Great post!
Solid-body humbucker and P-90 tones have been my staple for so long that comparing previous lead tones with the Special wasn't exactly a level playing field.
I'm kinda reminded of the way I can't get a decent lead tone with a Strat or Tele to save my life - no surprise, I didn't play the ones I had very often, so perhaps that's why they were never my thing.
But I've been experimenting with my amps and pedals using the Special, and I'm finding lead tones I think are pretty darn sweet. So I think sharing some of my findings is in order (these may or may not work for your style, or maybe you've found them but others haven't yet; in any case they work for me, and at some point soon I'll record them). Here we go:
One great thing about slightly less-thick lower mids in the Special is that the beauty and bloom of the upper midrange and higher frequencies comes more into play - without the mud that you sometimes get with solid body guitars.
This is especially true with the neck pickup. For me, this means I can increase the gain on the amp or pedals a little bit for color and sustain, and still have a clear tone with lots of string-to-string definition, and there can be even more responsiveness to my pick attack or guitar controls. I'm running the DG30's gain a bit higher than normal, for example, and it's proving to be a good match for the Special. I wasn't feeling that way at first - shows how wrong I can be until I get to the experimentation phase with a guitar.
I find that the Special is
kiiller with modulation effects. For example, I like using a chorus pedal on a very slow speed, mixed very gently in with the original signal to create almost a Leslie speaker effect. A swampy, pitch-shifting tremolo sound is gorgeous. With a solid-body, humbucker guitar it can get muddy pretty fast. Not so with the Special.
Also, making use of the classic Eventide micropitch sound is something I've found less useful with my solid body guitars (the H3000 was kind of a Strat staple in the late '80s and '90s, but less often used with humbuckers, at least in my case), but it's
magic with the Special if you don't overdo it.
In any case, with the Special I've found that I need to boost the upper mids and highs less, but it never seems to devolve into mud. The leads seem to cut through nicely. This is all to the good, as far as I'm concerned. I'm really liking this guitar.
As to the finish, it's growing on me. Sort of.
That'd be nice, too. I was thinking maybe the ebony would match the fretboard and headstock veneer. I have ebony buttons on my McCarty Singlecut, a guitar that has no other ebony or black parts at all but it has mammoth ivory birds and cream-colored other trim (that's how the run was done at the factory).
Maybe I should put the ebony buttons on the Special and the faux bone on the McCarty Singlecut instead?
On the other hand, maybe I'll leave well enough alone...