We’ve completely moved ToneShaper products off of the Acme Guitar Works website. These two companies have been cohabiting for too long, time they go their separate ways!
Actually, they’re very much connected, and probably will be for some time, but it was time that ToneShapers (or, more precisely, Tone Shapers, Inc) at least had its own website. So here it is!
NAMM ToneShaper Demo Guitar
We’ve put a couple of guitars on the site that were our ToneShaper demo guitars for NAMM, and which then went to a couple of the magazines for reviews of the ToneShaper for Stratocaster. You can read the reviews of the ToneShaper on our site, and watch a video of Tim Lerch demoing one of the guitars. Cool stuff!
These are great guitars, but we only have two, so don’t miss out!
Prewired Barden SSH Set w/ Push/Push Coil Tap
Joe Barden Engineering has been making high-end pickups for years. Originally made famous by über Tele-pummeler Danny Gatton, they have since found homes in the guitars of many mega luminaries and tone aficionados, like Bruce Springsteen, David Hidalgo, Sonny Landreth, and Keith Richards. Yes, Keef. The coolest.
You can be just as cool as these guys by laying down some hard-earned cash, and strapping on one of our prewired Barden-fueled rocket-sled devices. On you guitar. You’ll be waaayyy faster, cooler, and better-looking than your friends.
And chicks dig Barden’s polished rails.
Just sayin’.
Acme-Modded Standard Telecaster
We’ve added some new YouTube videos of a couple of guitars. One was a customer guitar that turned out really nice, and the other was the first of a series of spec guitars that we’re going to be doing (see it here). This particular spec guitar turned out beautifully, and we’re pretty excited about doing more of them. It allows us to essentially build our dream guitars on someone else’s dime, which of course is always cool.
The idea is that we’ll do videos of each of these guitars, and then they’ll be offered for sale on both our website and on eBay. So keep y’all’s eyes peeled, we’ll be comin’ atcha.
Henrik Freischlader
A customer from Germany stopped in today, and of course we started talking about guitar players, and he mentioned Henrik Freischlader. I’d never heard of him, but man, is he killer! He’s got exceptional tone, he’s a great singer, and he writes cool tunes. He has very formidable chops, but it’s his note selection that’s really impressive – he goes places that aren’t where you might expect. Here’s a great video of him doing a soundcheck:
When guys like this suddenly come up on my radar, I always wonder how many more there are out there. Cool stuff!
We’ve just added free domestic shipping on orders of $99 and higher for orders shipping to the continental US! Hope this helps you guys out in this tough economic climate.
This Latin phrase has a couple of potential meanings, but essentially it means that the writer cannot vouch for the accuracy of the details. I’m reminded of this phrase after a recent perusal of one of the prominent gear mags, in which several items stood out as being erroneous. Well, at least questionable.
This is one of my pet peeves. There’s an awful lot of myth and misinformation in the guitar community, and while it’s no surprise that there are unscrupulous manufacturers and retailers out there who will happily pull the wool over the eyes of the unsuspecting public in order to gain a competitive advantage (so what else is new?), it’s especially unfortunate that so many well-meaning – and presumably honest – “experts” out there are getting the details wrong, or at least only half-right, when they review gear in legitimate publications.
An example is the recent review – in this high-profile guitar mag – of a new Gibson guitar, where the reviewer compared the guitar to his own two-year-old Gibson guitar, and concluded that the new model’s pickups varied tonally from the ones in his guitar in some very specific and quantifiable ways, which he elaborated upon in some detail.
The beef I have with this is that I don’t think you can draw concrete conclusions about pickups when comparing them in two different guitars. While the guitars in question were both similar Gibson models, and many players might think that as such they’d sound similar, in reality there’s no question but that different “identical” guitars don’t always sound the same, and in fact, the tonal differences can be pretty startling.
For instance, a number of years ago I was at Lindy Fralin’s shop, and he had a bunch of Strat and Tele knock-offs in their R&D room that were made by local luthier Tommy Rodriguez (the word “luthier” is overused in my opinion, but it applies here). One of the Strats had Lindy’s SP43 pickups in all three positions, which is somewhat uncommon. When I asked him about it, his response was that the guitar was so inherently bright that it needed the output of the SPs. His comment was that they had tried a bunch of pickups in that particular guitar, but that until they got something in there with some output, and some corresponding fullness and midrange, the guitar just didn’t sound good, it was thin and harsh.
