Meet my Suhr Classic S!
This one is my do-it-all guitar. It's incredibly versatile encompassing all kinds of sonic styles, retro and modern. Suhr had a limited run of these metallic colors for a little bit and I snagged this Shoreline Gold beauty. I was between 3 Tone Sunburst and Shoreline Gold. I have no regrets!! I'm never sick of looking at it.
I've used this for a couple of R&B sessions and quite a lot of parts on my songs including the lead lines of Act 1 and 2 and most of rhythm layers on Strangely Familiar, last lead section of Second Chance, a bulk of Never Too Late, The Way Home, and the entire rhythm guitars on Double Agent.
This in particular has gone through a lot of different pickups- started out with a set of V70's and SSV, onto V60's and SSH, now with V60LP in the neck, V60 in the middle, and Thornbucker Plus in the bridge. I spent a lot of time trying to get the right balance in the "in-between" positions. I found that when the middle pickup is too high, it gets in the way of me picking. Also when it's too low, the neck and bridge pickups take over too much in the positions 2 and 4, getting not enough of the "quack." As a solution, I decided to stick with a little brighter pickup in the middle (in comparison to the neck pickup) so I can lower and still get the bright character, while having the neck and bridge pickup at the height I wanted. I don't set the pickups that high at all but I do like the middle pickup low, physically!
Since we are talking nerdy, I can also pull the bridge tone knob and split that Thornbucker Plus. I previously wired it to run the humbucker in parallel but I find that I like hotter pickups in parallel and low output ones in split for some reason, for alternate wiring.
In Action