Dual-Pickup Guitars featuring both humbucking and single-coil pickups first started appearing on the market during the Sixties. With a few exceptions, the most common configuration was to...
Dual-Pickup Guitars featuring both humbucking and single-coil pickups first started appearing on the market during the Sixties. With a few exceptions, the most common configuration was to place the single-coil pickup at the bridge and the humbucker at the neck. But during the Eighties a handful of players like George Lynch and Warren DeMartini preferred to reverse that configuration, placing the single-coil at the neck and the humbucker at the bridge, which is ideal for hard rockers and blues players who prefer humbucker bridge tones but also need a full range of single-coil tones.
More recently numerous guitarists, including Matt Bellamy, John 5, Lee Malia, Munky, Chris Robertson and others, have favored that setup as well, and now a few dozen guitar models offer this highly versatile pickup configuration as a standard feature, such as the Yamaha Pacifica PAC611VFMX reviewed here.
FEATURES
The Yamaha Pacifica PAC611VFMX is a limited-edition model offering several professional-quality upgrades and distinctive styling. Should you miss out on the limited-edition version, Yamaha also offers two other 611 models (the HFM and VFM) with slightly different features as well as the more affordable PAC311H. The main distinguishing features of the PAC611VFMX include a selection of matte finishes (translucent black, translucent blue or root beer) and an aluminum pickguard.
Tonewood materials consist of an alder body with a maple top and flame maple laminate, maple neck and rosewood fingerboard. The bolt-on neck features 22 medium-jumbo frets, a 25 ½-inch scale length, 13 ¾-inch radius, shallow C-shaped profile and Graph Tech Black TUSQ nut. The chrome-plated hardware is high quality and includes Grover locking tuners, a Wilkinson VS-50 vibrato bridge and knurled dome-top knobs for the master volume and master tone/push-pull coil-split controls. A Seymour Duncan Custom 5 TB-14 Trembucker humbucking pickup resides in the bridge position in a