Aloha.
This forum appears to have some other Allender owners and more experience with SE guitars in general, so I thought maybe this would be a good place to ask a few questions.
First - my axe:
http://imgur.com/a/phDAx
I was not expecting to buy this guitar. I had been zeroing in on an SE Cu24 and thinking that maybe I'd be able to purchase one in 2015. I was checking prices on Reverb and I found this one for auction by a local vendor. The high bid was about 80 bucks, and it stayed at 80 bucks for a week. With 5 minutes left in the auction I said "screw it" and I put in my own bid. I ended up winning the auction for 138$. Brand new! Didn't even have to have it shipped.
So I'm super happy about the fact that I won that auction and I love the guitar. It is nearly perfect as far as I can tell. I am not an experienced player (less than 18 months) but I can tell that it is better than my Epiphone, and seems to be on par with the MiA Strat that I was borrowing for the first few months.
Just one problem - I think I'm not so fond of the active pickups.
I don't play anything heavier than Metallica, and I do play quite a bit of clean stuff. I have been working on my 16th note funk rhythms a lot and trying to work on my first simple guitar solos - Smells Like Teen Spirit, RHCP - stuff like that.
I also think it's giving me a problem with my amp. I've got a micro-cube. The guitar seems to be capable of overdriving the heck out of my amp. It's hard for me to get the modeled distortion sounds to work right.
I have a pickup problem, but I'm not sure what to do. I've thought about trying to reduce the output of the pickups, but I don't know if there's a best way to approach that. Bigger pot? Put a resistor in series with the output? Etc...
I've also thought about purchasing some passives, but I'm not sure what I like and I have some anxiety about doing that. I have been trying to find some sounds that I like. I did find a demo of the recent MiA HSS Strats that sounded really good to me, and I followed that lead toward the Fender Custom Shop fat 50s. I loved the fat 50 pickup in the mid position of a strat, but I think that you can see my problem. I like single coil pickups, but I own an HH guitar.
I briefly looked into the p90, but I was reading that they're like a high output version of the fender single coils, and I know that the high output single coils don't do much for me. My borrowed strat had texas specials, which I didn't care for. I've also felt let down by a G&L that supposedly had "hot" single coil pickups, so I'm pretty sure that hot single coils are not my bag.
That's all I know. Not a lot as you can see.
I was thinking that maybe there's some humbuckers that I can look into that might give me an interesting sound and I was planning to start watching PAF videos. Not because of any particular interest, but just because I don't have any idea where else to start. So I'm asking around here first because I thought that maybe there's a chance that someone else felt the same as me? If so - what did you do to change the tone of your PRS?
Thanks for reading my feature-length introduction.
This forum appears to have some other Allender owners and more experience with SE guitars in general, so I thought maybe this would be a good place to ask a few questions.
First - my axe:
http://imgur.com/a/phDAx
I was not expecting to buy this guitar. I had been zeroing in on an SE Cu24 and thinking that maybe I'd be able to purchase one in 2015. I was checking prices on Reverb and I found this one for auction by a local vendor. The high bid was about 80 bucks, and it stayed at 80 bucks for a week. With 5 minutes left in the auction I said "screw it" and I put in my own bid. I ended up winning the auction for 138$. Brand new! Didn't even have to have it shipped.
So I'm super happy about the fact that I won that auction and I love the guitar. It is nearly perfect as far as I can tell. I am not an experienced player (less than 18 months) but I can tell that it is better than my Epiphone, and seems to be on par with the MiA Strat that I was borrowing for the first few months.
Just one problem - I think I'm not so fond of the active pickups.
I don't play anything heavier than Metallica, and I do play quite a bit of clean stuff. I have been working on my 16th note funk rhythms a lot and trying to work on my first simple guitar solos - Smells Like Teen Spirit, RHCP - stuff like that.
I also think it's giving me a problem with my amp. I've got a micro-cube. The guitar seems to be capable of overdriving the heck out of my amp. It's hard for me to get the modeled distortion sounds to work right.
I have a pickup problem, but I'm not sure what to do. I've thought about trying to reduce the output of the pickups, but I don't know if there's a best way to approach that. Bigger pot? Put a resistor in series with the output? Etc...
I've also thought about purchasing some passives, but I'm not sure what I like and I have some anxiety about doing that. I have been trying to find some sounds that I like. I did find a demo of the recent MiA HSS Strats that sounded really good to me, and I followed that lead toward the Fender Custom Shop fat 50s. I loved the fat 50 pickup in the mid position of a strat, but I think that you can see my problem. I like single coil pickups, but I own an HH guitar.
I briefly looked into the p90, but I was reading that they're like a high output version of the fender single coils, and I know that the high output single coils don't do much for me. My borrowed strat had texas specials, which I didn't care for. I've also felt let down by a G&L that supposedly had "hot" single coil pickups, so I'm pretty sure that hot single coils are not my bag.
That's all I know. Not a lot as you can see.
I was thinking that maybe there's some humbuckers that I can look into that might give me an interesting sound and I was planning to start watching PAF videos. Not because of any particular interest, but just because I don't have any idea where else to start. So I'm asking around here first because I thought that maybe there's a chance that someone else felt the same as me? If so - what did you do to change the tone of your PRS?
Thanks for reading my feature-length introduction.
