or Jacob makes a house call… Part 2
A few weeks ago, my friend Jacob Lampman made a house call to help me set-up a my Taylor T3c from a tone perspective. It was a great visit and an education for me and is well-documented in a prior posting.
In short Jacob, who is an accomplished guitarist, guitar instructor, and all purpose floor guy at my local shop, Bob’s Guitars agreed to work with me at my home with my three electric guitar’s tones as barter for a very nice, barely used hand-tooled El Dorado guitar strap.
The guitars remaining for Jacob to work with were a 2007 Taylor SBc Walnut (SB stands for solid-body) and a 2019 Taylor T5z Pro, Ltd (Molasses Burst).
The SBc is an interesting guitar. Taylor manufactured solid body guitars for only a brief time. They had developed a set of “innovative” pickups when they designed the hollow-bodied acoustic/electric hybrid T5 and sometime thereafter introduced their solid bodies to the marketplace so they could deploy the pickups in other guitars. They produced multiple designs with varying specs and the one I purchased last summer off of Reverb was one of the nicest ones that they made. My SBc had a Walnut top laid into a routed out Sapele body, and equipped with mini-humbuckers. The unusual appearing aluminum bridge was also a Taylor invention that allows multi-directional setting of the guitar string.
Taylor’s solid bodies reviewed well among the guitarati; however they did not sell enough of the product to justify continuance of manufacturing and phased them out. As a caution to anyone else inspired to buy one of these on the used market, they can be found at reasonable prices; however, make sure to carefully check the Sapele neck for twisting/warping as I have heard of several units, including the one I purchased, that suffered from the aforementioned malady. I was exceptionally fortunate in that Taylor replaced my neck, but I have heard again from multiple other sources that they no longer will do replacements.
The other guitar for Jacob’s review was a 2019 T5z Pro, Ltd. The Pro version is made with a flamed maple top inlaid into a routed out Sapele body. You can spend more and get a Koa top if you wish, which would be a T5z Custom. Other than gold-plated works and the top wood, the guitars are spec’d the same. The T5z is sold as an acoustic/electric hybrid with a 5 way switch to vary the choices of which of three different pickups (2 humbuckers of varying design and location and an acoustic body sensor under the bridge) with combinations thereof that can be selected. Unlike the recently introduced Fender Acoustasonics, there is zero modeling or sound alteration internally taking place with the T5z other than the preamp tone controls. The T5z is a lovely, small hollow bodied guitar with three nicely designed pickups.
The purpose of Jacob’s visit was to help me sort out how best to used the above described guitars as they interact with my amps and pedals, which can be seen on the right.
For a more detailed discussion of my various pedals please refer to here.
During his previous visit Jacob and I worked exclusively on my Taylor T3c, which is a semi-hollow bodied electric guitar with two full-sized “vintage” alnico pickups. and the goal of that set-up with to keep a relatively clean sound with enhanced mid-tones to suit the electrified country blues that I like to play.
We opened our discussion of the Solid Body by speaking to the differences between my full size vintage humbuckers on the T3 and the mini humbuckers on the SBc. The minis have a more focused tone and a clearer, brighter sound because they sense less string vibration with their smaller size. Further, mini humbuckers will create more “grind” when pushing the amp with extra gain, which increases the power of the signal from the guitar to the amplifier.
Jacob quickly disabused me of the notion that the Solid body was designed to play clean as “country water” like the T3. As suggested above, to sound its best, a solid body with mini humbuckers requires some extra “grind” or “grit” to take best advantage of the instrument, which means sending increased gain to the amplifier. The implements for that process would be my two Mesa Boost/Overdrive pedals. In sum, Jacob said we should seek to achieve a “hairier,” more intense driving sound from the mini-humbuckers.
