Some guitarists never play clean. They use Distortion controls, or the Drive/More Drive/Overdrive channel or setting, or modelling amplifiers mimicking cranked overdriven amplifiers. Do they know what their guitars sound like without all that colouring and all those harmonics present? Nope. How could they?
Those "dirty" channels and settings can make one guitar sound much like any other. You could imagine that the difference between a high quality strat with lovely pickups and a plywood slab strat with generic OEM pickups should be huge, but with an amplifier which isn't clean, how would you know? Playing your guitar clean though a fine tube amplifier should be a delightful sound experience. Adjusting the tone control on a strat by even one number will make a difference that you can hear and use in your playing, and changing pickups is like having a whole new landscape. Let's talk about strats...
I have been a strat guy since I saw my first Beach Boys album cover, then after I saw my first sunburst Fender, and Jimi's almost pure white reversed strat sealed the deal. I have had Silvertone, Ibanez, MusicMan, Squier and Fender strats. As I write this my main band guitar is getting a new bridge installed so my strat has come out again and I am remembering why I love that guitar so much.
The bridge pickup on a strat has always been a challenge for me though. The original wiring had no tone control so the bridge pickup always was just a little too jangly for me. I rarely used it except combined with the middle pickup for those quacky sounds and when I needed to just honk on the guitar. Eventually I rewired my strat to use the last tone control for both the middle and bridge pickups. Well, wouldn't you know, now I can take off some of the treble and get a great bridge pickup sound. Now I use it a lot more, and only crank up that tone control when I am in a darker sounding amplifier that needs just a bit more treble for the tones to shine. Jimi used to play an upside down strat so his bridge pickup was angled in reverse, emphasizing the lower strings and de-emphasizing the higher strings. That always sounds better to me than the original position, but then reaching the higher frets gets more difficult. Not for Jimi, but for the rest of us.
The middle pickup is not used by many people but has a range of mellow sounds for some rhythm playing, and can be lightened up with a tone control to be a bright and penetrating tone for great leads. There are many parts in SRV tunes where he changes from the neck pickup to the middle pickup to get this sound and it really allows his solo phrases to come alive. Apparently Ritchie Blackmore (another renowned strat player) never used his middle strat pickup and adjusted it out of the way. Fender's Ritchie Blackmore signature strat has a "dummy" pickup in the middle position! I am aware Ritchie almost always used a tube pre-amp in front of his main amplifier to push the input for more compression and overdrive, so rarely played clean. That is why his sound was the way it was, thick and creamy. I always wondered why he just didn't play a Les Paul.
The neck pickup has that big meaty sound and on its own, lets all us wankers try and sound like SRV. This is a characteristic strat tone that has great presence and enough of a mix of lows and highs to do it all. Some overwound single coil pickups can get close to P90s in character and that is a wonderful thing for pushing the amplifier input. Mixing the neck and middle pickup is a very special place where Jimi and Stevie used to go to take us on beautiful musical journeys, so whenever I select this pickup combination it is almost like a form of worship.
That's more like it: playing a great electric guitar like a strat clean into a fine tube amp is like a religious experience for me. Maybe it is tone worship or just pulling up memories of wonderful players or performances, but it is more than just playing a guitar ... whatever it is. At least for me. Maybe for you too.
But don't get me get started about setting up strat tremolos...
