Lundgren pickups

I have for a long time now been using EMG pickups in all my guitars. Since my very first test with an 81-85 setup I was totally floored. I just loved the punch and power that they created through a distorted amp. I have during the years replaced all other pickups in my guitar except for a couple of DiMarzio D Acti­vators. I am currently using EMG SA, 81, 85, 81X, 85X, 81/7, 707 and 808 pickups.

During the last couple of years I have begun to hear some things that I do not like in my sound. Small things, but still annoying. And I think my newest pickups, 808, sound a little unclear. It is time to testdrive something else.

I have seen that there has been a lot of very good things said about the Swedish Lundgren pickups everywhere. I visited their web page, https://lundgren.se, and found out that they have many different pickups. I have read a lot about the different pickups they make and listened to a lot of audio clips. For me the audio clips did not tell me much of interest about the different aspects of the pickups. But I know one thing, I like EMG and EMG sounds modern metal. The most modern metal pickup  they make is the M-series. But I also like things a little more classic sounding, so something like the new Black Heaven seemed like the perfects choice for me. At least according to the description of the pickup: "The Black Heaven combines the power, aggression and tight response of the legendary M6, but with more refined, organic character that lends itself to more diverse tonal applications".

For the testdrive I got hold of a used M6. Now I needed to select a guitar. I decided to use my old trusted workhorse, my Charvel Model 6. The pickup combination in this guitar is H-S-S. Since I never use the middle pickup I decided to leave that empty and try to find a single coil for the neck position. So what model to choose? The problem with the EMG 81 and SA combination is that the output from the 81 is much higher that from the SA. Since the M6 is a high output metal pickup I wanted to have a really high output single coil pickup as the neck pickup. I emailed Lundgren pickups and got a suggestion from Johan Lundgren himself to go for the Strat-90. Luckily I ended up finding a used Strat-90 neck pickup. So time for testing :-D

To be able to compare the pickups I did some recordings with the old and the new setup. Excuse me for the casual dressing and sloppy playing :-P

Charvel mod 6 with EMGs:

Charvel mod 6 with EMGs, solo:

Unfortunately the Strat-90 did not fit into the whole of the Charvel. So I skipped mounting that.

Charvel mod 6 with Lundgren M6 in brigde.

Charvel mod 6 with Lundgren M6 in bridge, solo:

As I mentioned before I like the power in the EMGs. This is the first time I have tried something else that gives me the same power. The M6 has more bottom end. Normally I would have rolled it back on the amp a bit, but now I wanted everything to be the same to show off the differences of the pickups. The bottom end is nice a tight though, so it does not disturb me. The high end of the M6 is warmer and it is a much warmer sounding the the EMG 81 when used clean.


Verdict:
I really like the sound of the Lundgren M6. It has a much warmer and nicer tone than the EMG 81 with almost the same power. I can't wait to have the Strat-90 put in so I can do the full comparison. There will be more Lundgren pickups in my guitars, that's for sure!!

Rock on! 

Guitar picks 2

I have used the new picks for a while now. I like the grip of The Dunlop Flow 3.0 but somehow I do not feel 100% comfortable with it. I have not figured out what the problem is yet, but I have to struggle with the playing position of it. I have therefore started to use the Gravity 4 mm more and more again. It might be the thickness, I don't know but it just feels more natural and it disturbs me less. We'll see what happens in the future. The struggle goes on... 

Rock on!

Guitar Picks

Back in history I did not really care what guitar picks I used. I started with really thin Sharkfins and Dunlop picks just because I thought that was the way to go. I read somewhere in Guitar Player or so that it was better with thicker picks so I tried it but it really felt awkward. But somehow I continued trying with thicker picks. I don't recall any dimensions or so, but it was more normal picks for rock guitar. During those days I was navigating towards the unobtainable perfect sound by the help of pedals and amplifiers.

In the modern age I stumbled on some guy on YouTube doing a review of an frightful guitar pick. It was big in size and was 1 cm thick!!! Unbelievable, who would even think about playing with such a monster. The guy meant that after just playing some weeks with this pick the right hand technique would really improve. The pick was the Insanity pick from V-Pick. After looking at several other YouTube-videos reviewing the V-Picks which came in many different sizes and thicknesses i got really curious. The reviews mentioned that the V-picks was made of a special glass material that reacted with the heat of the fingers and thus stayed firmly between the fingers without twisting. That alone sounded really good since I sometimes had really big problems with twisting picks. They also talked about a much more distinct sound that with regular picks. So I had to try it out. I bought a set of different picks and to my surprise they were right. They stayed in place between the fingers much better than any other picks I have tried and the they also produced a louder pick sound. I ended up using the Dimension V-pick as a standard pick for all my guitar playing for years. It is about 4 mm thick so I though playing funky rhythm stuff would be hard, but to my surprise it was not at all.

