You are the necro-post winner of 2017! ?
I've spent some time last few months concentrating on the picking/strumming hand. Fingers/nails/plectrums across guitar/bass/acoustic, trying to find what works for me.
For each I prefer something different, depending on what I'm trying to do. Sometimes you just have to come up with a solution on the fly.
While I was tracking some metal bass lines I found my choice (small dunlop jazz III) felt okay, but I could see that the output we were seeing in the DAW was a couple db quieter that when I dug in with the pick I grew up with - they are about the same stiffness but the other pick is bigger so I can exert a lot more force on the string naturally. So I just shaped the bigger pick a bit with a file to have the same sharp point as the jazz III and I'm happy. But for general play (not metal) I prefer my fingers, I get more tone variations from them.
On the acoustic, I'm pretty much nails and fingers only.
On electric guitar, it depends. My white sharkfins are very well used and still the goto for faster strumming (funk). Stiff picks (1mm+) for metal/rock and thinner picks for blues (0.7-1mm). I use what I can find, at the moment have a stack of dunlop pro-grips (and a few tortex's) in the pick bucket. I could make do with pretty much anything though, not having the 'right' pick won't stop the rock 8)
Although I've never had much success with making a pick out of something. Always feels odd!
modulator wrote:
BUT. I have been struggling with "tone" on my single coil guitar, I did learn about pickup height here, so I tuned that. And tuned that. (To get volume equal does not imply nice sounds...) Today I spent a lot of time going from the recommended 1.6 mm / 2 mm heights to a sound which is not harmful to the ears, quite pleasantly mellow, but not humbucker-ish. Except for the bridge, which insists it wants to be twang-y, harsh. In desperation ( I also noted the high E to be quieter than the rest when I play) I took out the red and white you-may-not-mention-in-polite-conversation and I was back in the old days, when everything was good, ignorance was bliss.
Dunno if you watched the Dan Patlansky video posted a while back? (
http://www.guitarforum.co.za/youtube-guitar-videos/dan-patlansky-'killer-strat-tone-tips-and-monster-playing'-video/msg274974/#new). There one thing he does I'm interested to try, that is lowering the pups almost all the way into the body (about 2-3mm lower than I have them now). This will drop output, so I'd want to make that up with a boost pedal (Klon/TS clone) or a compressor (depending if it's a blues or funk tone I'm aiming at) and see if that scratches my strat tonal itch. I expect it to add a lot of mellow and some more dynamics to the soundm we'll see.
You'll struggle to tame the twang of the bridge pup on a strat. If it''s a stock strat wiring, then the bridge pickup will not be affected by the tone pot. No load from the pot means a rather bright pickup. Literally a icepick - worked for Rory Gallagher - but not for me. I've had mine wired up to the tone pot, so I can roll off the highs if need be. I do use the vol & tone control a lot on the strat, there's a lot of magic for tone there. Recently was chatting to a old-skool tech at bothners, he is a fan of the greasebucket tone mod on fender's and -like me- we both prefer our vol pot just shy of '10' - just slightly rolled off, somewhere between 8.5 and 9.5.
