u/ksilenced-kid

Has anyone taken DCR readings for their bridge and neck pickup? I’m specifically talking about the Schecter branded humbuckers pictured (specifically G&B baseplate pickups without fillister screw poles, which Schecter markets ‘Diamond Plus.’)

Mine is an older model (2007) pictured. I’m a bit shocked the pickups are so close in DC resistance (15.2 bridge, vs. 14.6 neck). I would nearly assume I erroneously got two bridge pickups, but the wiring sheath is colored differently (if that means anything).

Of course DC Resistance is not everything - there might still be different magnets used or other differences that could change the tone. Yet if the height of the pickups is set equally, the neck pickup is significantly louder; I have to set the bridge pickup a bit higher and neck a bit lower to balance. Most guitars do use lower DCR neck pickups for that reason, so the pickups can be more balanced at the same height.

Though honestly at this price point it makes sense if they just didn’t bother to produce a separate bridge and neck pickup - but it’s odd there is in fact a small difference in DCR. So wondering if others get similar DC readings to mine?

(Also not surprised if this changed in more recent models, as there seem to have been several visibly different pickup types marketed as ‘Diamond Plus’).

Left is the photo from Guitar Center I nearly drove to, until ‘calculate shipping’ got an almost ridiculously low fee about 1/10th the cost of gas. So without playing it or knowing why it looked so gross, I bought it.

I owned this exact style Omen 6 between from 2003 - 2006 ; more on that later. I wanted another for two reasons- 1) Nostalgia, 2) I had not bought an HH hardtail guitar in some time. Unfortunately while my first Omen was bargain basement in price, new Omens (which are very similar but nicer visually) are more expensive by a notch - and they dragged the old ones with them. Finding a decent price seemed impossible till i found this initially gross one.

But in hand, it barely seems played; more like it was a wall decoration. The core guitar is very nice and the gunk (sticker residue?) shielded its still very nice finish. The two weirdest things are the nut (functional yet poorly shaped piece of tusq to replace the original plastic) and pickup rings (painted black, to cover at some point being painted red).

I remembered what I liked and didn’t like about my last Omen 6. And still this shocks me a bit; it doesn’t at all feel ‘bargain basement’ as I once thought:

- The neck is great; substantial without feeling huge, incredibly smooth satin finish, and extra large frets (almost no wear on mine). The neck joint is a tilted block, which fits my hand perfectly. I remember disliking the ‘volute’ on my original Omen 6, but I’m not picky about that now and concede the neck is just fine.

- The body is surprisingly heavy and substantial, for basswood. It is a thick full sized slab, not like a thinned down Squier Bullet/Affinity body. A bit noticeable on the forearm, but feels very quality with the carve, even without the binding.

- The stock pickups (though cheap looking) are very hot and full; using my typical ‘moderate’ gain channel settings, this thing saturates up a level even my Jackson SLX doesn’t do (equipped with Duncan Designed version of the JB). The Omen pickups are correspondingly a bit more dark and maybe slightly muddy/fuzzy, but the strength and compression of their output really makes playing fun, especially when I mostly have lower output pickup guitars.

TLDR - I expected a bargain basement stripped down guitar, but this feels and sounds a lot nicer than I remember. Maybe it is worth the cost of one of the new Omens.

…

Background: At college in 2003, I needed a cheap ‘dorm guitar’ (better than the Jay Turser I had with terrible honky sounding pickups). Tried a dozen at Guitar Center barely looking at headstocks or brands; Ibanez, Squier, whatever. The Schecter immediately stood out among those as best sounding and feeling; I paid about $150 for it with some sort of deal I think (MSRP meant nothing at that time for guitars).

Within a year I made stupid choices with that guitar. Despite picking the guitar in large part because of the pickups, I decided to try a few pickup changes without knowing what I truly wanted- All of which actually sort of disappointed me on first listen, because they weren’t as hot as the stock pickup (which is a dumb reason honestly). But I eventually landed on a Duncan Distortion, which at least wasn’t a bad pickup.

More stupidity; I changed directions and decided what I really wanted was a single coil guitar, so drilled a hole for a coil split/parallel toggle for the bridge pickup. Then added a phase switch. Of course I still was unsatisfied that it didn’t sound like a ‘real’ single coil. And I was a teenager, so wasn’t too careful about how I did this. I made the outside of the guitar uglier with some questionable paint of my own, threw on chrome humbucker rings (that weren’t quite high enough) - ugh. Eventually I sold the guitar to a friend so I could get the (single coil) guitar I wanted at that time.

But recently, I just also re-bought my first amp (of course a 1999 red Line 6 Spider) and found that it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought back when I had it the first time. So my mind had been returning to my regrets for butchering the Schecter, and whether it was ever actually that bad - Well, now I can say it isn’t, and it is a pretty great guitar. Glad I could redeem it in my mind, and finally appreciate what I once had.

I just rebought my first ‘real’ electric from 2003, a used Omen 6. As the same model is still produced almost 25 years after I first bought mine (and the new one is almost identical minus a few details), I went down the rabbit hole of recent/currently available low-priced Schecter offerings:

(With one exception these guitars are 90% similar so only touching on ‘differences’ below, for the most part)

- **C6 Deluxe** ($399) : All dot inlays, X-jumbo frets, graphite nut, round neck heel, flat-top body (though with beveled edge), no binding. The Schecter website description indicates: “The Deluxe & Plus models are the first ‘entry level’ guitar to bear the Schecter Diamond Series name.” This weirdly implies that my 2003 Diamond Series Omen was something more than an ‘entry level,’ though it almost certainly was basic for the era (being even lower spec than the current Omen).

