The DiMarzio Tone Zone, a monster pickup that takes some taming.

In the quest to make my Ibanez 20th Anniversary RG550 RFR really roar I decided to take on the DiMarzio Tone Zone. I had previously installed the DiMarzio PAF Pro in the bridge position, and as I mentioned in my PAF Pro review I found that it just didn’t drive my amp hard enough. I loved the tonality of it, but I didn’t want to have to kick an overdrive every time I wanted to use this guitar to get a similar amount of gain as I had coming from some of my other guitars.

The DiMarzio Tone Zone is a fairly polarising pickup amongst guitar players. It is a pickup that people either love or hate, and this love/hate relationship probably stems from its tonal properties.

With an Alnico magnet, a bass and middle rating of 8.5, and treble of 5 on the DiMarzio scale, the stats give you an immediate impression of massive low end grunt. To some this is massive fat high gain heaven, to others its high gain mud.

As I had mentioned earlier I was installing the Tone Zone in my Ibanez RG550. This guitar has a basswood body, and maple neck/fretboard. Acoustically my guitar has quite a thick low-end, and this tonal property did worry me a bit since the Tone Zone has such a massive amount of low-end.

On the initial installation of the Tone Zone I was hit by a massive wall of low end tones from my guitar, and very little high end to help it cut through. It did concern me a bit as it was far too muddy for notes on the low E string. I wasn’t about to give up on it just yet though, and was fully prepared to tweak things.

I had previously performed magnet swaps on a couple of pickups, and tried out the “half-air” mod that a lot of people perform on Tone Zones, and was prepared to open up the pickup if needed. I wanted to try and increase the high end and drop the low end a bit without the need for pickup surgery though.

After doing to research and asking some questions on forums I decided to try lowering the pickup a fair amount, and raising the 3 bass side screw pole pieces. I ended up with the pickup on the bass side of the guitar about 3mm above the pickguard, and the treble side a little higher. I screwed the 3 bass side pole pieces out so that the screw heads were pretty much sticking out the the guitar , and kept the treble side ones flush with the pickup bobbin.

My setup for the Tone Zone, note the 3 raised polepieces on the bass side.

I found that the sound was far more pleasing after these tweaks. The low-end was still very big, but not in a bad way. Keeping the pickup fairly low from the strings tamed the low-end, and raising the pole-pieces added enough high end to give the pickup clarity to go with its massive punch.

The Tone Zone works fantastically for big heavy rock, punk and metal styles as it provides a great amount of chunk and grind. It also responds very nicely to your pick attack, which gives you far more flexibility than most high output pickups. Rhythm parts sound absolutely massive, and lead parts higher up the fretboard retain a fatter sound than what you would get from most bridge pickups.

One thing that needs to be remembered when talking about the Tone Zone is that in standard series humbucker mode it is not a very good pickup for clean tones. This pickup is designed to rock through the dirty channel of your amp. Through the clean channel it will sound big and nasty, with a slight overdrive that is pretty unpleasant. However split it and combine a middle single coil pickup and you will find some pretty cool Strat-like tones that work nicely both clean and overdriven.

The DiMarzio Tone Zone is a fantastic pickup for a huge rock sound. With a little bit of tweaking of the pole-pieces and the pickup itself you will find that you can have a massive low-end wall of sound, and still retain enough clarity to sound nice and articulate. If you haven’t tried the Tone Zone go and try it out, and if you have and found it too muddy maybe give it another go. Play with the pole-pieces and lower the pickup a bit, and you might find that you can tame the beast a little, and make it work to your liking.