The only thing that was disturbing was that playing without distortion produced a clicking sound that I did not like. Since I do not play that much without distortion I lived with that problem. I tried normal Dunlop picks every now and then and now I really did not like the feel of them.

I read on internet that someone compared V-Picks with Gravity Picks and he thought that the Gravity Picks was almost the same as V-Picks, with the difference that the Gravity Picks did not create the clicking sound. I bought a couple of different picks to try them out. The clicking was not there, but they did not stick to the fingers as good as the V-picks. After playing a while they did, but not in the beginning of playing sessions so that was not really a problem. I have now used Gravity Picks for about a year. I tend to change between a 4 mm and a 3 mm thick pick.

I saw that John Petrucci had discoverd the power of the thicker pic and released a signature pick with Dunlop. It is a special version of the Flow Picks from Dunlop. I ordered a set of John's picks (2 mm) and also a thicker Flow Pick (3 mm) since 2 mm sounded really thin with my standards ;-)

 

The Petrucci pick was really too thin for me and it was too slippery. I cannot play with it at all.
But the Dunlop Flow 3.00 pick was really amazing. The grip was just amazing. The logo is 3D and that makes the grip really good. It has no clicking either. This pick became my default just after playing 10 minutes with it. Let's see if I still have the same opinion after a year.

As seven is not enough

So it happened! I bought my first 8-string. My god! Strings everywhere :-P
It is a beautiful Schecter  Hellraiser C-8 FR. A really properly built guitar with neck trough design and a really nice look and feel.

From factory it is tuned as a normal six stringed guitar on the top six strings. The seventh string is tuned to B and the eighth to F#. A little strange I thought at first, the 8:th string should of cause have been tuned to G. But then I realized that that should not have been a good idea since that would have meant an additional one band shift as between 3:d and 2:d string. That would have messed everything up two times. So F# it is.

I bought this guitar used as all the other guitars I buy nowadays. Since the seller lived in the same town as an old guitar player friend and of mine, he helped me to fetch the guitar. Thank you Classe, you rock!

At the same time I was looking at 8-string guitar videos on YouTube and came across one dude that talked about alternative tunings for 8- and 7-strings. He talked about lowering the third string from G to F# and therefore making a 7-string functioning the same way as a 6-string. I.e. the guitar becomes like a 6-string with start from the 7:th string. It's a little hard to describe but if you want to grip a B chord you do it with an normal E-shape starting on the 7:th string. The guitar then follows the chord all the way down to the 2:nd string since you have removed the 3:d to 2:nd string shift. That means that you without thinking can play AC/DC tunes in B. All the open chords will work. But an E-shape makes an B chord and an A-shape makes an E chord etc. Confusing? Not if you plan to play songs in B :-D. I decided to try that.

So what to do with the 8:th string? Well the most common choices are to leave it at F# or tune it down to E to create a drop tuning between the 8:th and 7:th string. I have never had a dropped tuning on any of my guitars so my first plan was to leave the 8:th string at F#.

When I got the guitar it was not tuned at all and the strings was way to thin. I looked up what strings where mounted on on delivery and they suited me perfect since it was an Ernie Ball skinny top heavy bottom set, i.e. the same type of set I use for all my guitars nowadays. I ordered a set and got it.

I did a full setup of the guitar as I always do, but when I tried to adjust the intonation on the 8:th string it was impossible. I got an octave at about the 10:th fret!!! :-O I e-mailed the Schecter technical support a couple of times and they were really helpful. Finally they asked me to check if the string was damaged in some way since that would be a logical explanation they said. I checked and I discovered this:

If you look closely you will see that the 8:th string has two different thicknesses. I complained and got a new set.  I told the story in a Facebook group and someone informed me that from the thickness 80 and up the string has a thinner end towards the tuning pegs so that it would go through the whole in the peg. I did not know that, so the error here was me mounting the string in the wrong direction. Since the guitar have a double locking system I always start with cutting off the balls and then you don't see any difference on the string ends. Embarrassing...   Well at least now I know :-) With the new set everything worked like a charm and the guitar was ready for the maiden journey.

A lot of strings for sure, but tuning the 3:d string down a half step really changed the usability of the guitar chord wise, but panic broke out when trying to improvise a solo or a fill. What the?? Then I realized that everything is really like on a normal 6-string but shifted one string up to the 7:th string. If I did not think about what actual chords I was playing the scales over it worked fine, for a while. Then it suddenly kicked in automatically and I got lost. So I was in for a challenge, i.e. fun :-) Then I deiced, why not also do a drop on the 8:th string when I'm at it. So I did, and it did not complicate things more than has already been done. And that's how I kept it. The tuning is now from 1 - 8: E, B, F#, D, A, E, B, E.

