Mon Mar 01, 2010 3:49 pm
Mon Mar 01, 2010 4:14 pm
Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:38 pm
RickT wrote:Hey Jim, you've got some sweet guitars there. That is quite a nice collection. Do you manage to play them on a regular basis?
RickT
Mon Mar 01, 2010 10:48 pm
Tue Mar 02, 2010 1:54 am
Marty wrote:Jim P can you compare the ASAT (top right)
the Jr and the super? (left middle) sound and playability please?
oh, and killer collections both of you
Tue Mar 02, 2010 9:50 am
Jim P wrote:Marty wrote:Jim P can you compare the ASAT (top right)
the Jr and the super? (left middle) sound and playability please?
oh, and killer collections both of you
Wow! That's kind of a tough question, but I'll give it a shot. First, the Super and the Junior are much more similar to one another than the ASAT. Both the Junior and the Super have semi-hollow mahogany bodies with no f-holes, mahogany necks with ebony fretboards, but the pickups on the Super are slightly hotter than those on the Junior. Still, the sound of both of them are very similar. They both have a warmer sound than any of my other ASATs, but they definitely lack the sustain of the solid-bodied guitars. I can only compare them to other ASATs due to the inherent qualities of the MFD pickups, but that's about as far as it goes. If you can imagine a scaled-down version of a Gibson ES-330 guitar with P-90 pickups, and then throw in some brighter highs as well as a tighter, but slightly thinner low-end, that's probably about as well as I can explain the tone. Both have 6100 jumbo frets and play very well. Both are obviously BBE-era guitars, too.
The '88 ASAT, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast. It has an all-maple solid body with a maple neck and rosewood fretboard. I've had it refretted with 6105 frets, so it plays like a new guitar while having great string bending capabilities. Sound-wise, I find it to be a great guitar for clean rhythm playing, for it seems to magnify very crisp and clean highs without being piercing to the ear while maintaining well-balanced lows as well, but I've found it to be kind of a disappointment when playing leads. Surprisingly, the guitar doesn't seem to sustain all that well when overdriven through an amp, and some of the overtones seem to become lost as well. It's really difficult to explain, but when I've played the guitar with bands or at jams while playing lead solos, I just never felt that it had the full-bodied sound I had hoped to hear. In comparison to my blonde '86 ASAT, which has a solid ash body, the '86 is much richer in terms of tone while also having much more sustain, but I would choose the '88 ASAT in a flash for clean rhythm tones.
Anyway, I hope that answers the question. Of course, tone is always a subjective thing, and I've never really quite figured out how to put it into words.