Now, this guitar was essentially identical to several others in the shop, all of which were built by a single person (unlike any of the production models from Fender and Gibson), and yet there was significant tonal variation between them.
So back to the Gibsons. In fairness, it’s possible that the two guitars referenced in the review are measurably so sonically similar that the observations about the pickups would stand up to scrutiny. But I seriously doubt that any lab analysis of the guitars was done beforehand.
Here’s another “comparison” from the same issue of the same mag, but from a different reviewer, regarding another guitar. He states unambiguously that the TonePros bridge and tailpiece on the reviewed guitar added sustain that was “noticeable”. But compared to what? Was he comparing the reviewed guitar sans TonePros to the reviewed guitar with TonePros? Because that’s the only meaningful comparison. Unless he tried this guitar with a Nashville bridge and stop tailpiece, for instance, and then compared that to the very same guitar with the TonePros units installed, then how can he determine what the difference is, or whether there even is a difference?
By the way, I suspect that there would be at least some difference, whether discernible or only measurable, and I think the TonePros products are proven, but my point is that there was no comparison made, so the statement comes across as glib.
I don’t mean to suggest that these reviewers are inexperienced or incompetent gearheads, or that they’re in any way disingenuous. But I would suggest that they’re unacquainted with lab protocols, where lack of controls leads to scientific inaccuracy. And we see this all the time. Posts on forum sites where people compare the Fralin Blues Specials in their Strat to the Fender CS Texas Specials in their buddy’s Strat, and then wax prophetically on the differences between the pickups.
I get asked to compare pickups all the time by customers. “How do the _____ compare to the _____?” Well, for the reasons outlined above, it’s hard to know, unless we’ve played both of the pickups in a given guitar, or better yet, recorded them so that we can listen and compare them in an immediate, A-B manner. You know, like at the eye doctor, as he/she flips the lenses back and forth: “Is A better, or B? A…, or B? A…, or B?”.
Of course, we could go the unscrupulous route: “Definitely pickup _____ is better, with smoother upper-mids and more throat. You’ll love ‘em”.
But we assume you want an honest answer.
And by the way, what is “smooth”? And what are upper-mids? Because I have no idea, and a trip to the Internet, and an hour spent with the Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook, turned up no definition. But it wouldn’t have mattered even if I’d found a standards-based definition, because the term means nothing when used in a description, unless all of the parties involved – the writer and the readers – understand and agree on the definition. Here’s an interesting experiment for you: Blindfold 100 guitar players, put them in a room with pink noise (white noise?) pumping through a PA, and tell them to raise their hands when they hear a bump in the upper-mids. Then push the faders on a 1/3 octave EQ, one at a time, and watch when the hands go up. I’m guessing: No consensus.
So be careful what you read. Even the pros can make mistakes. As always, your opinion is valid, it’s the one that matters, so trust your own ears.
We’ve recently added a bunch of stuff to our clearance section, with more to come. Good deals in there on some cool stuff, so get it while you can!
We have several articles that I’ve written that discuss fretting & setup, and some that cover pickup & wiring topics. The fretting articles have been on the site all along, but the wiring articles have never been on the site. This has now been rectified, and you can access them here.
These were written for Premier Guitar Magazine in 2007-2008, so we’ve put the appropriate magazine covers for the various months, and clicking them will take you to a hi-res PDF of that month’s column. You’ll find that they cover many arcane areas of wiring, but there are always more, so there are many more articles like these that I’d like to write. Illustrating them is the hard part, though I love illustrating in the computer. I’m marginally good at it, but slow, so it takes me forever to do an article that has a lot of illustrations.
One thing I always found too, when writing the column for PG, was that what would at first seem like a simple concept to discuss would grow in the telling, to quote J.R.R.Tolkien, so that what I thought I could cover in a single column would often take 2-4 columns to get through. 800 words is just not enough to get much information across.
Also, regarding these columns, there could be a mistake here or there – I tried to research everything carefully and proofread carefully, but humans goof, as I did when I put the wrong number of turns of wire for a Strat pickup and Jason Lollar emailed me to let me know. Oops! So you may find something here or there that I got wrong, and if so I hope you’ll bring it to my attention. Of course, I don’t have the ability to edit these PDFs, they’re as-published and were supplied by the magazine; but future tech articles could benefit. Never too late to learn, even when you’re an old fart like me…
Enjoy!
You can find them here. Per the post below, we’re simplifying prewired products. New images of the various assemblies will follow soon. Oh, and the prices have been reduced!
