For those who can't get enough of minute details of stripe differences, I had an interesting experience today. I swapped out the stock Yamaha bridge pup, which is a nicely voiced all-rounder with a lot of upper-midrange "sing," in one of my guitars with a SD SH-6B Distortion.
As you may know, the SH-6B is a pretty high-output, but still very "thick" pickup with a lot of low end-- I wanted the possibility of a really thick, sludgy riffing tone a la Neurosis (who use SH-6Bs into, among other things, MkIVs.) Well, with my usual settings, it was pretty cruddy into my purple stripe. Leads sounded pretty good (thick, all right) but palm mutes were really fuzzy and indistinct, even when I backed the pickup waaaaay down from the strings. R2 was a disaster-- the R2 voicing on the purple is pretty boomy and fat, and while single notes sounded great, any chord voicing that involved the low D string was pretty much not happening.
So, I went and plugged into my green stripe and it was pretty much a perfect match. I've found the green, like many MkIVs I have heard, almost too tight in the bottom end, with that sort of inorganic "boxy" sound. However, with the big fuzzy bottom from the SH-6B going in, it's doom-sludge heaven. Palm mutes are clear without being mechanical, and the lead tones are thick and saturated without being harsh. R2, which I found kind of thin and stiff before, is a great mid-gain channel now. Cleans sound pretty good for a high-output bridge humbucker, keeping in mind that I am not a huge fan of the MkIII cleans anyway.
As you may know, the SH-6B is a pretty high-output, but still very "thick" pickup with a lot of low end-- I wanted the possibility of a really thick, sludgy riffing tone a la Neurosis (who use SH-6Bs into, among other things, MkIVs.) Well, with my usual settings, it was pretty cruddy into my purple stripe. Leads sounded pretty good (thick, all right) but palm mutes were really fuzzy and indistinct, even when I backed the pickup waaaaay down from the strings. R2 was a disaster-- the R2 voicing on the purple is pretty boomy and fat, and while single notes sounded great, any chord voicing that involved the low D string was pretty much not happening.
So, I went and plugged into my green stripe and it was pretty much a perfect match. I've found the green, like many MkIVs I have heard, almost too tight in the bottom end, with that sort of inorganic "boxy" sound. However, with the big fuzzy bottom from the SH-6B going in, it's doom-sludge heaven. Palm mutes are clear without being mechanical, and the lead tones are thick and saturated without being harsh. R2, which I found kind of thin and stiff before, is a great mid-gain channel now. Cleans sound pretty good for a high-output bridge humbucker, keeping in mind that I am not a huge fan of the MkIII cleans anyway.
