i don't know if it would be a buying choice for you when you buy a guitar because to be frank most modern strats come with rwrp right but that's just a matter of changing that middle pickup it is i'm looking forward to living with this for a while just yeah just to see just to see because again and i'll say again the thing that really made me go hang on a minute is it one of those is it another one of those things in that vintage tonal soup like when we started listening to that 61 strat and we heard you know i was lucky enough to have it for 18 months and really was it 18 months yeah pretty much wow so we got a really good listen to that guitar and we heard it back to back with all these other strats week in weekend week in week out and we came to the conclusion that it sounded better than all of them astonishing guitar and of course it's a blooming you know it's made in 1961 it's a 60 year old guitar yeah but all of these little things you know is rwrp a factor in why a 60 year old guitar sounds so good maybe maybe maybe it's part of the soup so interesting so it's something to think about i don't know what the advice there is other than um to me anyway the rwrp sounds slightly hollower slightly more scoopy yep and if you want the john mayer sound it it almost seems like a must sure yeah okay so can we just touch on the neck pickup because that's one of the you know that if i think of stevie ray i think of that neck pickup sound that he had yeah what's going on there i don't know it just seems that there is something about this neck position in a stratocaster especially if you had a bit of glass on there that just has this woody flutey you know for those of you who play les pauls um well any humbucking guitar it can get real muddy real quickly but with a strat yes it can get muddy but it the clarity and for me there's a couple of things on the neck pickup that i love one is that srv type thing yeah um i guess if we're going to go for that i should play the maestro and see if we can do the uh e-flat thing okay we'll put some glass on um yeah let's do that first so it you know for those of you who like that kind of srv thing and certainly i do um this doesn't sound like srv but e flat is flat it's absolutely essential for that sound and then neck pickup there's just something about it and what we'll do is we'll add a bit of tube screamer and then i'm gonna and then i'm gonna add some glass onto the top of the tube screaming okay let's see let's see where we get to i'm gonna get going gets a reverb going in the two rock [Music] [Music] mmm [Music] [Music] unreal so you hear how much clarity it still has unreal yeah now let's add some glass on top of that and a little bit again with the bad bob [Music] [Music] [Music] uh what i've done now i'm going to come forward a bit unreal go towards the in-step album where he added a bit more gain and like the maybe two cheap screamers i don't know what he was using for but if we wind some gain on the dnm drive there you'll get a bit more of that [Music] uh i can hear that's the sound man that's amazing you can hear the bad bob giving it a bit too much glass up top yeah and you you just won't get that out of a neck position humbucker no it's that strat e flat and just to prove that if i if i move on to the regular tune guitar a minute sorry i mean i suspect it will still sound cool but there's just something about e [Music] flat [Applause] [Music] um [Applause] [Music] thank you just awesome you was mentioning before that he has a lot more trouble than people think yeah that's why i kicked that bad bob on the end yeah to give that bit of just a bit of bite because the tube screamer alone quite often can rub a bit of that yeah yeah it depends on youtube screaming about a bit a bit of top end loss but yeah and then maybe maybe a little bit too much gain there you know lest we forget you know may he rest in peace stevie ray dumbledore string singer marshall major oh yeah vibra verbs you know that sound and i i was talking to doyle brown once and he told me that he played a gig with stevie once and stevie was taking a solo or something playing as doyle walks onto the stage and he said stevie ray played and he literally fell to his knees it made his knees buckle so clearly the whole rest of it is part of that but that e-flat you know bit of mid-range neck pickup and then you you know it doesn't have to be stevie ray i think if we do the neck pickup thing i'll add a bit of delay and reverb we'll go for exactly the same sound um just not with the with it not with the dnm drive for a second [Music] hey [Music] [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] do [Music] two [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow [Music] apologies for the wig out oh stop it but i think it's unbelievable that that's my case for strats the dynamic range far out is colossal when see if you did all that with the les paul it would sound amazing it was really great and everything but the the top of it would be too much sure be kind of uncontrollable and but with the strat you can pile it all on you can pull the volume on you can you can bring it back and it's kind of clean yeah