Fishman Fluence Devin Townsend Set

Devin Townsend is one of my favorite artists and he always has this lush, full guitar sound. It sounds so powerful but melodic and clear at the same time. So, I decided to pay the hefty price tag. Let me tell you right away that it was some of most well spent money on a guitar related product I ever did. You get 3 voicing (actually you get 2, but there's a second variation of one of the voicings). Included in the box, besides the pickups themselves, there's everything you need. You get 2 different diagrams for your pickup installation. The normal way would be to use some push-pull pots (included, as well as standard pots), but according to the diagram, you would only get 2 voicings. To get all 3 voicings you have to install it like Devin does, using a DPDT on-on-on switch. These are not very common and therefore are a little bit more expensive. If you need one, search Thomann for the "Göldo EL013 Miniswitch BK". There's some soldering involved but the pickups themselves have some pins where you connect the included wires that actually have plugs on them already. All the wires have different colors and this makes following the diagram super easy. It also makes it very easy and convenient to change pickups if you want to try some other Fishman pickups. You get an active humbucker voicing, a real single coil voicing and an intermediate one. The active humbucker voicing is the main one that Devin uses, and let me tell you: it sounds absolutely amazing! Unlike traditional active pickups, these are not as compressed, making them very responsive, fuller sounding, but still with a big output (not noisy). This less compressed behaviour makes it sound somewhere between an active and a passive pickup. However, less compression and more lows also means that these pickups are not as tight as let's say an EMG 81, 707, etc... EMGs will sounds much tighter and controlled, but also more sterile. Don't get me wrong! I love EMGs and the majority of my guitars have EMGs installed, but this time I was looking for something a little bit different and more specific. I believe both active and passive pickups users would love these. The second main voicing is the single coils. This is not some EQ trick, some digital emulation or some coil splitting. These actually have single coil pickups in them. You are indeed getting two pickups in one! The technology used to make these pickups is very interesting. These have stacked thin PCB boards with copper traces as windings. This ensures absolute consistency while manufacturing. Just like the PCBs, both pickups are stacked on top of each other. The single coils sound exactly like you expect single coils to sound. Then there's a third voicing that is some kind of mix between the humbucker and the single coil. In practice it's like you have a more passive sounding humbucker with even more lows. These pickups allow for an extremely versatile guitar. Devin plays a lot of different stuff, and it can go from very clean and very mellow, to very dirty and very heavy stuff. This pickup set is so versatile that it allowed him to travel with a lot less guitars. From all the people I talked that have these pickups, not even a single one regrets buying them and some of them have them installed on several guitars. They're that good!

This is my second set of fluence pickups: I also have a guitar with the fluence moderns, so that's going to be my main point of comparison. I put this set into an Les Paul style guitar, so I actually followed the Fluence Classics wiring diagram, with a PP pot for each tone knob, one switching from voice 1 to voice 2, and the second switching from humbucker to single coil mode. So to be clear, there are four distinct sounds available for each position - voice 1 humbucker, voice 1 single coil, voice 2 humbucker, voice 2 single coil.

Compared to the moderns, the bridge pickup in voice 1 humbucker under distortion sounds quite similar, maybe ever-so-slightly less tight in the bass, but all very much in the realm of an EMG 81-type sound. Where I hear a much more distinct difference is playing clean on the neck pickup. Unlike the modern, which has so much treble that they included the HF Tilt wiring to chop off those high frequencies when needed, the Devy set is inherently much more controlled, and in fact, voice 2 single coil actually feels darker to my ear than voice 1 single coil, with less high frequencies despite being lower output, even in single coil mode. Also, interestingly, switching between the voices has, to my ear, a much more dramatic effect on the overall tone than switching to single coil mode, which you wouldn't expect, especially as you can get some 60 cycle hum with enough gain when you go to single coil. Finally, compared to the moderns, the Devin Townsend set seemed to me to have noticeably overall higher output - I found myself needing to position the pickups lower to prevent from clipping on my interface.

For me, there are some specific instances where I actually like having the option of those very high frequencies in the moderns, even for clean neck pickup sounds, but for those who wouldn't wire up the HF tilt, or generally find the moderns too bright, might find the Devy set much more balanced. I think this is where people find them more "natural" or "organic" or "passive sounding" than the moderns, even though the sound is, to me, still very much that of an active pickup. In short, I really like them as I do fishman fluence pickups in general.