Info on the Legacy Special

[rauchman]

Greetings,

New guy here. As far as the Strat template guitars, I see lots of info on the Legacy, S-500 and Comanche. Not so much about the Legacy Special. I like the idea of this guitar, but even on Youtube, reviews are limited. Am I correct in assuming the humbuckers basically produce a single coil sound without hum? Any thoughts on this guitar? How are these pickups for harder edged rock? I've seen a couple of beautiful used ones on Reverb and am interested in getting one.

Thanks!
Ken

[FZTNT]

The Comanche would suit you well. You can pretty much get any sound possible (no BS) and those Z-Coil pickups are dead silent. The S-500 can be noisy just as any single coil can be un less you get an HSS and stick to the hum bucker.

Just my tuppence...

Tom

[rauchman]

The Comanche would suit you well. You can pretty much get any sound possible (no BS) and those Z-Coil pickups are dead silent. The S-500 can be noisy just as any single coil can be un less you get an HSS and stick to the hum bucker.

Just my tuppence...

Tom

Excellent! Thank you!

[lefty_major]

I pulled the trigger on a Legacy Special a few months ago and it is due to arrive early next week. My understanding is the pickups are silent and you can get some LP style humbucker tones as well, which was one of the reasons I got one.

Boogie Bill has a few posts out here were he provides some nice descriptions and his thoughts on the various G&L S-style guitars.

http://guitarsbyleo.com/FORUM/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1329

http://www.guitarsbyleo.com/FORUM/viewt ... oogie+bill

[rauchman]

I pulled the trigger on a Legacy Special a few months ago and it is due to arrive early next week. My understanding is the pickups are silent and you can get some LP style humbucker tones as well, which was one of the reasons I got one.

Boogie Bill has a few posts out here were he provides some nice descriptions and his thoughts on the various G&L S-style guitars.

http://guitarsbyleo.com/FORUM/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1329

http://www.guitarsbyleo.com/FORUM/viewt ... oogie+bill

Very much appreciated....thank you

[DanDoulogos]

The Comanche would suit you well. You can pretty much get any sound possible (no BS) and those Z-Coil pickups are dead silent. The S-500 can be noisy just as any single coil can be un less you get an HSS and stick to the hum bucker.

Just my tuppence...

Tom

I agree with everything Tom said, including, and perhaps especially, the no BS part.

I picked up a Comanche Tribute last summer and it has become my #1 go-to guitar when I play out. It is quiet in every configuration, and though it has it's own tone, yet it can produce any sound I've ever tried to get out of it. I prefer my Comanche (Tribute) to the (American) Legacy I have. Both are great, but the Comanche has proven itself to be decisively the better guitar in every conceivable way.

Not putting down my Legacy - I'm just being honest. The Comanche has just been that good.

[rauchman]

The Comanche would suit you well. You can pretty much get any sound possible (no BS) and those Z-Coil pickups are dead silent. The S-500 can be noisy just as any single coil can be un less you get an HSS and stick to the hum bucker.

Just my tuppence...

Tom

I agree with everything Tom said, including, and perhaps especially, the no BS part.

I picked up a Comanche Tribute last summer and it has become my #1 go-to guitar when I play out. It is quiet in every configuration, and though it has it's own tone, yet it can produce any sound I've ever tried to get out of it. I prefer my Comanche (Tribute) to the (American) Legacy I have. Both are great, but the Comanche has proven itself to be decisively the better guitar in every conceivable way.

Not putting down my Legacy - I'm just being honest. The Comanche has just been that good.

Great info....thanks. What is it about your Comanche that you see as "better" than the US Legacy?

[DanDoulogos]

Great info....thanks. What is it about your Comanche that you see as "better" than the US Legacy?

Let's see how can I quantify this? It's all going to come down to the Z-Coil pickups.

There are other noiseless pickups - I still have the Fender Strat Plus I bought new in the eighties. It came with noiseless Lace Sensors pickups (Golds), and though they do reduce the hum, they likewise seem to deaden the tone a little at the same time.

