Regular readers of this website may have seen me mention my love for Dialtone Pickups before. I was lucky enough to see them at the 2015 Winter NAMM Show and I installed my first set of Dialtone Pickups in May last year. Since then I have mentioned a few times how much I love the pickups and several people on Twitter and Facebook have asked me how they sound. Each time I’ve said something along the lines of “They sound amazing! I need to make a video to showcase them.”
Well it took me almost a year and a fresh install of my own v2 Dialtone Pickups, but I have done it. The video has been put together. Pity it wasn’t really worth the wait—you’ll see soon enough if you read this entire article. then again, maybe this well crafted blog post with pretty colour photographs will make it all better. Let’s see.
When I received the second set of all-new and improved pickups, I was excited. When I saw the packaging I was even more excited. When I saw that my handle Scarebear had been embossed on the back of my pickups I may have become a little too excited. Waving the pickups in my wife’s face didn’t even seem to make her as excited as I was. This is as close to signature pickups as I will ever get. That there is really one of the most appealing parts of the Dialtone Pickups offering though in my opinion.
It’s not that you can dial in an amazing amount of tone from the one pickup. That’s fun for a while, but once you have found that sweet spot, you can lock it in. What you’re locking in is your own favourite tone. Your signature sound. Few pickup manufacturers can offer that to the everyday guitarist.
I could waffle on for ages about this. But to save you all some time, I’ll let the pictures speak their thousand words.
With my pickups in place, I’ve been able to record some material on my iPad using the very awesome AmpliTube by IK Multimedia and then capture it all on video. I’d like to point out at this stage that I am not a professional video editor. I will never be a successful video blogger. Thanks to the awesome clean tones and Orange Amplifiers setups in AmpliTube though I’ve managed to showcase exactly what I have been enjoying for months with my Dialtone Pickups.
The video below uses two of my favourite clean tones from my neck pickups followed by my favourite distorted tone from the bridge pickup. I have experimented with a lot of distorted options from these pickups, but to be honest, the one I used in this video is the one. That’s the kind of signature tone I mentioned earlier. The bridge pickup pretty much stays where it is now. For me, this is the killer tone I want from my bridge pickup. It’s my kind of brutal.
The intro piece in the video below also uses the distorted Dialtone Pickups tone. That just happened as I was putting my video together. I felt there was too much silence before the audio sample component of the video kicks in so I threw the intro piece together.
I may have a preference for distorted guitars. Is it obvious?
There you have it. I promised a video—last year—and I delivered a video. Now to work on a certain musical collaboration I promised someone last year. I’m so efficient! Maybe I’ll use this guitar and these pickups. They are damn amazing.