Why Mesa gain pedals? Well, the marketplace is awash with pedals of this type and choosing proper ones can be overwhelming. I had owned an Electro-Harmonix Soul Food and an MXR Boost, but decided to dump them because I thought they added unwanted noise to my pedal signal chain. Rummaging around one Saturday at my local shop I noticed the Mesa pedals. They were originally very expensive but were marked down and the guys in the shop demonstrated them for me. I grabbed the Tone Burst that day and the Flux Drive a month or two later. The Mesa pedals were produced by a company (Mesa/Boogie) that makes high-end guitar amplifiers so they know what they’re doing, the pedals were well reviewed, they are beautiful, well built objects and I got an excellent price for them. Bob’s your uncle…
Mesa does not make a plethora of pedals and they focus primarily on the gain/drive/boost sort. The Tone Burst is mostly a gentle boost and tone modifier, while the Flux Drive acts more like a pre-amplifier with the purpose of adding enough gain into the signal chain to overdrive the amplifier and create break-up or distortion.
Despite almost a year of fiddling with guitar pedals I am still a relative neophyte, particularly with the application of gain and overdrive to the signal chain. As a general rule and personal preference, I do not like playing with a lot of distortion. I agree with the late great Charlie Christian who preferred his guitar to sound electrified but not electronic! Because gain pedals are so omnipresent, I put a couple of them on my board because I thought I needed them, but because I am loath to add distortion, I used the Tone-Burst to lightly thicken my sound and actually rarely utilized the Flux-Drive.
Jacob was adamant that it was time to deploy both Mesa pedals to get the SBc properly sounding. In fact, he had me rearrange the order of the two pedals, flipping the Flux-Drive from behind to in front of the Tone Burst in the sound chain. With this arrangement, the Flux-Drive would determine “how thick the bread slice would be.” In other words, the Flux-Drive would be used to fatten the sound, and then the signal would be “sculpted” afterwards by the Tone Burst to bring out appropriate “highs” and “mid-tones” as determined by Jacob. The goal was to be within the scope of sound quality that I am comfortable with, and that works well with the electrified country blues that I play.
We left the modulation control settings on my pedal board, including Reverb, Delay, Vibrato, Tremolo, and Chorus the same as used with the T3, which can be found here. Jacob is not a big fan of pitch shifting, so we left use of my Octave pedal to my discretion. I like to the way it punches out the lower tones. And that was the end of our work with the Solid Body.
Jacob and I spent less time with the T5z mostly because it is a very acoustic-sounding electric guitar and though it can handle gain and distortion, it is not how I would ever play it. Plus it was getting late and we were getting tired. We did decide that for my purposes, using the 5 way selector switch in the 4th position to deploy both the “hidden” neck and stacked “lip-stick” humbuckers simultaneously and in parallel would be a good setting for my purposes.
We dabbled with the onboard bass and treble controls provided with the guitar’s preamp but were inconclusive as to how to best set them, leaving them to my discretion. I tend to drop the treble and to increase the bass signal a bit to suit my ear. The preamp controls are actually very sensitive and a light touch best serves proper sculpting of tone.
Finally, Jacob and I considered the broad array of pedals I have at my disposal for use with the T5z. We turned off the Flux Drive, which has true bypass, and left the remainder of the pedals set similarly to how I had them for the T3; however, Jacob saw fit to fine tune and adjust my chorus pedal to complement the T5z. I am actually not a big fan of chorus effects but Jacob was insistent that for the acoustic nature of the T5z, chorus is an important effect to use to sweeten the sound. As described by Reverb, “Chorus effects thicken your signal by copying it multiple times, coloring the copied signals, and playing them back slightly delayed.” Jacob readjusted every setting on the pedal while I played the guitar to best suit the T5z! I suppose I will use the chorus effect for a while to see if it suits me… As of this writing I actually prefer a bit of delay with my MXR Echoplex over the Boss Chorus…
So in the end, it was a great learning experience for me having Jacob make his house calls and was well worth the barter of the El Dorado guitar strap.
