Guitar talk, and easy guitar lessons from beginner to jazz with Birdsnake Brown
I really like that cool strat quack tone on the 2nd and 4th setting. In this lesson I share tricks to setting your pickup height or even matching different pickups to make your stratocaster have that quack sound on the in between settings.
There is quite a bit of talk online about Stratocasters not playing well with Dumble style amps, so I made this video to show how I set my Dumble clone to get a great strat tone. I think the whole video is just the neck pickup which is an Amalfitano 60s style.
I go through different tones with the clean and overdrive, as well as the bright switch, mid boost, and PAB boost.
I can always get a great clean with the Strat and Dumble but sometimes when I’m playing live I struggle to get a balance with the overdrive channel.
I wired up my Stratocaster with the super-switch so that I could get all of my favorite pickup settings. Neck, Neck + Middle, Neck + Bridge, Bridge + Middle, and Bridge. I also put the a treble bleed circuit on a push-pull knob… when it’s in the “in” position there is no bleed. I usually don’t like the treble bleed but it’s still a cool option to have.
Here’s a really ugly diagram for the super switch wiring:
I consider the Pro Track to be the absolute best single coild sized humbucker ever made. It’s another piece of gear that I sold once and the rebought.
I had one of these in my Eric Johnson strat and I loved it. It gets really close to the sound of a PAF style humbucker. Eventually, I went through a phase where I decided to make my Stratocasters as “authentic” as possible. I also had a hook up on pickups made by Jerry Amalfitano, so at the time I felt like I didn’t need the DP188 anymore. I was wrong.
About a year ago I bought another Pro Track and put it in my EJ strat again… it is awesome! It sounds like any great humbucker should sound but it fits in a strat sized package.
DiMarzio Pro Track DP188: https://amzn.to/2Kyuwli
I originally built this Tone Bender clone way back around 2010 but the wiring was sloppy and it ended up just a circuit board in a box. More recently I decided to rewire it and give it a permanent enclosure.
The OC75 transistors were in some of the original units and they truly sound fantastic in this build. I got them matched from Small Bear Electronics way back in the day.
The MKII circuit can go from splatty gated fuzz to something smooth and violin-like depending on how you bias it and where the controls are set.
Here are three videos of this Tone Bender. First the build, then some demos.
Tone Bender MKII Fuzz Build:
Tone Bender with a Stratocaster Demo:
Tone Bender MKII with a Les Paul