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And then the beauty of the totally separate controls is you can then instantly switch to a searing lead on the bridge pickup wide open
I don't really use the tone knobs much though, only really find them useful for singlecoils to stop the icepick highs and excessive twang. I have a P90 neck pickup and will occasionally use the tone knob to take the edge off to emulate more of a rounded humbucker sound.
(formerly customkits)
Here's everyones favourite, JB demonstrating the flexibility of the Gibson controls:
Thanks for the replies so far.
Disclosure:
I’m looking at this from the point of view of somebody who prefers the simplicity of two pickups, one volume and one tone.
But I have rewired all my guitars of this type so that the neck pickup doesn’t see the tone control.
Now I’m wondering whether to rewire again so that the bridge pickup doesn’t see the volume control.
So a single bridge tone and a single neck volume.
I’m wondering whether the loss of flexibility in the front and back positions might be more than compensated by more flexibility in the middle position.
This is why I’m curious whether any Gibson players would miss a bridge volume.
I think you're right in general though that having separate tone and volume for each pickup isn't massively useful. That's probably why other guitars that are just as popular as Gibsons, if not more, e.g. the Strat and Tele (in fact pretty much every other guitar) don't have them.
Personally I always re-wire guitars (whether they have 3 or 4 pots) to just have a master volume and a master tone and I can't remember a single time where I thought it would have been handy to have any more control than that.
I'd be interested in hearing those tones demonstrated in that way when sitting in a live mix with the rest of the band. Especially a band that's bigger than a bass/drums/guitar trio. I suspect some of those tones would get lost unless other "sound engineer" things were happening around them.
I don’t normally preset sounds and switch, either - but that’s one of the few good things about the original 3-pickup wiring for the Les Paul and SG Customs, you can do that if you want while not having the two-volume problem, because the middle position uses only the bridge controls.
But it has to be said that a traditional Gibson design just looks wrong with anything else... especially those horrible new ones with three knobs and a switch.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
It's the only control I ever use.
I really dislike the 4 control thing on Gibsons.
I have two polar opposite tones that I use a lot:
- Bridge Pickup, Tone Full, Volume Full, British Amp Crunchy Level Gain (Similar can be achieved with clean amp and a tube screamer).
- Neck Pickup, Tone Backed Off a little, Volume also backed off a little, Clean American Amp Soaked In Reverb (Some times dirtied up a little by pushing the volume full).
Both of these are super easy to dial in with the gibson tone layout. Also especially if you are using the bridge tone (I have played in rock/grunge bands for which that tone is the base of all song tones) it's really handy to stick the neck pickup to 0 and have a on guitar kill switch for killing irritating feedback between songs.
I do agree with @ICBM though, not having 4 controls on a Gibson looks wrong.