I love the dirt section of my pedalboard, which has been built with care, patience and love, and is informed by decades (well, at least two) of experience, but I still love checking out new stuff. So when I catch wind of new pedals that sound interesting, I race to check out whatever demos I can find. Unfortunately, I am forever left frustrated by said demos: Invariably, it seems, the player in question spends the whole time on the bridge pickup. Sometimes, the demo-er will noodle on the neck pickup then—right before activating the pedal—they will switch positions. Occasionally, there might be some bluesy lines played in the neck position, or some half-hearted strumming on a low-gain setting, but if you want to see what a given pedal can do when the gain is working its mojo, your point of comparison had better be the bridge pickup.
How did I wind up on the “wrong” side of this divide? Despite the fact that tone gods Les Paul and Nile Rodgers made their bones using the neck pickup, I appear to be in a distinct (but distinguished) minority. More recently, Sonic Youth, Built to Spill and Yo La Tengo have married neck pickups and dirt boxes to glorious effect, helping to change the face of modern rock music, but that change doesn’t seem to be reflected in the universe of pedal demos.
Further, calls to fellow guitar players for examples of players who do most of their heavy lifting on the neck pickup resulted in a lot of head scratching (“Maybe Richie Blackmore?” “Surely someone in Radiohead?”); Clapton’s “woman tone” doesn’t count. And maybe that’s the problem: there aren’t enough antecedents, but I’ll address that below, because I’m here to tell you it’s OK to use your neck pickup—even (especially!) with dirt.
More tone: Let me throw a few words at you: “Deeper,” “round,” “full-bodied.” Here are a few more: “Twang,” “growl,” “honk.” The former were used by pickup manufacturers to describe their neck pickups; the latter were used to describe their bridge pickups. Now, I cherry picked these, but they are representative of the adjectives used to describe these two types of pickups and I think they tell the tale: The neck pickup offers broader frequency response, and the bridge pickup offers narrower frequency response, with tones that are easier to pigeonhole—why else would so many pickup manufacturers tout the increased body offered by their bridge pickups?
This magazine is called Tone Report. And how many pedal builders (and users) worry about bypassed tone? I’m going to go out on a limb and say tone is something we’re all concerned with, so why not play with the pickup that offers the broadest range of tone? It seemed to work OK for Jimi Hendrix (who was a pretty big fan of dirt boxes if I recall correctly).
No historical limitations: Speaking of Hendrix, I realize we’re toiling in the shadows of great pioneers of gain, many of whom spent most of their time on their bridge pickups. But one of the benefits of this golden age of stomp boxes is that we don’t have to rely on hotter pickups and more nasal frequencies to be heard above our bandmates. Nor do we have to drag around speaker stacks (unless we want to). We have access to amplifiers and PA systems that are much more robust than what, say, Pete Townshend had to work with when battling Keith Moon and John Entwistle at the Marquee. This means we can take a more nuanced approach to our tone at high volume, and one of the things that makes this possible is the fact that…
Most of today’s pedals have tone controls: Look down at your feet and you’ll see it’s true. You love your neck pickups cleans but it gets too muddy when you add gain? Find a pedal with a tone control that works with your rig. With today’s pedals, you can have it all: Go from a rich, rounded clean tone to a biting, raucous attack with the click of a switch!
“But I don’t want to compete with the bass player:” you say. Tell your bass player to stop playing the root and write his own parts. As I am addicted to guitar forums, I’ve had many occasions to notice that when people ask how they can be better heard in the mix, some forumites will say “add mids.” Guess what? The bass player already has mids, the drummer has “mids” (snare, rack toms, kick attack, maybe ride), most singers have a midrange (unless your singer’s a soprano), keys utilize the low end, midrange, and high end. Everyone in your band is straddling at least a couple of different frequency spectrums, so why should you be forced to settle for nothing but the upper midrange that the bridge pickup specializes in? If your instrument has two pickups it can put out a wide range of frequencies, and good arrangements—and your neck pickup--will allow you to utilize those frequencies.
For some, the bridge pickup is the sound in their head. Others are perfectly happy to switch between pickups on the fly. But to those who play the bridge pickup because they’ve assumed it’s an inviolable rule of rock guitar, I implore you: give your neck pickup a try. Too dark? Turn up the treble on your amp. Too much low end? Turn the bass down. Too much midrange? Turn the mids down. I’m betting the notes you play are important to your music—use your neck pickup and let your audience hear those notes at their fullest.