Now if those noiseless pickups were MFD, I expect that I wouldn't seem to experience the same tone-loss across the spectrum in my Lace Sensors as I do now, since the MFDs will suck more tone out of the strings by virtue of the better managed magnetic field. But the Z-coils have two things going for them (three if you count the MFDs) that normal noiseless pickups do not - and this is where the genius of Leo Fender shines - they have split the coil and offset it so that instead of having one coil closer to the strings than the other, they both serve their own triplet of string at the same height - and because the coils are offset - they can reverse the poles between coils, without losing sound when you bend the third and fourth strings.

It helps that there is a toggle that pulls in the neck pickup in any configuration, so you can play like a tele if you want.

Now, having said that, what you get is a guitar that sucks every nuance out of the strings, without losing any signal in doing so, or having various harmonics in the signal, washed out by the hum.

The first time you play one, you'll be wondering what's missing? It's the hiss. All you hear is the guitar, that can be a little off-putting at first, since we typically crank the bass and treble cuts wide open the first time we play, and we're used to a signal that mixes hiss and guitar. When it isn't there, it can be almost jarring. It doesn't sound like you expect it ought to... It isn't wrong, or worse, it is just pure, naked, signal.

When you dress it up with some effects - that is when you realize how (a) getting rid of all that noise, and (B) having a more nuanced tone (because of the MFDs), makes your guitar sound incredible through any effects you throw at it.

I've played lot of guitars in the past 30 years. I haven't tried every guitar known to man, but I can tell you, I can do more with my Comanche than I could with any other guitar I have owned/played. I haven't found any tone I couldn't nail on my Comanche.

Mileage may vary, but I for one can't praise the Comanche enough. I like my other guitars, but since I've got the Comanche, it's the only guitar I gig now, it just keeps on giving.

[FZTNT]

Great info....thanks. What is it about your Comanche that you see as "better" than the US Legacy?

Let's see how can I quantify this? It's all going to come down to the Z-Coil pickups.

There are other noiseless pickups - I still have the Fender Strat Plus I bought new in the eighties. It came with noiseless Lace Sensors pickups (Golds), and though they do reduce the hum, they likewise seem to deaden the tone a little at the same time.

Now if those noiseless pickups were MFD, I expect that I wouldn't seem to experience the same tone-loss across the spectrum in my Lace Sensors as I do now, since the MFDs will suck more tone out of the strings by virtue of the better managed magnetic field. But the Z-coils have two things going for them (three if you count the MFDs) that normal noiseless pickups do not - and this is where the genius of Leo Fender shines - they have split the coil and offset it so that instead of having one coil closer to the strings than the other, they both serve their own triplet of string at the same height - and because the coils are offset - they can reverse the poles between coils, without losing sound when you bend the third and fourth strings.

It helps that there is a toggle that pulls in the neck pickup in any configuration, so you can play like a tele if you want.

Now, having said that, what you get is a guitar that sucks every nuance out of the strings, without losing any signal in doing so, or having various harmonics in the signal, washed out by the hum.

The first time you play one, you'll be wondering what's missing? It's the hiss. All you hear is the guitar, that can be a little off-putting at first, since we typically crank the bass and treble cuts wide open the first time we play, and we're used to a signal that mixes hiss and guitar. When it isn't there, it can be almost jarring. It doesn't sound like you expect it ought to... It isn't wrong, or worse, it is just pure, naked, signal.

When you dress it up with some effects - that is when you realize how (a) getting rid of all that noise, and (B) having a more nuanced tone (because of the MFDs), makes your guitar sound incredible through any effects you throw at it.

I've played lot of guitars in the past 30 years. I haven't tried every guitar known to man, but I can tell you, I can do more with my Comanche than I could with any other guitar I have owned/played. I haven't found any tone I couldn't nail on my Comanche.

Mileage may vary, but I for one can't praise the Comanche enough. I like my other guitars, but since I've got the Comanche, it's the only guitar I gig now, it just keeps on giving.

Well said Dan, that's a pretty good endorsement for the Comanche and I fully agree with all your points.

