A 26 1/4" scale length, beastly pickups, and buttery playability provoke deep overtone exploration and riotous drop-tuning sounds.
A smooth, easy player that makes exploring extra scale length a breeze. Pickups have great capacity for overtone detail. Sounds massive with mid-scooped fuzz devices.
Hot pickups can obscure some nuance that the wealth of overtones begs for.
$1,499
Reverend Billy Corgan Drop Z
reverendguitars.com
No matter how strong your love for the guitar, there are days when you stare at your 6-string and mutter under your breath, “Ugh … you again?” There are many ways to rekindle affection for our favorite instruments. You can disappear to Mexico for six months, noodle on modular synths, or maybe buy a crappy vintage car that leaves you longing for the relative economy of replacing strings instead of carburetors. But if you don’t want to stray too far, there are also many variations on the 6-string theme to explore. You can poke around on a baritone, or a 6-string bass, or multiply your strings by two until you reach jingle-jangle ecstasy.
Or you can check out the Reverend Billy Corgan Drop Z. At a glance, the Drop Z may not look like much of a cure for the 6-string doldrums. But pick it up and you’ll feel the difference fast. The Drop Z is built around a 26 1/4" scale and a 24-fret neck that makes this Reverend feel like a very different instrument. Designed and optimized for use with drop tunings, it opens the doors to whole palace ballrooms full of new musical possibilities.
Beastly Blue and Easy To Use
If the feel of the Drop Z alone doesn’t dislodge you from a guitar rut, there’s a good chance that its pretty profile would compel you to pick it up and play. It’s a handsome instrument. The conservatively chambered alder body (it’s routed at the bass and treble horns) is clad in a very pretty twilight-blue-meets-ocean-turquoise glossy finish, which is complimented perfectly by the brushed-aluminum pickguard. The chambered body definitely helps with the weight; the Drop Z is a little less than eight pounds. It also helps the guitar feel very balanced. There’s not a hint of neck dive. And if it weren’t for the discernibly longer stretch you make to reach the first fret, it would feel as familiar and comfortable as a nice Stratocaster.
The medium-oval neck, which is satin-finished maple with a maple fretboard, is a pleasure. It feels substantial and fast, and getting around its expanse is facilitated by a perfect setup. The 12" fretboard radius and jumbo frets also add to the Drop Z’s easy-breezy feel. Big bends require little more effort than they would on a normal scale, and I never felt the urge to squeeze a note to compensate for the weird intonation issues big frets and long scales can cause. From first fret to 24th, playing the Drop Z is an easy glide.
The Drop-Z pickups are a modified version of the Railhammer Billy Corgan Z-One pickups in his other Billy Corgan signature Reverends. The pickups’ impedance is rated at 14.5 ohms, which suggests a pretty hot unit. In this incarnation, the Z-One pickups are tuned for even more output and smoother treble. That’s a good idea for a pickup designed with heavy musical settings in mind.
Fangs on Cue, but Mellon Collie, Too
Though the Drop Z is easy to play in a getting-around-the-fretboard sense, plugging and turning up may take adjustments in approach and attitude. As the pickups’ impedance rating suggests, the Railhammer Z-Ones have a lot of hop, and as the expansive lengths of string resonate impressively, you’ll hear a lot of very present treble overtones. I spent most of my time with the instrument in a C# modal tuning or C–G–D–G–B–B, and in each tuning the Drop Z rumbled impressively (particularly through a late-’60s Fender Bassman head, which is a beautiful, burly match for this instrument). But unless I wanted to linger among the peaky resonances of the highest two strings (and I often did), I needed to attenuate both tone controls.
The good thing is that each of these controls has a very nice range. And while the guitar can start to feel stripped of its essence with too much tone or volume attenuation, there is wiggle room for softening transients and taming unwanted overtone blooms. These pronounced peaks are easy to hear in both the neck and bridge pickup, depending on your approach. I worked a lot more with open strings and drones than Billy Corgan might on songs like “Zero,” which the guitar was tailored for. But for those keen to explore the mellower side of the Drop Z’s personality, the combined pickup setting is a magic bullet. It’s airy, open, and makes it easy and rewarding to navigate slow-moving chord changes with strong bass foundations. It’s also fun to take advantage of the fretboard’s whole expanse in this setting—darting and dashing from toppy treble-note clusters to growling bass harmony notes—and enjoying the detail and string-to-string balance. By the way, the Drop Z, as you might guess, sounds positively massive with distortion, though you should be careful to choose your gain device carefully. The pickup’s midrange emphasis will make a similarly mid-heavy distortion sound harsh. A Sovtek-style Big Muff, with its scooped midrange and round low-end resonance, is an ideal fit if you want to get extra large.
