Quote Originally Posted by fender3x View Post
That's an interesting question, particularly the way you put it. Thin is not necessarily bad. Robert Cray has a thinner tone than Ry Colder, but both have great tone.

A good thin tone will have crisp, full, maybe even chimey or jangly highs. Thin pickups are "bad" when the highs are harsh or unnatural sounding. They also don't tend to have the booty of a fat pickup.

Single coils tend toward the thin side, with P90s and Tele bridge pups more or less defining the fat end. Strats tend to sound thin to me. Not bad, but thin.

Fat pickups emphasize the lows--the booty. The highs are not always emphasized. Fat pickups tend to sound better overdriven. Humbuckers are often fat, but the highs can suffer or get filtered out somewhat. Bad ones, to me, sound washed out or a but dull.

The best pickups produce a full range of tones from high to low...so neither would sound washed out. But it is very hard to get a chimey sound out of fat LP humbucker or a fat booty out of a strat single coil.

Totally IMHO!

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That's an interesting point. I don't mind the odd bit of funk, and a treble rich strat in that context sounds good-thin.

What inspired the post was seeing a local band playing a pub gig. There was a young guitarist clearly playing through his first guitar rig, as it was all entry level stuff. The sound seemed to lack "body" for want of a better word. It was loud enough, but seemed empty/hollow/lacked substance. I'm not sure it was the bottom end that was missing.

At the time I just figured "oh he's got cheapo crap pick ups plugged into a solid state amp". I didn't stop to think how/why those things would result in that sound.

At the other end of the spectrum I've been watching "That Pedal Show" on Youtube. They frequently plug a strat or tele into a valve amp (typically a Fender or Vox) and get a noticeably "fat" sound. Again I'm not entirely sure additional bottom end is purely the answer.