« Over the top neck pickup sound »

In the mid 70s Dimarzio was looking to cash in on the popularity of their Super Distortion pickup. They concluded that they should make a Super Distortion voiced for the neck position. Guitars felt they needed a hotter neck pickup than the PAF to go with their new Super Distortion bridge pickups On paper this may sound like a good idea but in execution it was not that great. First thing they had to do was lower the output a bit. While the classic bridge position super distortion puts out 13.7k in output, the new Super 2 as they would call it only puts out 8.7k. Then they went and changed the voicing of the pickup. This drastic change in voicing makes the Super 2 a completely different pickup pretty much. While the classic Super distortions voicing is slanted towards the low bass end, the super 2's voicing is slanted in the completely opposite direction. The Super 2 offers almost no bass at all and ridiculous high end. DiMarzio said they were looking to balance out the extra bass you get naturally in the neck position but I think they went too far in trying to do this. This pickup will only work in the darkest sounding 22 fret guitars. In any other type of guitar the pickup will produce an unpleasant sound. With the sound completely different than the Super Distortion it still comes with all the same problems. It does not clean up well as if it is only going to be played with high gain. If you have an extremely dark guitar this may be the neck pickup for you, but there are better new Dimarzios on the market. A Paf Pro does a lot better job at being a hotter neck pickup than this one. Dimarzio was still a new company in the 70s and I guess they did not have everything figured out back then.