Dimarzio Three-90s

[newey]

Ran across this the other day while window-shopping at MF:

Vox Virage Guitar with Dimarzio Three-90 Pickups

Now, I'm not about to spend $2400 for a Vox (although I wish I could!). But I thought that the info on the pickups was interesting:

The guitar employs the proprietary VOX Three-90 Pickup System, which relies on two triple-coil pickups to deliver clean, crunch and lead tones, similar to having single coil, P90 and humbucking-style versatility all in one instrument. Its analog circuitry requires no batteries or active electronics, and provides hum free operation regardless of the tone selected. This pickup system was designed and built in the USA exclusively for VOX by DiMarzio. A three-way toggle makes selecting pickups quick and easy. Users can jump between clean, crunch and lead modes independently for each pickup with a quick flick of each pickup's 3-way mode switch.

Here's hoping Dimarzio moves beyond having this pickup as a"proprietary" VOX offering and begins selling it to the great unwashed masses (i.e., us.)

I checked DiMarzio's website and saw no mention of this pup, and a quick google search disclosed only various selleres of the above guitar- a double-cut version is also available.

If SD can market the P-Rails, why isn't Dimarzio pushing this out the door? This could have some interesting tonal possibilities since the description makes it sound as if the coils are very dissimilar.

[ChrisK]

why isn't Dimarzio pushing this out the door?

Because it's a "pickup system designed and built in the USA exclusively for VOX by DiMarzio."

If SD can market the P-Rails

Because this isn't a ........

I suspect that the P-Rail will cover much if not more than what the DiMarzio does.


In my P-Rails (or not) post I discuss and link to Pawar guitars. They use a custom multi-coil pickup designed specifically for them by Seymour Duncan.


What you need is one of these;

They can be found for $400'ish when on clearance.

Then you can get real cute and coil'y in a P-90 kind of way.

The top one is the one that I'll do by routing for and moving the bridge P-90 to the middle. The new bridge pickup will be either a DiMarzio DLX-Plus or Virtual P-90 (I have both).

If you think that these are neat, you should see the rest of my furniture! ;D

[sydsbluesky]

Just browsing... And for Dimarzio I've noticed that they seem to like to supply some of their pups ONLY to the guitar companies and not to us...

High end Ibanez Gits seem to come with pups that are simply not to be found aftermarket.

...maybe they just change the names? I dunno. I think Dimarzio likes to be sneaky sometimes.

[ChrisK]

Sneaky, nah, there's just money involved. It's called a business.

You couldn't buy SCN's for a few years after their introduction either.

They all make custom pickups on an OEM basis.

A P-90 is a wide flat coil with two horizontal magnets underneath. A Fender single coil is a tall narrow coil with slug magnets. A side-by-side humbucker is two weak short narrow coils sharing a flat magnet underneath.

The P-Rail (you need to have two to have rails) kind of covers all three. With a little capacitive shunting, many tones can be coaxed therefrom.


The Ibanez Duo-Bucker is an attempt to do similar things.


The Three-90 is a key technology to the Virage. Otherwise, it's likely just a possibly nice expensive guitar. I doubt that they'll ever be available aftermarket unless the Virage fails (which is possible) and DiMarzio is released from their marketing agreement with VOX.

The market for the Virage is quite small. If I were going to buy the ES-339 that I often threaten to, I'd seriously look at the Virage dual cutaway.

It's kind of coincidental anyway as I just picked up a new VOX catalogue (they're British you know) yesterday and am looking at the Virage.