Last November I decided it was now time to give my 10-year old Ibanez RG 350DX a bit of a makeover. The first step was to replace the bridge and Neck humbuckers from their factory Infinity pickups to DiMarzio ones. Originally my thought was to go with Evolution pickups since they work so well in Jems but then it occurred to me that as cool as Steve Vai’s sound is, it’s Steve Vai’s, not mine. Luckily DiMarzio has a very handy tool called a Pickup Picker, where you tell it what sort of tone you’re looking for and it recommends various combination of their pickups based on that.
I had settled on the Super Distortion for the bridge, despite not being too fond of its beige colour but I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about the neck pickup. After discussing with an advisor at GuitarGuitar, I was recommended the Tone Zone for the bridge and the Air Norton for the neck. As it turns out, it’s a very common combination of pickups which you often find in Ibanez Prestige models so it should have gone smoothly… except it didn’t.
The first mistake I made was ordering the wrong type of Air Norton (mostly due to my inability to see important letters in the product name). You see there are 2 types of pickups: Standard spacing and F-spacing. To sum it up, F-spaced pickups refers back to a time when the two main electric guitar manufacturers, Fender and Gibson, used a slightly different spacing between each string, a spacing which had to be mirrored on the pickups. In the Ibanez trem system, they require an f-spaced pickup, which is slightly wider than the standard one. And so while I had correctly ordered an F-spaced Tone Zone, I also ordered an F-spaced Air Norton, when I should have seen the “F” in the product name and thus had to delay my whole installation by a few more days.
Eventually, both correct pickups were on my desk and I could proceed with the installation. Now I had never really done this before but there was no reason for it to be too complicated since it was really just swapping a pickup for another. Of course DiMarzios have a special colour code which you should be aware of. I’m not gonna go into the combination for tapped setups but for my setup the important thing to know was that the wires worked as follows:
Red > Hot
White + Black > Neutral
Green + Silver > Ground
For a graphical representation of many different brands of pickups I recommend the exhaustive list at guitarelectronics.com.
At that point I had not replaced the middle pickup as it sounded fine and I wanted to stretch my expenses (a pickup costs an average of £75) and for about a week it worked just fine. Then with no warning, no noise or anything untowards the Tone Zone just stopped working. I figured I must have soldered something wrong so went back in and redid the soldering and it seemed to work again. As an aside when you work on pickups on a scratch plate you have to be very careful when soldering because there are clumps of wires everywhere. I recommend you give your soldering iron plenty of room for the power chord to move around so you can solder from many different angles without risking to touch something that shouldn’t get hot. The instructions included in the DiMarzio pickups recommend using rosin-core solder. I’m not sure what would go wrong if I had simply used the lead-free thinner wire I have but perhaps someone with more experience with soldering can shed some light on this. Luckily I do have rosin-core solder so I didn’t get to find out what would have happened if anything else had happened.
And so it was all fine for another week, and then it stopped working again, only this time it wasn’t the whole pickup that stopped working but only half of it. So I decided to have the store I bought the pickups from look at it. One of their guys resoldered the whole thing, thinking perhaps I did something wrong with my own soldering. And sure enough, after I got it back, it worked just fine.
For a week
So I took it back to the shop and this time they had their guitar tech look at it. I left it in his hands despite it being the full swing of the Christmas season. I was advised that the output of the pickups was wrong and that it was likely a problem with the antiquated cheap tone switch that came with the factory build. So I got him to replace the switch and got the guitar back within a day or two. And Christmas came and went, and a week later the Tone Zone failed again. At that point I decided that was too much and went back to the store to ask for a replacement pickup. As this was a day or two before Hogmanay (new year’s eve if you’re reading this outside Scotland) I wasn’t expecting the guitar back right away, they had to take out the old pickup before giving me a new one but it took a week before I eventually called and was told it was ready to collect.
By then we’re well into the first week in January and I decided that since that saga had lasted that long, I may as well go ahead and order a replacement for the middle pickup as well.
On the DiMarzio Pickup Picker page I was advised that the best hum-cancelling vintage sounding single coil for me would be either the Area 58 or the Area 61. After reading (and watching) a few reviews, I opted for the latter. This time I ordered it off eBay from a store which dispatched it to me really quickly so I was rather impressed.
Now I had a new Tone Zone to install and the Area 61 to make work with the other two. I was a little baffled by the Fender switch that the guitar tech had fitted as all the diagrams I found were very confusing. But with the help of wiring diagrams from guitarlectronics.com and from DiMarzio, I was finally able to solder everything in a way that produced sound. As an aside, the shop had kept my old pickup springs which I had reused when fitting the new pickups and fitting the ones supplied by DiMarzio is… challenging to say the least. So if you intend to do this sort of upgrade, I suggest you hang on to your old springs, unless they’re broken or have too much slack of course.
But this isn’t the end of the saga, there was one more obstacle to overcome before I could reach the setup I was after.
You see when I wired the Area 61, I simply swapped the wiring of the existing pickup. There’s only a hot and a ground to contend with so it’s fairly straightforward. However the tapped positions 2 and 4 just didn’t sound right. It was very quacky and not at all like any of the pickups they were supposed to be a combination of. It took me a little bit of head scratching but eventually I found a passage in the Area 61 instructions which say
If you install this pickup in a guitar with other pickups and find that the pickups to be out of phase when they are played together, solder the RED wire to ground, and the GREEN wire to hot
This rang a major bell, so I went back in, for the last time, and swapped the red and green wires from where the diagrams had told me to put it and that was finally the end of it. Each selection now sound beautifully and give me the rich output I was looking for.
I still have much to explore in terms of tone adjustment and playing with various levels of distortion but so far it’s been a dream, and yes, a month after all this ended, the soldering still holds up so the original Tone Zone I was sent was definitely faulty. This is the final setup on my guitar:
So if you fancy doing a combination of Air Norton + Area 61 + Tone Zone on your guitar, I hope this will be helpful to you.