You don’t have to be a John Petrucci fan to appreciate a good pickup. But you can appreciate Petrucci’s experience with fitting his tone into the dense layers of a band’s big sound. From tight riffing to smooth legato leads to complex chords, this has it covered.
I’ve tried the LiquiFire in a few guitars over the years and it’s remarkably consistent, so that it was easy to know what it would deliver. The LiquiFire came relatively early in my search into DiMarzio’s neck pickup options, and I remember it being a whole new world of responsiveness.
When looking at the specs, it might seem like something different, but DiMarzio seems to really lead the pack in being able to voice pickups in ways that is a means to an end. In an area where many players get eaten up with obsessing over specs, this is would be a good way to drive yourself nuts. It looks like it could be a high gain monster that’s full of an overly compressed voice, but that’s just not the case.
The LiquiFire does deliver push and drive and sustain, but not at the expense of the tone. You get controlled lows and rounded highs in all the best ways you would want a neck pickup to show off your skills. I mean, who wants to be mid-shred and have your newest lick totally demolished by flabby lows or shrill highs? When you spend all that time turning your fingers into pretzels to master that perfect chord, you want a pickup like this that will let the nuance and open character really ring through.
But you don’t want to be a total showboat and risk the bass player not letting you load your gear into his mom’s van. You need a tone that will help you fit in to a band setting without stepping all in to everyone else’s Jell-O. And the LiquiFire is great at that.
series – 10.09k
north – 5.13k
south – 4.96k
parallel – 2.52k
output – 300mV
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