The Verdict
The Korea-made Drop Z is a beautifully crafted instrument and a silky, easy, balanced player that will make you forget, in moments, about the expansive fretboard and extra scale length. It feels completely natural and effortless. How you relate to the tones here will depend on your musical mission. The hot pickups make it a perfect fit for outsized, aggressive tones. I, for one, would prefer to explore the wealth of overtones this well-constructed instrument generates via less aggressive pickups. But players like me will still find much to love in the combined pickup settings and the pickups’ impressive capacity for detail, which, depending on the tuning you use, can highlight harmonic interplay between notes and chords that would be much less prominent and less fun to explore in a more conventional guitar.
Reverend Billy Corgan Drop Z Signature Electric Guitar - Pearl White
Billy Corgan Drop Z, Pearl WhtWhat can bassists learn from popular tone-circuit mods for guitar?
Fig. 1
Different capacitors in a treble blend circuit altering the cutoff frequency. Image courtesy of basslab.de
It has been a while since we looked at tone controls. (The last time was my June 2012 column “Active Versus Passive Tone Controls," which focused on the pros and cons of each system.)
While active systems usually work comparably to the multi-band tone controls we have in our amps, passive systems are most often represented by the simple treble blend. Doesn't look like a fair comparison, right? But in fact, there are many possible ways to use passive elements to control tone, and our guitar colleagues constantly discuss them in great detail. This type of modding is far less popular among bass players, so let's consider what passive systems offer and see if they can be useful to us.
Passive resistance. The number of passive elements used for tone controls is small: just resistors and capacitors and (less often and more theoretically) inductors. The next limitation is that these few elements can only be wired in series or parallel with nothing in between. Still, given the number of varying electrical specs and possible combinations, these simple elements can be deployed in a vast number of ways.
One trait of passive wirings is that almost everything influences everything. That means, for example, that using a given wiring with two different pickups can produce very different results. (Meanwhile, changing pickups with active systems doesn't alter the preamp's behavior at all.) So to get a passive control to regulate a specific frequency, you have to experiment to find the right values for your particular pickups—and sometimes even your amp—or dig deeper into electrical engineering to calculate values before you start. Since not everyone wants to be an electrical engineer, let's go with the experimental approach and focus on schematics and principles, rather than concrete electric values.
Guitar circuits on bass. Don't be afraid to check out guitar wirings on bass. They all work, and you only have to change a few values, but not the circuit itself. Fig. 1 is a reminder of how capacitors of varying value in a standard parallel treble blend can alter the tone (or frequency response) of your pickup. The greater the value of the parallel capacitor, the more high frequencies get cut.
Fig. 2
A capacitor cascade with a DPDT-switch (on/on/on) for a switchable passive bass/treble cut.
Image courtesy of singlecoil.com
One obvious thing you could build from this is a simple SPDT switch to activate different capacitors, each removing varying amounts of upper-spectrum frequencies. Here the pot controls the amount of amplitude reduction above the “end of spectrum" roll-off frequency, as determined by each capacitor's value. To expand this further, you could arrange even more caps on a 6- or even 12-way rotary switch. The basic wiring is the same as the simple 2-capacitor wiring. But while the rotary switch is helpful for finding the values that suit your setup and taste, it's not very practical for permanent use.
Bass with less bass? While a switch to remove varying amounts of treble frequencies sounds useful to a bassist, it's harder to imagine what happens if we do the same for the bass range. True, it doesn't appear very useful at first, but then again, even the weirdest sound might meet the requirements of a specific song! Also, with the current popularity of lowered tunings and distortion pedals for bass, such bass-cuts can clean and clarify muddy low end.
To cut bass frequencies, all we have to do is rewire the capacitors from parallel to serial. Also, while higher-value parallel capacitors remove more treble frequencies, the opposite is true for bass: lower serial values mean greater bass frequency cuts. Using an extra DPDT switch and some wiring, it's easy to expand the rotary switch circuit to a switchable bass-cut/treble-cut wiring with a quick bypass (Fig. 2).
Assuming you've found your favorite capacitor values for both bands (and omit the rotary switch), you end up with independent treble and bass controls. To some extent, that's similar to the controls of an active system, yet the results sound very different. While the active tone control bends the spectrum by changing the amplitude of a given frequency range, the passive control almost cuts off the frequency range at its ends. Another difference: The passive control can reduce frequencies, but never increase them.
Passive treble and bass controls still leave us with a question: How can we control mids? More on that next month, along with some wirings that were once so popular, they earned their own names.