I have a short sample, but with the 8:th string still in F#. So now it goes even further down in the basement ;-)

Me and Ez Drummer goin' deep

After using the guitar some 5 times or so at rehearsals it started to make really nasty sounds. It behaved like bad connection in the output jack or the volume pot. It was hard to diagnose. After opening the stomach I noticed that one of the cables close to the pickup selector was really badly peeled. There where parts of the wire sticking out in all directions and it was probably short circuiting the signal sometimes. I tidied  it up and put everything together and than it worked fine again. Problem solved. I don't know if this was the doings of the former owner or if it was done in the factory. Never mind it is solved now.

I have also finally bought some really usable things from Music Nomad to create a better workbench for my guitar works. A Premium Work Mat and a Cradle Cube. Nice products.

Edit:
I forgot to mention that I equipped this guitar with the Super-Vee Mag-Lok also. But this time I actually got a little disappointed. When I tried to install the device I found out that it was broken. There was a crack in the plastic cylinder that should keep the magnet in place. So what happened is that the magnet got stuck on the magnet in the metal pipe and stayed there when I did a dive with the whammy. So there was no functionality. Also the pin was very loosely mounted in the metal pipe so it easily wiggled side to side during mounting. Bad quality! I have several of these units and I have not seen this before. I sure hope it was a one-time thing. Anyway some strong glue fixed the whole problem so now it is working fine. I was actually a little worried how it should work with an 8-string guitar but it worked fine. Since it is working in the balanced resting point my guess is that it is fairly independent of the total string tension. A plus for that, but a big minus for the quality this time :-(

The Flower Kings

I did a new musical discovery today :-D
I have listened to Transatlantic for a while now, mostly on some live concerts on YouTube, but I have also seen them perform on Sweden Rock Festival. I discovered Transatlantic because the former drummer of Dream Theater, Mike Portnoy, plays drums in the band. When looking at the line-up I realized that there was a Swede playing the guitar, Roine Stolt. Interesting, but I never got the idea to follow up on what bands he plays in. Today I did this. He is the founder of the Swedish progressive rock band The Flower Kings. Since Transatlantic is a so called super group it is probably a mixture of the styles from the different members and since Portnoy represents the heavier style I did not expect Roine's bands to be of the heavy type. But today I found out that The Flower Kings almost have the same heavy sound as Transatlantic. Well they do not really, but they have it in another way that I really like. I watched a live concert on YouTube today and it was really captivating. Some new sounds for  me and som old familiar ones at the same time. It was a step towards a more gentler and elegant music with sudden bursts of typical progressive passages. I liked it very much today, but as I've mentioned before I have to listen to music many times before I can really judge it. The future will tell...   Now I'm going to lookup if they have any shows planned in Sweden for this year. :-)

Tremolo stabilizers 2

I have now tried the Van Rosa Stay Tuned Tremolo Claw for a while. I think I get the idea with the construction, but I just cannot seem to get it to work the way I want. 

As you can see in the picture below there are 5 claws to hold springs. Three of them are fixed on the claw and the other two can be adjusted with the two screws. I think the idea here is to adjust it so that the tremolo's resting point is determined mainly by the tension of the three fixed springs. Since the two adjustable claws makes the springs attached to them shorter, the tension from these springs will therefore be much less than from the fixed ones. Now when you bend a note for example and therefore increases the string tension, the bridge will move from the resting point to the right in the picture. When it does, the tension from the three fixed springs will be higher of cause. But as it moves the tension from the two adjustable springs will more and more effect the total spring tension. The move of the bridge to the right will therefore be shorter compared with just having the three springs. And since the bridge moves a shorter distance, the pitch also changes less then with just the three fixed springs. 

But, when I try to adjust the system I end up with the two screws fully screwed in, i.e. the adjustable springs as long as possible. That is the only setting that I am satisfied with the amount of pitch change I get when I bend a note. So it works fine you might say. But if you watch the picture you will realize that this setting is almost the same as having 5 fixed springs there. The drawback with this setup is that maneuvering the bride will require a lot of muscle force, and you will still get a change in pitch. 

I will change this to the Super Vee Mag-Lok instead. It works much better. It gives me much less pitch change and it requires much less muscle force to do a dive. 

Verdict: Do not use!

Dream Theater

Every now and then I tend to forget how absolutely wonderful Dream Theater can be. When it comes to music I’m really a moody dude. And it is not everyday I cope with the sometimes, even to the listener, demanding progressive metal that they deliver with perfect precision and elite musical skill. But it strikes me every now and then that despite the advance and nasty sections there is a melodical and attractive side that grabbs you and pulls you in (not under ;) Today I discovered them again. I stumbeled on this on YouTube

Absolutely phenomenal! And it reminded me. I visited a concert at Circus, Stockholm, on The Astonishing tour. That was so good and I hope to god that they release a DVD from that tour, but I have not seen anything about that. Still praying.....