Chords for Steve Vai Describes Developing Dark Matter 2 Pickups with DiMarzio

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[D] _ _ [E] How do you go [Ab] about testing pickups?
Because every guitar [D] that you put a pickup in, the guitar has a quality to it [N] also that
has a tone, even if it's the same guitar.
Well what we did was we built a guitar, it was this guitar actually, the Woody, and I
asked them to make me 5 pick guards with various pickups in them.
So when I was testing these guitars and testing the pickups, we would have the exact same
guitar and we would just put different pick guards in.
And the pick guards that I asked them to make, I happened to have them here.
So this was the first prototype that Steve had sent me.
So this was what I compared, I recorded a little something with each one of these pick
guards and then I compared _ this to those.
And then he made me another set of prototypes. _
This was prototype 2.
_ And in the different prototypes, he's still reaching for the kind of sound that I was
expressing to him I was looking for.
_ And then what's in here now was the third prototype.
And this proved to be [Eb] very revealing _ [Eb] and probably one of the best ways to kind of test pickups.
Because I would play, I'd play the same thing and I'd record it and I'd go through clean
sounds, I'd go through some dirty stuff, and then [G] listen back very carefully to each pick
guard so to speak.
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_ [B] One of the marvelous things of working with Larry DiMarzio is to fool around with all
of this crazy new kind of stuff that fascinates him and absolutely is the muse for the artist.
One of the things that I got to do was design straps.
[N] And these straps are actually based on _ the dipped gem _ swirls, they call it, the seven
string that originally came out that was this multi-colored swirl guitar.
But in order to commemorate the 25th anniversary release of Passion and Warfare, which on the
cover I'm holding one of those original swirls, _ we decided to create, with Ibanez obviously,
three seven strings that were based on various colors on the Passion and Warfare cover.
So you have this blue one here, _ _ and look what Larry made here.
Believe this guy? _
And then there's this one here which is light blue cherry kind of a color scheme that you
see more towards the middle bottom part of the album cover.
And I don't have one of those straps here, but it's on its way.
And then there's this one here, _ which is probably one of my favorite looking guitars in the
last decade because it's just awesome.
The red, the orange, the yellow, it looks like it's on fire.
_ And there'll be a strap for that too.
Then there's this one, which I really like.
Now what this strap is, it's actually, it's my art.
Or it's my something, my doodling, my cryptic hieroglyphic secret language _ _ that not even
I know what it means. _ _
The whole team, they take everything they do very passionately because they just want the best.
_ That's the thing that moves them.
And boy am I lucky.
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