New Pickup Day (NPD): DiMarzio Tone Zone

Balls to the wall!

I’ve had a DiMarzio PAF Pro installed in the bridge position of my 20th Anniversary Ibanez RG550RFR for a while, and whilst in sounded pretty sweet it just didn’t have the drive I wanted from a bridge pickup. Even after some modification experiments I found that I could give it a little more power, but it also increased the brightness. I’ve since put the PAF Pro back to stock in readiness for its new position as a neck pickup.

So I decided I wanted something with more power and and bit more low end grunt, and decided to try out the DiMarzio Tone Zone. It’s a popular choice amongst guitarists wielding basswood-bodied Ibanez guitars, so I thought I couldn’t really go wrong with it.

From my initial testing I’m loving the way it pushes my amps’ dirty channel, and the mid-range coming from it is just about perfect. I’ve found that the low-end is a little too much for my liking, but it might just need some tweaking to find the right balance. If I need to I might even try a mod or two on it to get it sounding just the way I want.

The pickup I got is a used zebra one, like in the picture. It doesn’t quite go with the colour theme of my RG550 (Road Flare Red), and the green PAF Pro I have in it, but if I’m happy I’ll order myself a green one to match the garish colours. I’m planning on building a custom strat, and I think that the Tone Zone will sit just nicely in a brighter sounding alder or ash bodied guitar.

I’ll have a review written in the coming weeks once I’ve had some time with it.