nuke

Gotta say, Heritage has made some darn pretty gee-tars.

My favorite Heritage and me waiting to go play at a jam. 2001 H535 in blonde, with HRW's. I put the Faber bridge and tail on it, and a set of lightweight Gotoh tuners. The heavy Rotomatics were really stiff from disuse. I got this one used a few years ago. It was absolutely pristine with virtually no sign of play. I picked it up browsing at a guitar shop, wasn't even looking. But it instantly had "the sound" that I look for in a great semi-hollow 535 or 335 style guitar. It had a problem that explained the utter lack of play. The fretboard was like a roller coaster. Some heroic efforts to level the frets on the wavy fretboard had been done to it along its history. Some of the frets were tall as brand new wire, others were under .030 tall, what most of us would call worn out. The fret tops were level, but the board wasn't. The neck itself, straight as an arrow. The surface of the board was nuts. I tried everything I could think of, but just one day said, "this is it." and grabbed my fret puller pliers and took them all out. I put some fine grit paper on my leveling beam and lightly sanded, which revealed all the high and low areas. Pretty much like a lunar landscape it turned out. Also, I measured the radius at around 9.25 inches which kind of meandered up and down the neck. Clearly, this one escaped the factory with a wonky fretboard. The fret nibs were all intact, so no question it was built this way. I leveled the fingerboard and flattened the radius down to about 10". I was already sanding into the pearl dots by then. Didn't want to get into replacing inlays, so I stopped about there. Put in a set of Dunlop medium jumbo wire. With the board leveled out, the frets went in nicely and only needed minimal leveling after installation. I put in a CNC-cut nylon 6/6 nut. Nylon was used on the Gibson's of the late 50's and early 60's. It is a fabulous material for guitar nuts. Hard, durable, and extremely slippery. The Faber hardware went on after. The Schaller stuff was shiny and clean without a single speck of corrosion, but I'm so used to tune-o-matic bridges, I changed it. The most amazing bit of that were the deep bushings Faber offers for their ABR and the tailpiece. They sink much deeper and tighter into the wood and really get in that maple center block a lot better than the short and skinny Schaller bushings. The tone change from the bushings alone was remarkable. And here she is. This is a 100% keeper for life guitar. It's everything a semi-hollow guitar should be. Plays like butter, sings like a bird.

My blonde '01 H535 with HRW's. It had an issue when I bought it several years ago. But I pulled the frets and leveled the fingerboard, which was a mess from the factory, and re-fretted it. It always sounded great, and now it plays like a dream. I have a '98 H150 that I picked up and new at first strum, it was a keeper since 25 years ago. That one came with SD '59s and standard tailpiece and Nashville-style bridge from the factory. I've played the heck out of it.

All da money in da right hand.

So, I'm one of those nerdy engineer types in real life. I've read the Peavey Transtube patents and they're pretty interesting. Sondemeyer was Peavey's chief engineer for decades. Hartley Peavey hired him directly from RCA's solid state division, back in the days when RCA was a giant manufacturer of tubes, transistors, integrated circuits and even microprocessors, as well as a huge maker of TV and other consumer electronics. Sondemeyer was a brilliant engineer. He created many things, including the CS-400 sound reinforcement amplifier. That was the world's first truly bullet proof professional audio amplifier. I still sometimes see these in venues that have probably been in use since the 1970's. Sondemeyer passed away about 10 years ago. I've actually bread-boarded out the original transtube preamp circuits from the patents and the first-generation amps. It is extremely clever, (getting nerdy here) a modified Darlington pair of transistors, and a couple of other tricks, to mimic the characteristics of vacuum tube triodes, like the 12AX7 tube used widely in guitar amps. That generation of guitar amps are actually quite good. Reliable too.

Collings makes the I35 in both laminate (ply) and solid top form. The I35 LC is laminate wood, like the ES335, H535. The I35 and I35 Deluxe are carved solid wood. Both are very nice and I've demo'd them in the store side by side. I preferred the LC, but that's likely because I had 335/535 on my mind at the time. YMMV and I might even change my mind depending on what day it happens to be. They're different sounding, even acoustically.

My H150 is horny enough. My Les Paul likes to sneak to the naughty websites when no one is looking.

Doesn't seem like a, "vs." question to me. I think they work great with either.

Yeah, there's no such thing as a, "Dumble". If Dumble didn't make or rebuild it for you, specifically, it's not YOUR Dumble, it will always be the amp Dumble built for the artist he built it for. There are many amps built by Alexander Dumble and they're all different. That's no judgement on the quality of this particular pedal. It might be great. And Mr. Dumble built some pedals too...

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 been trying to set hands upon a Morgan Shadow Fuzz. I've heard a couple, but have never had a chance to use one in person. They seem to clean up well, and live on the edge-of-break-up sound really well. Vertex Effects youtube channel has an interview with Just Ostrander, with a really good demo of it. The one I have and really like is a very rare, hand-built Noel pedal, the red one. It isn't really a fuzz, it's a mosfet distortion though. I had an original Fulltone '69 a long, long, time ago. I liked it but found I wasn't using it much. When the price went bonkers on those, I sold it.

You know he's an expert pronouncing the name in the original French. 😆

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".

Pickup an old Peavey, even a solid state one. They're cheap as dirt and the better ones with the Black Widow speakers are killer good. Reliable as all get out too. And if you turn your back on it, it will be the only bit of equipment not immediately stolen from the stage. They have that "sound" too, even in gain mode. Heck, there's probably someone somewhere who's been trying to get one out of the garage for years with no takers somewhere. Music Man is another great one, but they seem to have a bit of a following, rarer and command a bit more money. If you're going all out, a Fender ToneMaster Pro and accompanying speaker is great. If you're playing live in modern "no stage volume" venues, they'll love you for it and probably forget whatever guitar you walked in with.

To be fair, Schaller made a lot of good pickups. They also made an enormous variety of them too. I think might still be in the pickup business, but they didn't get on board the retail market for end-user pickup swaps. That's driven a lot of growth in the market. I know back in the early 80's when I was a teen, not many of us even knew where the pickups in our guitars came from or who made them. It was sort of the EVH thing that got people talking about DiMarzio and their Distortion Plus. Prior to that, I don't think end-users really considered pickups other than what the manufacturer of the guitar made in house, or bought depending on whether they wanted to invest money in the machinery to make them, or just buy them. Schaller was in the parts business, bridges, hardware, brackets, tuning machines and pickups were just another item in the line catalog. They'd wind up whatever the customer wanted too. Even Gibson had some pickups made by Schaller and many components of pickups they bought from Schaller for their own production. It's pretty simple to make a pickup. The factory Heritage was housed in, certainly made Gibson pickups going to way back when, including the much coveted original PAF's. Heck, a couple of years ago I bought a pair of brand new humbuckers from China, for $14 a pair, including shipping to my house. Honestly, I can't even buy the raw materials and wire for that. They were OK too, nothing special, certainly worked just fine, as advertised. Even included the springs and mounting screws. Like I said, if I didn't like them so much, I'd open those HRW's right up for a look.