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THE SOUND I don't have the guitar to run through its paces, which is
why this is a blogpost and not an actual review. I have gone out
of my way to listen to as many demos as i could find and while i didn't
find much with the Taylor Classic SC (i think it's still too new) i have
to say that i didn't hear anything that didn't sound good.
Ultimately, it's always VERY hard to get a feel for what something
really sounds like when it's via a YouTube video or mp3's that
somebody in Nashville posted for his buddies.
The best video on YouTube is David Hosler putting a Classic SC
through a quick demo first on a Vox and then a Marshall. His
playing style and choice of material lends itself more to the clean
sounds of the Vox than to the distorted sounds he has dialed in on the
Marshall.
The first time i watched this video i hadn't yet read anything about the
Classic SC (i've already seen plenty with Taylor's dual humbucking
guitars) and the very first thing that came to mind was that this guitar
sounded like it had stacked humbuckers along the lines of the now
mega-popular DiMarzio HS3. Especially through that
Marshall. Taylor believes that what they have achieved with this
pickup is a "vintage single-coil sound with the power and dynamic
range of modern pickups". Ok so you could increase the power of a
vintage single-coil pickup and while it will change
the way it drives a tube preamp, it'll still basically sound
the same. But to change the dynamic range of a
single-coil pickup?? The sound of every pickup IS its dynamic
range and so to alter the dynamic range of a pickup is to alter
the way it sounds. Period. I don't care what kind of
pickup you're talking about - vintage; modern; whatever. Let's say we
compared the dynamic range of a stock 1974 Gibson humbucker to a stock
1974 Fender single-coil and figured out exactly in which ways they
differed sonically. If you could magically add to the single-coil
whatever the double-coil has that the single-coil is lacking (not even
considering noise) without detracting in any way from what the
single-coil is already capable of, what you would end up with is a
pickup that DOES NOT SOUND like it did before the alteration. The
biggest difference between a stacked dual-coil single-pole pickup and an
actual single-coil pickup is that the single-coil sound is
thinner. You could give that stacked pickup all the bite and high
end that the single-coil has, but if it sounds thicker in the low and/or
midrange, it's different. Presumably the Taylor design team had
one ore more vintage single coils around during the process in order to
achieve their goal and then to state their claim. I'd really love
to know which vintage pickups they're directly comparing these dual-coil
single-pole pickups to. I will say this again though: i liked
the way all of the pickup combinations sounded with the Classic SC
through both a clean amp and a distorted one. I would be perfectly
happy with those tones from what i can gather via internet videos and
mp3s. But i don't believe that these pickups would be at all
sonically indistinguishable from a vintage set (noise excluded of
course). previous (4)
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