DeArmond Pups Plugged Into a Fender Silverface

[zombywoof]

Just curious how many of ya'll plug your Starfire into a Fender Silverface amp.

I pretty much have spent my life with an old Fender electric strapped on. I love them shop project guitars. So when I first acquired a Guild Starfire it was a whole new world for me. Not only is it a hollow body but the DeArmond pup was quite a bit different from the low gauss single coils I was used to. I loved the sound but could not for the life of me figure out how to tame the low end with the amps I had. I don't think I have ever heard as much of a low end out of any guitar as that Guild.

I never cottoned much to Fender Silverface Amps. Not enough warm bloom or full enough mids for my taste. But when I went out amp hunting (with a pretty limited budget) what I ended up with was yup, a Silverface Pro-Reverb. I tend to stay plugged into the lower power reverb input but what sold me on this amp was I found that I got less low end bass rumble when turning the bass up and was able to find that balance point between where the bass and treble pots are set and pull a nice crisp low end sound out of the amp.

Guess you can teach an old dog new tricks.

 

[alpep]

i have an old gretsch silverjet that I use with a brown princeton and the sound is just magic. I often boost the signal with a zinky tru grit pedal and you get a really clear overdriven sound to "out of control" feedback.

but I tend to love fender amps.

 

[zulu]

tellin' the Zomby troof.

No silverface here, but I am a new Starfire owner, working with those bass issues.

 

[Walter Broes]

I like pre-master volume silverface Fenders a lot, and have had a bunch, particularly Super Reverbs.

I also have a DeArmond equipped '61 Starfire III, and though it's a little harder to amplify than my other hollowbodies, bass was never the problem for me. Tweak the pickup and polepiece heights would be my advice, and keep the poles on the bass strings low - in my experience DeArmonds tend to favour the bass strings if you don't.

 

[zulu]

Something I haven't tried, a luthier suggested to me once:

use bronze strings, acoustic strings. The bronze isn't magnetic; doesn't get 'picked up' by the pickups. The core of the wound strings is all the pickup sees, and it is much closer in mass to the higher strings, resulting in even sound.

maybe you guys have heard of, or tried this.

 

[Walter Broes]

I really don't think there's a need for anything that drastic - just get the guitar dialed in, balance the volumes between the pickups, and the string-to-string volumes, and keep the bass on the amp fairly low. (the bass on my amps never goes above "3").

You can tweak DeArmond pickups by adding/subtracting spacers under the pickups, and by tweaking the polepiece heights. IMO the general rule with these pickups is keep the top of the pickup fairly close to the strings, (lower if it gets boomy bassy), keep the poles fairly low, especially on the bass strings.

 

[motopsyche]

Walter is on the money. He advised me to sink the poles on the bass strings into the body of the pickup on my DeArmond-equipped Starfire III's and it worked like a charm. I did the same thing on the DeArmonds on my Martins with the same result. Really smoothed them out.