Ed DeGenaro
04-08-2008, 02:10 PM
Sporting a five-position Curve switch and an Intensity control, the Quintet ($170 retail/$129 street) is designed to work in conjunction with your guitar’s pickups to deliver varying timbres. The Quintet is as passive as passive gets. There is no battery, and even though the pedal has labeled input and output jacks, it doesn’t matter which one you plug into. Just make sure the Quintet is the first pedal in your signal chain because its mojo lies in its interaction with your guitar’s pickups. The Quintet will not work properly, if at all, if it is placed after another pedal. Nor will it work with active pickups, piezos, or wireless units. (The Quintet is also available as a tone pot replacement that drops directly, and discretely into your guitar.)
With my Telecaster running through a Reverend Goblin 5-15, I began clicking through the Quintet’s tones. Setting One is the darkest, as it takes a rear position single-coil and fattens it up to an almost humbucker-like butteryness. For Strat players who are scared of honking on their rear-pickup this is a godsend, as it’s almost like changing pickups. With humbuckers, I found this position to be useable, but a tad wooly. Setting Four gives you a boost around 300Hz, a substantial cut around 800Hz, and a slight treble reduction above 4.5kHz. THD likens this tone to the in-between setting on a dual P-90 equipped guitar, and that’s a very fair description. I found it usable with all of my guitars, as it fattened up single-coils without sacrificing any of their inherent airiness, as well as giving humbuckers some added beef—albeit lean beef. Pretty neat. As you keep clicking, the tones get progressively skinnier, adding some Filter ’Tron-like characteristics, as well as some good old-fashioned brightening. The Intensity control simply mixes your guitar’s straight signal with the Quintet’s, affording even more tonal flexibility.
The Quintet is subtle, and as simple as it seems, you can actually find yourself dicking with it for hours—at least I did. The shades it imparts make it a studio tool par excellence, as you can change the character of your guitar in a very natural and organic way. In fact, I would dial-up a setting on the Quintet, and adjust my amp’s EQ accordingly to get just the right fit. That, my friends, is tone shaping in the truest sense of the word.
With my Telecaster running through a Reverend Goblin 5-15, I began clicking through the Quintet’s tones. Setting One is the darkest, as it takes a rear position single-coil and fattens it up to an almost humbucker-like butteryness. For Strat players who are scared of honking on their rear-pickup this is a godsend, as it’s almost like changing pickups. With humbuckers, I found this position to be useable, but a tad wooly. Setting Four gives you a boost around 300Hz, a substantial cut around 800Hz, and a slight treble reduction above 4.5kHz. THD likens this tone to the in-between setting on a dual P-90 equipped guitar, and that’s a very fair description. I found it usable with all of my guitars, as it fattened up single-coils without sacrificing any of their inherent airiness, as well as giving humbuckers some added beef—albeit lean beef. Pretty neat. As you keep clicking, the tones get progressively skinnier, adding some Filter ’Tron-like characteristics, as well as some good old-fashioned brightening. The Intensity control simply mixes your guitar’s straight signal with the Quintet’s, affording even more tonal flexibility.
The Quintet is subtle, and as simple as it seems, you can actually find yourself dicking with it for hours—at least I did. The shades it imparts make it a studio tool par excellence, as you can change the character of your guitar in a very natural and organic way. In fact, I would dial-up a setting on the Quintet, and adjust my amp’s EQ accordingly to get just the right fit. That, my friends, is tone shaping in the truest sense of the word.