- **C1 Standard** ($399) : All dot inlays, jumbo frets, graphite nut, round neck heel, Roasted Maple/Purpleheart Multi-ply with Carbon Fiber Reinforcement Rods, flat top body (no carve, mahogany/maple), binding. ‘Diamond Standard’ (vs. Diamond Plus on the others) pickups with screw poles, and a Strat style hardtail. Definitely the outlier of the group. Amazing this has the same MSRP as above C6.

- **C1 SGR** (discontinued, apparently $450 in ‘18) : One fancy 12th fret inlay, medium frets, graphite nut, square neck heel, arched body, no binding. Sure these are discontinued, and with the C1 Standard now existing I can sort of see why. Visually it looks the most like my old Omen. There’s also a warning on the FAQ page that using strings above 9s voids your warranty, for some reason.

- **Omen 6** ($499) : ‘Gothic’ inlays, X Jumbo frets, graphtech/tusq nut, square neck heel, arched body, binding. Again note my 2003 Omen had no binding/dot inlays and a plastic nut (before I replaced it), but was otherwise similar to the current Omen in all other specs. Pre-2003 the Omen had a stop tail though.

…

Some final comments looking at those specs: The C-1 Standard seems to be a crazy good deal, though I’ve never played one. I can only assume that not carving the body top at all frees up a lot of cash for other, more materially important things like the neck construction (and arguably nicer body materials?) I hardly see how the same price C6 exists alongside this guitar. But I’m sure somewhere someone is picking up a C6 and loving it for what it is.

For being the most expensive, the Omen gives you the fanciest inlays, slightly upgraded nut, carved top, and the same X-Jumbo frets as the C6 has. I don’t necessarily fault the old neck joint, it’s still slanted for comfort and feels fine. The Omen looks nice, but the C1 still looks arguably much fancier (despite the flat top), and it’d be hard to pull myself from the C1 just based on specs.

The SGR (discontinued) seems to have been designed for the gap made, when the older style Omen got upgraded with nicer inlays etc. but I guess the new models made it obsolete. Honestly I’m in no market for any of these because the 2003 Omen (as I learned from almost 20 years not having one) fills its niche quite well.

But pretty weird to see how Schecter sees its most inexpensive price bracket now. While my 2003 actually doesn’t materially differ from the new Omen by much at all, that was back when MSRP (which was $450 in 2003) didn’t factor into real world guitar pricing - I definitely didn’t pay more than $200 for it, and at the time acknowledged it as one of the the most basic playable guitars you could buy (that wasn’t a total POS, plywood etc.)

Links to the above specs:

https://www.schecterguitars.com/C-6-Deluxe?quantity=1&custitem_color_master_list=236

https://www.schecterguitars.com/product/17488

https://www.schecterguitars.com/C-1-Sgr-By-Schecter?quantity=1&custitem_color_master_list=421

https://www.schecterguitars.com/Omen-6?quantity=1&custitem_color_master_list=212

My current main amp (Marshall TSL60) blew up a few days ago, and will be stuck in the shop for a while- I took that as a sign to finally jump on this, which was for sale locally and had been tempting me for the last week or so.

An identical Spider was my first amp around 2001, but I eventually got frustrated, basically gave it away and got a Vox AD30VT (which I liked quite a bit more at the time). My main complaints were that the Spider could sound really muddy/undefined, and pretty much lacked dynamic sensitivity to pickups/guitar volume, in a way that made all my guitars sound the same (whether single coil or humbucker); even if they didn’t necessarily *sound bad* through it.

But I sort of regretted ditching the Spider ever since - Frankly I was a dumb kid who had no clue how to adjust an amp, and my guitars had various points of being equally wonky. It’s haunted me in a dumb way- For years I wanted to revisit the Spider I, but they rarely come up in decent condition and are usually unreasonably priced.

But I found the one pictured and have been playing it today, a few observations:

- I am not sure what I was doing that I thought it was so muddy/undefined back then. If I’m optimistic about my 19 year old self, maybe there was a firmware update my old amp didn’t get - or otherwise it was user error on my part in the settings. At any rate the amp sounds fine in that respect.

- Yes the amp models color the guitar tone a lot, but it’s unfair to say they lack dynamics or make ‘everything sound the same’ - Different output pickups, or different positions/settings on the guitar definitely sound different, you can clean up with volume etc. All the amp models seem to have a bit of compression to the sound that one could say makes things seem a bit ‘same-y‘ but not horribly so. It’s not necessarily an amazing sounding amp, but it’s hard to make it sound terrible.

- One thing that I only remembered when I plugged this one in: It is *loud*, and does not like being played quiet; even with the Master at 1 and the channel volume low, it is hard to set a quiet ‘practice’ volume - Even my TSL can do this fairly well, but the Spider demands at least slightly higher volumes than I am comfortable practicing at. Weird considering it’s still basically marketed as a ‘practice amp,’ (but not a consideration if you are actively playing with others).

I don’t plan on using the amp much and although it’s lasted this long, I don’t know how reliably a 25+ year old modeling amp would hold up under regular use - though apparently this amp had been getting regular use for years before I picked it up. If I was to use it, a foot-switch would pretty much be a requirement as fiddling with all the on-board buttons etc. does not lend itself toward active performance, especially if you want to use the effects (of which, the flange is notably better than I remember- even if I almost never want to use flange).

But it was an interesting experiment to revisit it, and find that it was a lot more competent than I gave it credit for at the time. I remember people claiming the Spider II and III were ‘way better’ than this amp when they came out, and basically everyone considered the OG red Spider to be trash. But I’m happy to have this one back in my stable and somewhat redeemed in my eyes.