PEAvEY
that come with pickups that don’t even use
shielded wires, opting instead for all-cotton
push back wire. Can you believe it? It’s 2008,
but suddenly to them its 1947. But you know
what, I’m not going to be the one who says
anything because these guys claim to be hot
stuff and they’re still doing crazy stuff like
that. This company’s big competitor’s two-pickup guitars use that rationale, too. If you
put the selector switch in the center position
and turn down either of the volume controls,
guess what, both volumes go down—well
duh! And they’ve been doing it this way
since 1952, go figure. It’s this kind of nonsense, historical nonsense that drives many
companies. Rather than doing it a better
way, they’re going to cling to an antiquated
idea. That’s like voting with paper ballots
instead of using today’s technologies.
Many players celebrate that voodoo.
Sadly you can’t believe everything you see
and very little of what you hear. The problem, I’ve discovered, is that even when you
The Peavey T- 60, circa 1976. As the first musi-
cal instruments made with CNC technology, the
T-Series bridged the vintage and modern eras of
guitar making.
tell people what’s going on, they don’t
want to hear it. The truth is the pickups
were “scramble-wound,” and is that a good
thing? Well, it depends on who you talk to.
Are there people out there who know how
to build good pickups? Absolutely, but most
of them are nothing but variations on the
same tired theme. It’s like guitar players are
in a time warp sometimes.
Say a guitar doesn’t balance right—they still
build them that way, regardless. I can do
that, too, but I just want to do something
better. It’s an interesting situation when you
think about how this stuff comes about.
My god, they’ve been building tube amps
for seventy-something years. Audio as we
know it got perfected because of the motion
picture business—“talkies.” The 6L6 was
invented in 1936, the 6V6 the next year and,
it was designed, interestingly enough, for
car radios. But as we know, it makes a hell of
an amp for guitars and so do the European
models: the EL34 and EL84. There are a lot