i've got a bit of work to do here there's still i need to there's still a bit of cleanup issue going on and um i did turn the octave on at the end there the other thing about stratnet pickup with the volume and the um tone roll back a bit that's the the classic octave sound didn't sound very classic there i think the tweedy was doing something weird to it but um that was amazing just uh i just need to satisfy my own curiosity minute down foods yeah very good much happiness oh man i have learned so much today there's a yeah um clearly there's so much more we could talk about general setup yeah i don't want to get into it now fingerboard radius just just to say that all my strats are seven and a quarter right which is the vintage the curvy fingerboard radius that you can't bend strings on dan can't bend strings on a vintage on a vintage radius board [Applause] unreal yes you can unreal i mean to be fair action's not low but yeah it it's not a barrier a vintage radius board sure so there's that we could go on we could go on didn't even talk about middle pickup middle pickup man okay sorry it's been really long i i'm enthused by strats and i could talk about for weeks oh i'm so glad we did this because i genuinely i've learned so much there's so much of that stuff you said i had no idea it's when you spend so much time with an instrument like i can go through telly stuff yeah you know talk about sort of saddle metal material and just that you know the difference that the actual plate makes you know and all that stuff but you know you pick out that stuff when you're specifically playing one guitar for a long long time yeah this is like and and yeah it's almost like a knackered old car or yeah right an old pair of trainers you know you can do so much better you can use lawrence's pickups you can have more comfortable neck profiles there's so many things you can do and i'm sure this video will be full of comments going have you tried have you tried having tried the answer is yes i have yeah over the well now i got my first proper strap when i was 14 years old wow so you know it's been that long playing strats i'm now 47 so how long that is 33 years and yeah i have i've really tried it all and which is not to say it's better or worse or or or any of that it's my personal preference is for that original guitar that i will own one day because i'll just say knowing you for as long as i've known you and the amount of detail that you will go into to to explore these things i mean it is incredible so if you've ended up here after this journey it's like okay that's good enough for me you know yeah but it's you know i i equally know lots of people who just can't live with the six point bridge yeah and there are loads of people who just cannot get a sound out of that bridge pickup and that this is all completely valid and really underlines that whole tps message of you know there are no answers only better questions and understanding what this does or that doesn't do to enable you to make a choice that's going to work for you and that's that's what it's about thank you you've played so beautifully thank you thank you so lovely to hear you it was indulgent yeah it was just wonderful wonderful brilliant thank you so much for watching if you've made it to the end you're an absolute legend oh quick did i just talk about impedances um a massive thank you to our preferred retailers in the uk and in europe is no treble bleeds 250k pots no trouble bleed no trouble we could just keep going yeah okay 250k pots and but preferably heading towards 270 280 on the towing pots wow okay um is anderson's music of guilford and sorry where you can buy lots of strats and time pots yeah yeah um also our friends in australia uh pedal empire of brisbane queensland where you can also buy strats and lots of other nice things uh a massive thank you to our patrons on patreon uh thank you guys uh for helping us out there really appreciate it thank you dearly and also a massive thank you to everyone that's gone to thatpedalshowstore.com yeah and grab t-shirts we're twinning today that was a yeah a happy mistake we've got a bunch of new stuff coming so keep your eye on that pedal show store yep um we haven't mentioned sweetwater in the states links below i wish i could have a percentage of every strat that gets sold over the next two years some sweet water [Music] brilliant and then i could afford to buy my old strap then yeah but one day one day but this this on there sounding unbelievable yeah yeah yeah did i say true vintage springs there needs to be no village springs okay this look at that bridge oh wow yeah is that new um well yes wow it needs to sit slightly off center did you know that this never sits right in the middle no yeah so yeah patent numbers no lesson on those later later let's have a cup of tea thanks everyone uh pick god bevel that's really really important uh the the font don't forget to subscribe if you haven't subscribed have a fantastic day we'll see you soon thanks everyone bye

Channel: That Pedal Show

Views: 232,272

Keywords:

Id: -ndkUzSGKNA

Length: 92min 12sec (5532 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021