tone controls

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

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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.

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Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

What 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.)

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