Leaderboard

which by the way, I just snagged . The owner was very reasonable, and it will make a great compliment to the 535 and 575

Well, if you want to go down the deep side of the rabbit hole, I just picked up a used set of ThroBak pickups and installed them in my Gibson custom shop R0 in place of the Custom Bucker 3 p'ups they come with. It is shocking how different they sound than the Custom Buckers and how different they sound than the SD '59 pickups that came stock in my 1998 H150. I measured the inductance, capacitance, field strength and so on, and I have notes on all the pickups I own, including the HRW's in my 2001 H535. Despite being in the range of low-output PAF on every parameter, the ThroBaks are just shocking how bright, clear, harmonic and punchy they are. That goes for the Seth Lovers as well, which are a touch brighter and clearer than the 59's, but man. The only humbuckers in my collection that come close to the ThroBak are the HRW's, but they are a different style of pickup being hotter wound and the bridge especially so. I do know that ThroBak acquired a vintage winding machine from Heritage, that was left over from the Gibson days. ThroBak uses a variety of the same exact winder machines that Gibson used, even some of the actual winders from Gibson. If you know ThroBak at all, it all sounds like absolute hype, but the product performs. I've witnessed hands-on several examples, including my own now. I have no temptation to replace the HRW.

I just don't get this mystique, but maybe I play the wrong kind of music to appreciate these pickups. A close friend of mine used to be a Heritage dealer so I've played a few sets of HRWs, but I always preferred the sound of Duncans in the Heritages I've heard, with my favorite being the Antiquities or Seth Lovers. One thing I do like though is the double adjustment screw for the angle as Iike the pickups to be parallel with the strings. I wonder why more people don't do that and just supply the pickups with new rings.

Yeah, the thing with Dumble amps is no two are identical. He built each and every one of them for the particular artist. It's not "a" Dumble, in the sense of one Fender Twin Reverb being a member of a large population of such amps produced. It's "your" Dumble if he made it for you. If you buy someone else's Dumble, it's still that artist's Dumble. I've seen the insides of an ODS and a couple of Fenders that Dumble modified. He had some general approaches that evolved over time, but each and every amp he built was a work of art, intended for a particular person to play and tailored to suit that player. He also rebuilt amps when they got sold to a different artist, in fact he recommended that as a way to get the amp quicker, rather than a scratch-build. The Dumble estate and name are being curated by the Dumble preservation association and they're trying to make new ones with the name. I have some doubts, since the man himself isn't around anymore. I hope they can protect his name and reputation though. There are some "clones" of Dumble amps who's schematics have leaked out. ODS #182 is probably the most "cloned".