The only thing I would add is:

Who wouldn't want to play a guitar that looks like this:

[JagInTheBag]

Unless of course they had one that looked like this:

G&L Comanche by Patrick Krook, on Flickr

[cbm]

I have an old three-bolt Legacy Special and a relatively recent Comanche. The Comanche is my #1, and has been for over a year. I love the Z-Coils, although there is a bit of a learning curve in getting the most out of them. The same is true of the Legacy Special, actually. The PTB tone stack is crucial to getting these guitars to sit right.

There are some pretty Comanche's above, but I'm still really partial to my orange one:

[DanDoulogos]

It doesn't hurt at all that the guitar I speak of, not only sounds incredible - but suffers no loss in the Eye Candy department...



I really do prefer my 2008 Tribute to the newer Tributes. It looks and plays and feels incredible.

[John C]

Interesting discussion - I think that in a way the Legacy Special is a model whose time has come and gone. If I'm remembering correctly they debut circa 1993, and they seemed like they were a bit of "competition" for Fender's Deluxe Strat Plus, which had a "hotter" set of Lace Sensors - a blue logo in the neck (PAF or P-90ish voice), silver logo in the middle ("fat Strat" or Fender Texas Special-style voice) and a red logo in the bridge (very hot Strat/Duncan Quarterpound/etc. voice). So you got a Legacy with 2 medium output rail-type pickups and a hot output rail-type bridge pickup. Seemed to fit the music of the times.

But times change. When they rediscovered the Z-coil pickups and brought out the Comanche a couple of years later that seemed to kind of replace the Legacy Special as the G&L alternative for those looking for a more vintage-y noiseless sound instead of a hot/hard rock kind of sound from their S-type guitar.

[Tooslowhand]

Glen Campbell played a really beautiful blue Comanche as his primary electric guitar in the later years of his career. If you want to hear what one sounds like you can look up his work from about the last 15 or so years. Of course talent counts for something too. Very few people can play like Glen. Even as dementia was overcoming him, he was still brilliant.

[DanDoulogos]

This was the video that eventually convinced me to give a Comanche Tribute a try.

[video]https://youtu.be/C_JZlDOyJOs?t=2m55s[/video]
(urlvoid.com approved link)


Edit: I changed the start point of the video to avoid the first 2:55 of noodling....

[Challenger]

I've played a Comanche and it sounded great, but the Legacy Special is still my preference. The link above does a great job of describing the Legacy Special. If the lack of a toggle switch is holding you back from the Legacy Special, that would be an easy modification to add. I actually asked Paul Gagon (who designed the pickups in the Legacy Special) what he thought of adding the switch. He indicated that he recommended it and his own personal Legacy Special has that mod. So, guess what my next project is...

The Legacy Special really sounds more like an SSH guitar than 3 humbuckers. The neck and middle are not would that hot so that they retain a lot of the Legacy/Strat sound without the noise and still have a characteristic bell like chime quality to them. The bridge pickup is definitely more humbucker in nature.

I played a lot of modern rock and alternative in the late 90's and the Legacy Special was always my number one. If I were gigging today, I would take a Legacy Special and a Fallout. Between these two, you could cover about any sound out there.

Pictured is my 1995 in red swirl and my 2002 in three tone sunburst.

[john o]

Unless of course they had one that looked like this:

G&L Comanche by Patrick Krook, on Flickr

jag, that thing sure looks pretty sweet!
personally, i have watched some comanche videos and i don't think they sell the comanche sound at all.
as Dan and Tom alluded, the sounds you can get out of a comanche are unique to the guitar. they don't sound like a strat or a tele or a les paul. they might sound like the sound you were always trying to get but never thought you would, or a pleasant surprise that comes out by accident at a gig. there are some funky sounds, especially using different p'up combinations, and i agree the PTB is essential to crafting tones on the comanche. i also get some buttery tones on mine just from the heft of the #1 Classic C neck. i think this is integral to the tone as well. i also love the way it drives the gain channel of a good tube amp.