Leaderboard

Back around 2010 Joe and I went to Nashville to visit the Gibson Store. As Heritage owners are want to do, we took photos of us outside of the store with our Heritages. Good times.

Try this: Roll the volumes down to 9 and your tone controls down to 7. This will take the hair off the SD59's. My '98 H150 came factory equipped with SD59's. Heritage back then was equipping them with 300k volume and 150k tone pots, which smoothed them down quite a bit. A little too much in my opinion. I had occasion to replace a bad jack and a slightly scratchy pot, so I replaced the pots with Dimarzio 500k volumes and 250k tones. That's electrically, the equivalent of making 7.5 the top of the tone pots. Seems about right to me. The Dimarzio pots have a 30% audio taper, which allows smoother control of the volume as you turn down from full. The usual 10% audio taper pots are designed to give smooth control coming up from full off. I have a Gibson Custom Shop 1960 re-issue with the Custom Bucker III pickups. They're lower output, softer in the highs with a little upper high frequency shimmer. The Alnico 3 magnets are low flux, so the pickups can go closer to the strings, which they kind of need to. Had occasion to play a Collings I35-LC (ES-335 style) which was equipped with ThroBak SLE-101-plus pickups. Wow, match made in heaven. Clapton's ES335 was most likely "patent sticker" humbuckers. Lifeson's ES355 was most likely t-top humbuckers. Different tones, different eras.

Wolfetone Legends

I've got no skin in the game, and respect Heritage for trying to reach the beginner or low income guitar buyer. My only issue is the bolt-on necks of some of the Heritage imports. Sure its cheaper to build than a set neck, but it's a big turn-off, unless you're building a Strat or Tele type guitar. To me that really cheapens the guitar and diminishes the brand.