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Hatsubai « Fat and clear »
Published on 03/23/11 at 17:52The DiMarzio Steve’s Special is a pickup that Steve Blucher wound as an experiment more than anything else. It happened to turn out to be quite an awesome pickup. Most pickups out there boost the midrange to really drive the amplifier, but this pickup is actually scooped. Normally, that would make for a bad combination, but it seems to work quite well in this pickup. It features allen head bolts on both coils for ultimate adjustability, four conductor wiring and a ceramic magnet to help keep everything nice and tight. This pickup got most of its fame thanks to John Petrucci using it for a very long time throughout his career.
The Steve’s Special’s specs aren’t normally the kind of thing you’d look for in a pickup. A guitar is a midrange instrument, so when you have a scooped frequency, you tend to get lost in the band mix. However, the frequency band of this is spread out pretty wide. It uses a dual-resonance design to help spread everything out. With the relaxed midrange, this actually aids in clarity. When mids are boosted too much, it tends to make everything a bit less clear due to the signal being pushed so hard. By pulling back on the mids a little bit, you can hear the detail a bit better.
This isn’t a neck pickup, and I can’t see a situation where you’d run it in the neck. It’s solely meant for the bridge. When split, it sounds like a really nice single coil, and parallel sounds pretty awesome too. I find this works best in basswood. Basswood actually has a good bit of midrange and some slightly relaxed treble, so the extended bass and treble of this pickup tends to be almost perfect. Using a basswood guitar with this pickup and running it through a Mesa/Boogie is the secret to that Dream Theater tone.
The Steve’s Special’s specs aren’t normally the kind of thing you’d look for in a pickup. A guitar is a midrange instrument, so when you have a scooped frequency, you tend to get lost in the band mix. However, the frequency band of this is spread out pretty wide. It uses a dual-resonance design to help spread everything out. With the relaxed midrange, this actually aids in clarity. When mids are boosted too much, it tends to make everything a bit less clear due to the signal being pushed so hard. By pulling back on the mids a little bit, you can hear the detail a bit better.
This isn’t a neck pickup, and I can’t see a situation where you’d run it in the neck. It’s solely meant for the bridge. When split, it sounds like a really nice single coil, and parallel sounds pretty awesome too. I find this works best in basswood. Basswood actually has a good bit of midrange and some slightly relaxed treble, so the extended bass and treble of this pickup tends to be almost perfect. Using a basswood guitar with this pickup and running it through a Mesa/Boogie is the secret to that Dream Theater tone.